Martin's Booklog

Steampunk — Paul Roland

Published on January 31, 2015Leave a comment

Cover of Steampunk

Steampunk
Paul Roland
191 pages including index
published in 2014

If I felt more nasty Reginald Pikedevant’s excellent cri de coeur against steampunk fakery would be my whole review. I spotted Steampunk: Back to the Future with the New Victorians in the library among the new books and thought “great, just the sort of field guide I need to come to grips with this newfangled steampunk nonsense”. Sadly though this turned out to be just a shallow cash in which told me little I didn’t know written in an irritating manner that had my hackles up halfway through the first chapter.

The danger in writing about steampunk is that one starts to write as if one was indeed a Victorian gentleman, with all the loquaciousness and florid prose that image conjurs up. I can’t do that convincingly and neither can Roland, but he gives in to the temptation occasionally, where his normal writing style is much more casual. These style clashes are jarring and annoying, but would’ve only been a minor annoyance had the rest of the book been better.

Modern steampunk is more than just a literary subgenre, but something of a lifestyle, with artists, writers, musicians and not in the least costume makers inspired by the idea of an alternate, up to date Victorian aesthetic. To give a comprehensive picture of this subculture in less than twohundred pages is a challenge. You need a firm grip on the essentials, a vision of what steampunk means throughout all its various incarnations in art, music, literature and costuming. If you can’t or won’t do it, you run the danger of drowning in details and names.

I think Roland makes two mistakes in Steampunk: he doesn’t provide real definition or vision of what steampunk means to him and compounds his error by dividing his chapters by artform, looking at each in isolation. With the limited space he has for each (literature, music, art, costuming/clothing, movies, conventions and the internet) it’s no wonder each chapter is mostly name checking and listing the requisite names. One feature of the book that could’ve helped in this regard, the short interviews with key figures Roland provides, actually end up hindering because they lack any real depth.

I didn’t catch Roland out in any gross mistakes in the part of steampunk culture I know most about, the part that started as a science fiction subgenre, but neither did I get to read much new. Roland touches briefly on the actual nineteenth century scientific romance writers like Wells and Verne but is right not to consider them part of steampunk — lacking that sense of nostalgia and retrofuturism that’s essential to the genre. He then moves on to proto-steampunk like Moorcock’s The Land Leviathan before talking about K. W. Jeter’s “invention” of the genre by analogue to cyberpunk in the late eighties, to refer to the books he and his friends James Blaylock and Tim Powers were writing. Roland is a bit snippy about those early steampunk books, finding them too wild to be real steampunk, not fitting neatly into what the genre would later become.

These were in my view the most coherent chapters in the book, Roland’s short overview of the history of steampunk as a genre and his survey of contemporary steampunk writers. The chapters after that, diving into music and such, are less interesting. When most of the artists interviewed say that they didn’t consider themselves steampunk, you have a problem. It might have helped if he had put the subculture and steampunk fandom front and center rather than trying to cram everything remotely steampunk related into the book.

This isn’t a completely hopeless book, but it’s shapeless and doesn’t rise much above enumeration of steampunk artifacts in its analysis. It needed a better vision to provide a proper narrative. You’re better off just reading the Wikipedia or TVtropes pages on steampunk and following the links…

Pandora’s Planet — Christopher Anvil

Published on January 30, 2015Leave a comment

Cover of Pandora's Planet

Pandora’s Planet
Christopher Anvil
192 pages
published in 1972 (original in 1956)

Libertarianism has a well deserved bad reputation in science fiction, largely because so many writers who profess to be adherents also are godawful people who write jack off fantasies about how freedom requires their jackbooted thugs putting their boot in somebody else’s face, whether it’s Heinlein’s repeated wish to kill off all the lawyers or Kratman resurrecting the Waffen SS to deal with an alien invasion. But once upon a time there was a gentler, more humane sort of libertarianism, one that still catered to the prejudices of Analog notorious editor John Campbell Jr, but that hadn’t quite lost its humanity. H. Beam Piper was its best known representative, but there were others, like Christopher Anvil.

