science fiction

The Big Time – Fritz Leiber

Published on January 28, 2008

Cover of The Big Time

The Big Time
Fritz Leiber
127 pages
published in 1961

Rereading Asimov’s The End of Eternity remonded me of another time wars novel, a far more cynical and modern one: Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time. And since I had never read a Leiber novel during all the time I’ve kept my booklog, I thought it was time to start. I had read this novel before, first in Dutch, then in English and been impressed by it. Nor was I the only one: in its original, magazine publication in 1958 it so impressed the fans that it won a Hugo Award, which is high praise indeed.

The Big Time is a somewhat unconventional science fiction novel, in that it’s staged as a one room play, with the stage fixed while characters move on and off it. Which means that all the action that doesn’t happen in the room has to be described in dialogue between the characters, which of course has a distancing effect. For a genre which often takes pride in creating awe inspiring, inventive and strange settings and then making them believable to the reader, this is an audacious trick. Leiber takes this huge idea of a time war, in which history is in constant flux and which spans billions and billions of years throughout the universe and only shows us glimpses of it. You wouldn’t think it would work, but it did.

The Execution Channel – Ken MacLeod

Published on January 23, 2008

Cover of The Execution Channel

The Execution Channel
Ken MacLeod
307 pages
published in 2007

The Execution Channel is MacLeod’s newest science fiction novel and a return to the sort of book he made his name with, after several more traditional sf novels: intensily political, near future novels in settings that seems to flow logically from our own times and as a reaction to contemporary political developments. In science fiction the urge to respond to current events often results in shallow, cliched tripe, but that’s never the case with Macleod, largely because he’s a better writer than that, but also because he doesn’t as much respond to a single event as to the general direction politics is taken. In his Fall Revolution novels he was partially responding to the accelerating pace of globalisation and the role of the US as a caretaker superpower, here it’s the War on Terror and the emergence of the hypersecurity state and the increasing brutalisation of our societies as a result of this, made visible by the concept of the execution channel. Which is exactly what it sounds like, a tv channel dedicated to showing state sanctioned killings.

MacLeod has been at his best so far when he’s writing near-future science fiction and The Execution Channel is about as near-future as you can get, set perhaps ten years from now, perhaps only five. It’s a future in which all the fears we’ve had and still have about the War on Terror have become true: American and British troops not just in Iraq and Afghanistan anymore, but all over the Middle East, while in Britain itself the security state has taken over, terrorism is rampant and this in turn has led to pogroms against Muslims. And then a military airfield, RAF Leuchars, is hit by what looks like a nuclear attack. From there on things get worse.

The End of Eternity – Isaac Asimov

Published on January 20, 2008

Cover of The End of Eternity

The End of Eternity
Isaac Asimov
192 pages
published in 1955

So it turns out that in the more than seven years now that I’ve kept this booklog, I had not read any Asimov novel at all. Which is somewhat strange, as it was for a large part due to discovering Asimov in my local library’s youth section that I became a science fiction fan. I, Robot for example may very well have been the first proper science fiction book I ever read. For a long time Asimov was
in fact the gold standard against which I measured every new science fiction writer I came across. If they weren’t at least half as entertaining or interesting I wouldn’t bother with them. Of his many novels and stories it was this, The End of Eternity that was my favourite, one of the first science fiction books I bought for myself and the first to introduce me to the idea of time travel as more than an excuse to visit scenic parts of the past. Rereading it, the question was whether it would be as good as I remembered it to be. So many novels first read as a child disappoint when you reread them; fortunately this didn’t. In fact, it read almost exactly as I expected it to be.

The central idea in The End of Eternity is the existence of Eternity, an organisation that monitors and safeguards all of humanity’s history from the first invention of the secret of time travel. Most people outside of Eternity think the organisation only exists to facilitate trade between various centuries and perhaps in some vague way protect them from the unspecified dangers of time travel. What they don’t realise is that Eternity in fact exists outside of time, from which realm it can not just study and monitor time, but alter reality to make sure that humanity is kept on an ever increasing path to perfection. A whole organisation of Computers, the people who calculate these reality changes, Technicians, who execute them and various other specialists all work together to this goal, over a span of time that is literally millions of years long. Power is provided by tapping into Nova Sol, the Sun as it goes nova at the end of its lifecycle. An incredibly neat idea, not quite original to Asimov, but as I said the first time I encountered it was here.

The Long Twilight – Keith Laumer

Published on December 26, 2007

Cover of The Long Twilight

The Long Twilight
Keith Laumer
222 pages
published in 1969

Keith Laumer is one of the authors I devoured dozens of books from in my personal golden age of science fiction, first in Dutch translation, later in English. That’s because he had a knack for writing gripping, fun adventure stories that pushed all my sf buttons. Time travel, parallel worlds, supersecret superhuman agents who don’t know who they are themselves, that’s the stuff science fiction is made off when you’re twelve (and still is when you’re (at least nominally) an adult). His is a type of science fiction no longer being written, as it no longer seems to be commercially viable. Short novels you can read in less than two hours are no longer a good buy when the average paperback barely gets you change back from a tenner. No matter how much fun they are.

But fun Laumer’s books are, with The Long Twilight no exception. Laumer is at the height of his powers in this book, making this story about two feuding alien warriors stranded on Earth much better than it needed to be. Published in 1969, it came out only two years before Laumer would suffer a near-fatal stroke from which he would eventually recover enough to write again, but never again with the same skills. Which is a bit sad, because if not for that stroke, who knows what Laumer could’ve achieved…

Double Star – Robert A. Heinlein

Published on December 2, 2007

Double Star
Robert A. Heinlein
127 pages
published in 1956

There are times when you can no longer understand why Heinlein has such a good reputation in science fiction, considering his often pernicious influence on other writers and the vileness of his later books, when even the “good Heinleins” do not look so good anymore in retrospect. At such times, it’s good to reread a novel like Double Star and remember why you liked Heinlein in the first place. Double Star has long been one of my favourite Heinleins, but after this reread it may just very well be my alltime favourite. It has all of Heinlein’s strengths and few to none of his weaknesses.

If you’re familiar with Heinlein, especially late Heinlein, you’ll know these weaknesses: a tendency to preach and pontificate, a weakness for obnoxious blowhards as his heroes, an inordinate fondness for incestious relationships… None of these are present here. Instead you get Heinlein at his best, packing a rollicking adventure story, political intrigue and a fully realised future in less than 128 pages.