science fiction

Prador Moon – Neal Asher

science fiction
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Cover of Prador Moon


Prador Moon
Neal Asher
248 pages
published in 2006

When I read The Voyage of the Sable Keech last year I dind’t realise at first it was part of a series of novels and quite late in the series too, which rendered it slightly more confusing than it needed to be. What I should’ve gotten instead is Prador Moon. It’s a prequel to the main series, set much earlier in its internal chronological order, doesn’t depend on knowledge of other books in it and is also a much simpler story altogether. Prador Moon is a straightforward tale of interstellar war, proper space opera. It all starts when the Polity, Asher’s star-spanning a.i.-cracy ruled from Earth central, comes up against the first alien race ever encountered by humans, the titular Prador.

Said Prador are a race of aliens looking something like a very large landcrab with slightly too many legs and which are very much a race of magnificent bastards, reveling in their evil. They can’t help it, biology makes them do it. A Prador’s life is full of danger, being reared in creches to serve their Father as loyal servants, stormtroopers and occasional food source, kept under control by pheromones. The biggest, meanest and most intelligent of the children become First Children, with some limited indepence and the potential to challenge their father’s supremacy. Whether there are female Prador is not mentioned. A Prador lives to conquer and subjugate and their whole society is built around conflict, which is why the first diplomatic meeting between humanity and the Prador was cut short when the ambassador didn’t surrender immediately, as was the ambassador himself…

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My Loot, let me show you it (again)

Bibliophilia, science fiction
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I spent a little bit too much money getting more classic science fiction, but there was so much good stuff and honestly I could’ve walked out with twice the number of books I did:

  • The Halfling and Other Stories – Leigh Brackett
  • Odd John Olaf Stapledon
  • The Island Under the Earth Avram Davidson
  • Mutiny in Space Avram Davidson
  • The Phoenix and the Mirror Avram Davidson
  • The Falling Torch Algis Budrys
  • The Texas-Israeli War: 1999Howard Waldrop & Jake Saunders
  • Time for the Stars Robert A. Heinlein
  • The Universe Against Her James H. Schmitz
  • Virconium Nights M. John Harrison
  • The Floating Gods M. John Harrison
  • A Storm of Wings M. John Harrison
  • Quark 4 Samuel Delany & Marylin Hacker (editors)
  • The Chronicles of Corum Michael Moorcock
  • The Inner Wheel Keith Roberts
  • Eyes of Amber Joan D. Vinge

My treasures, let me show you them

Fantasy, Hype!, science fiction
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What good is a booklog if you cannot permit yourself a small gloat over newly acquired treasures every now and then? I struck a rich new vein of fantasy and science fiction books last Monday and would like to show them off to you now:

  • Sweet Silver Blues – Glen Cook
  • Dread Brass Shadows – Glen Cook
  • Old Tin Sorrows – Glen Cook
  • The Game Players of Titan – Philip K. Dick
  • Counter-Clock World – Philip K. Dick
  • The Man Who Japed – Phlip K. Dick
  • Strange Seas and Shores – Avram Davidson
  • Or All the Seas with Oysters – Avram Davidson
  • The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World – Harlan Ellison
  • Flandry of Terra – Poul Anderson
  • Can you Feel Anything When I Do This? – Robert Sheckley

All of these, except Anderson, are authors whose books are rare to find secondhand here. The Glen Cook novels you can find are usually Black Company ones, all of which I already have. Ellison is rare as hen’s teeth, the Dicks are usually marked up because too many booksellers know they’re supposed to be rare and Avram Davidson and Robert Sheckley are such acquired tastes few Dutch sf fans seemed to have bothered with them….

Locus recommended reading 2008

science fiction
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The Locus Magazine 2008 recommended reading list is up, a decided on by their editors, reviewers and friends. I’ll excerpt the sf novels list:

  • Matter, Iain M. Banks (Orbit UK)
  • Flood, Stephen Baxter (Gollancz, Roc ’09)
  • Weaver, Stephen Baxter (Gollancz, Ace)
  • City at the End of Time, Greg Bear (Gollancz, Del Rey)
  • Incandescence, Greg Egan (Gollancz, Night Shade)
  • January Dancer, Michael Flynn (Tor)
  • Marsbound, Joe Haldeman (Ace)
  • Spirit, Gwyneth Jones (Gollancz)
  • Escapement, Jay Lake (Tor)
  • Song of Time, Ian R. MacLeod (PS Publishing)
  • The Night Sessions, Ken MacLeod (Orbit)
  • The Quiet War, Paul McAuley (Gollancz)
  • The Company, K. J. Parker (Orbit)
  • House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz, Ace ’09)
  • Pirate Sun, Karl Schroeder (Tor)
  • Anathem, Neal Stephenson (Atlantic UK, Morrow)
  • Saturn’s Children, Charles Stross (Orbit, Ace)
  • Rolling Thunder, John Varley (Ace)
  • Half a Crown, Jo Walton (Tor)
  • Implied Spaces, Walter Jon Williams (Night Shade Books)

Of the list, I’ve already read Matter, Anathem and Saturn’s Children and will definately read The Night Sessions, Half a Crown, House of Suns, Implied Spaces and The Quiet War. The Company, Escapement and Song of Time are also possibilities; the rest not so much and I already know I won’t read the Baxter novels. In all, a good list and as far as I can judge a good overview of the more important novels of last year.

There are remarkable few women on this list, just Gwyneth Jones, Jo Walton and K. J. Parker. The fantasy list has a better gender divide: six out of eighteen novels are by female authors. Is science fiction really such a male preserve?

The H-Bomb Girl — Stephen Baxter

science fiction
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Cover of The H-Bomb Girl


The H-Bomb Girl
Stephen Baxter
265 pages
published in 2007

This is a book that’s going to give me nightmares, I can tell. Because I grew up as a kid in the Second Cold War, the last kids to grow up in the shadow of Nuclear Holocaust, when one side was ruled by a succesion of doddering paranoid old men who had gotten their job training under Uncle Stalin and the other was governed by a cowboy actor who half the time seem to believed he had been the war hero his b-movie career had portrayed him, I’ve always been fascinated and horrified by nuclear war. I remember having h-bomb nightmares almost every night when I was eight or ten. Even now, just reading the Wikipedia description of Threads is enough to give me bad dreams, let alone reading a novel the centrepiece of which is an all too realistic description of what could’ve happened to Britain if the Cuban Missile Crisis had not been defused in time. I can only imagine what the intended young adult audience for The H-Bomb Girl will think of it, having grown up with very different nightmares.

So far Stephen Baxter had never impressed me with his writing. I’ve read and enjoyed several of his short stories scattered through various anthologies, but bounced hard of his awful Mammoth novels while the other work of his I’ve come across never appealed to me. The only reason I picked up The H-Bomb Girl in the library was because it got talked about over at Torque Control during the runup to the Clarke Awards. Reading the first few pages intrigued me enough to take it home. Once I started reading it in earnest today I got sucked in and didn’t stop until it was finished. There’s not many books that I do that with these days. Score one for Baxter.

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