Anvil is one of those writers I only ever had heard about, but had never read simply because I’d never seen any of his work for sale, new or secondhand. He was never translated in Dutch as far as I know, one of those minor Analog writers who’d been reasonably popular in the sixties and seventies but was passed by when the genre moved on. From what I gather he specialised in stories in which clever humans put one over militaristic aliens and Pandora’s Planet is in that mold, gently cocking a snoot at authority in general in the process. It’s gentle and not very humourous satire, but much better than the modern libertarian habit of genociding every alien race that looks at Earth funny.

Anvil uses an idea that other writers, like Niven & Pournelle or Harry Turtledove, would later use in more “serious” novels, that of Earth being invaded by aliens who have found the one simple trick of interstellar travel but are actually somewhat dimmer than us earthlings. The Centrans have been conquering star systems for thousands of years, but never had as much trouble as they had with Earth. But while Earth, divided between nations nowhere else seen by them, is able to keep the invaders busy, they can’t win due to the overwhelming numerical supremacy of the Centrans.

For the moment at stalemate, with Earth nominally conquered but the Centrans harassed and harried at every corner, they try a different tactic: don’t conquer, but let the Earthlings be assimilated in the Integral Union. The Centran High Council has thought up this plan because it has been impressed by Earthmen’s intelligence and drive. They however are smart enough to not give the Terrans access to the entire Union, only a part to see if Terran intelligence and drive could help improve the Union, but in such a way that any possible damage would be limited.

So the Earthmen were let loose in the galaxy and chaos reigns on the various Centran colonies they visit and settle on. All which is shown through the eyes of Klide Horsip, the Planetary Integrator who was supposed to have Earth integrated in the Integral Union. Now assigned to keep track of their progress to that part of the Galaxy known to them, Horsip and his righthand man Brak Moffis are firsthand witnesses to what happens if you let communists, fascist dictators and snake oil salesmen loose on an unsuspecting, innocent alien empire…

All of which is fairly dated, mainly satiric riffing on modern life, mid-fifties vintage, but Anvil is an engaging enough writer that you plow through this. What’s more interesting is the sympathetic treatment of the Centrans, which really isn’t an evil empire but seems to follow the same impulses as say the Federation in Star Trek. And while they may not have the same intelligence and drive as Earthmen, they have their own strengths, rather than just being fanatical warriors. Anvil is also smart enough to realise that in group differences in intelligence may very well overshadow differences between groups. In a society as large as the Integral union there will therefore be many Centrans as smart or smarter than humans and best of those are on the High Council because the Centrans don’t waste talent the way Earthmen do.

That’s what sets Pandora’s Planet apart from the flood of other Campbellian adventures where tricksy humans outsmart hidebound aliens. Anvil’s sympathies lie with the Centrans more than with the Earthmen and while the Earthmen do wreak havoc in the Union, it doesn’t get nasty. An entertaining if ultimately shallow read.

Schismatrix Plus — Bruce Sterling

Published on January 27, 20151 Comment

Cover of Schismatrix Plus

Schismatrix Plus
Bruce Sterling
319 pages
published in 1996

As a literary movement, cyberpunk has had the misfortune to be dominated by not just one particular writer, (William Gibson) but by one particular novel: Neuromancer, which ever since its first publication in 1984 has served as a template for what is and isn’t cyberpunk, stultifying the genre almost from its birth. I do not blame Gibson or Neuromancer for this, but rather the legion of mediocre writers who jumped on the cyberpunk bandwagon after it, churning out third and fourth rate copies. Everything that was original and good about cyberpunk got lost in this flood, anything that deviated from the Neuromancer template shoved aside.

Which unfortunately included Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix, which never quite got the acclaim it deserved. Coming out only a year after Gibson’s Neuromancer, it should’ve taken its rightful place beside it as one of the acknowledged classics of the genre. However, this never quite happened. Somehow, cyberpunk had already solidified too much for Schismatrix to fit in comfortably. It was just too different from the low life with high tech template put forth by Neuromancer and its imitators. Schismatrix‘s influence would only be felt later, in writers like Charlie Stross and Neal Stephenson, after cyberpunk had crashed and burned.

For me personally, Schismatrix was one of the seminal cyberpunk novels, one of the few available to me when I was still almost entirely dependent on the Middelburg library for my science fiction fix. Together with of course Neuromancer and Dan Simmons’ Hyperion series I’d discovered at the same time, it was a first taste of modern science fiction, because until then the library mainly had stocked Golden Age and New Wave science fiction, not so much new stuff.

What Schismatrix showed me was a future in which space stations needed not be clean and sterile, but could actually decay and smell funky. A future in which space travel was boring, something you had to do to get from one place to another, not an adventure or a noble striving to be free of the ties of Earth. That was new to me.

Looking back, Schismatrix was of course very much influenced by the Cold War environment in which it was written, with its Solar System divided between Shapers and Mechanists. The first are those who use genetic enginering and psychological training to shape their bodies and minds, while the Mechanics use cybernetics and software. In the 23rd century, these are the conservative faction struggling for supremacy. Caught up in this battle for power are the various independent and not so independent colonies on the Moon and in L5, ruled by or allied to one faction or another.

The Mare Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic is one of these colonies, ruled by ancient Mechanist families, whose innate conservatism strangles the possibilities for the younger generations in the colony. In hindsight, a very eighties concern as the baby boomers came of age and started grappling with political power. Something Sterling would also come back to in the later Holy Fire. Abelard Lindsay and Philip Constantine are two friends who’ve both been trained as Shaper diplomats in nominal service to the colony, rebellious and wanting to make a grand gesture to change its politics. That fails, it kills Vera Kelland, the woman they both loved and sets them against each other. Constantine remains at the colony, Lindsay is exiled.

As Lindsay moves from colony to colony, Constantine stages a coup and assumes control of the Mare Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic. His presence remains as a menace in the background, driving much of the plot of the first half of the novel, as Lindsay attempts to get away from his influence. Ultimately he ends up on an asteroid colony originally founded by a Shaper clan and now taken over by a Mechanist cartel. His attempts to keep peace between the two factions fail and open war breaks out, which he and his new love only survive due to the coming of the aliens, the socalled Investors.

The second half of Schismatrix is taken up with the impact their arrival has on the Solar System’s political scene and economy, as it’s soon clear they care nothing for the Shaper/Mechanist squabbles. Détente sets in, but isn’t kept. In the meantime the struggle between Constantine and Lindsay continues, half hidden in the everyday political manoeuvring of the various powers. This part of the story stretches over decades and centuries.

Unlike Neuromancer, Schismatrix has dated much less, even if its politics are very eighties. Sterling has a knack for creating believeable, lived in, dense political and cultural futures and a scope that’s at easy with centuries and the entire Solar System to play in, in contrast to Gibson’s more cramped, Earthbound futures. Nevertheless there are similarities. The dirty secret of the cyberpunks is that, despite their rebellious stance, they were science fiction True Believers, confident that humanity’s future lies in space and in both novels that future is in progress. If you squint hard enough, they could be part of the same future.

Apart from Schismatrix itself, Schismatrix Plus also contains the Shaper/Mechanist short stories originally collected in Crystal Express:

Swarm (1982)
Spider Rose (1982)
Cicada Queen (1982)
Sunken Gardens (1984)
Twenty Evocations (1984)

The Instrumentality of Mankind – Cordwainer Smith

Published on January 24, 2015

Cover of The Instrumentality of Mankind

The Instrumentality of Mankind
Cordwainer Smith
238 pages
published in 1979

Cordwainer Smith was one of the more interesting science fiction writers of the fifties and sixties. Under his real name, Paul Linebarger, he had been instrumental in the development of psychological warfare, worked in China in WWII to coordinate military intelligence there, became a confidant of Chiang K’ai-Shek and consulted for the US Army in the Korean War. His science fiction reflected his life, much more literate and creative than was the norm in the genre at the time, influenced by Chinese literature and culture among other things and not afraid to be poetic, especially in the titles.

Smith had a real knack for creating gorgeously strange far future worlds, on display here even in the earliest story in the novel, “War No. 81-Q, written in 1928 when he was still in high school. Most of his stories, including the majority here, are set in the same universe, The Instrumentality of Mankind as in the title. It’s a future that stretches out from 2000 AD to 16000 AD, with the Instrumentality itself established around 5000 AD. There’s almost no continuity with our own time, though two stories here do star timelost refugees from the collapse of nazi-Germany, the Vonacht sisters, in “Mark Elf” and “The Queen of the Afternoon”, set early in the revitalisation of humanity after the devestation of the Ancient Wars that had destroyed civilisation.

All the instrumentality stories in this volume, from “No, No, Not Rogov! to “Drunkboat” are in chronological order, with the non-Instrumentality stories bunched up at the end of the book. Short text pieces connect each of the first couple of the Instrumentality stories with each other. To be honest, the stories here aren’t the best Cordwainer Smith has written. As the back cover makes clear, The Instrumentality of Mankind was the last in Del Rey’s seventies republishing of Smith’s oeuvre and some of these stories clearly are leftovers.

But these aren’t bad stories and although this isn’t perhaps the best volume to try Smith with, there’s enough merit here to pick it up if you find it. Otherwise, there’s the NESFA Press collection The Rediscovery of Man which has all of Smith’s stories in one convenient volume.

Stories in this volume:

No, No, Not Rogov!
War No. 81-Q
Mark Elf
The Queen of the Afternoon
When the People Fell
Think Blue, Count Two
The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All
From Gustible’s Planet
Drunkboat
Western Science Is So Wonderful
Nancy
The Fife of Bodidharma
Angerhelm
The Good Friends

Who Fears Death — Nnedi Okorafor

Published on January 24, 2015Leave a comment

Cover of AWho Fears Death

Who Fears Death
Nnedi Okorafor
386 pages
published in 2010

As I was reading Who Fears Death, about a third to halfway through it, a simple question sprung to mind: why did I think this was set in Africa? There had been no recognisable place names, no mention of Africa, no hint of what the Seven Rivers Kingdom corresponded to in the real world until almost at the end of the book, when it’s revealed to once have been part of the Kingdom of Sudan (which as far as I can determine, has never existed, at least not under that name). Yet from the start I had no doubt this was set in some part of Africa, but why? Was it just because Nnedi Okorafor is a Nigerian writer? Or the cover, which does look very “African”? Ironically, for once in a field where protagonists are often whitewashed on the cover, here the opposite may have happened; the heroine, Onyesonwu, is described as being “sand dune coloured” in the book, paler than most people.

Because of this, by just looking at her, people know she’s the child of rape, an Ewu, born of an Okeke mother raped by a Nuru man, as part of a strategic campaign of ethnic cleansing by the Nuru of the Okeke, traditionally their slaves. Any child born of rape is not just a permanent reminder of Nuru superiority, it also undermines the Okeke’ future directly, as they aren’t Okeke and nor would their children. Onyesonwu therefore, like all Ewu, is outcast, barely tolerated in Okeke society and that only because of her father, not the man who raped her mother, but the man she chose for her when she and her mother came out of the desert they’d been living in. And it is when her father dies when she’s sixteen, that everything changes for Onyesonwu, when it becomes public that part of the unwanted heritage she has gotten from her mother’s rapist is the ability to practise magic. Now she has to find somebody to teach her how to control her powers and how to use them to protect herself.

That’s all in the first two short chapters, setting up the rest of the story. At the end of the first chapter it’s established that it’s being told by Onyesonwu to an unknown listener, four years after the death of her father, while she’s waiting for her own death. Throughout the rest of the story she occassionally flashes forward to this moment, as we learn more about why she ended up there. At first the story is told mostly in flashback however as Onyesonwu talks about her growning up and trying to fit in with a society in which she’s an outcast. Her innate sorcerous abilities, in a society where of course sorcery is the domain of men, doesn’t help. Large parts of her story revolve around her struggle to control and learn to use her powers, in the face of the (well intentioned) refusal of those who could help her.

The town Onyesonwu lives in is far removed from the realities of the slow burning civil war that her mother fled, but as the novel progresses it comes closer. It also becomes that the driving force behind the genocide of the Okeke is her own father. And with Onyesonwu’s becoming a woman and growning mastery of her sorcery, she comes to his attention, seemingly setting things up for a familiar quest story, in which Onyesonwu has to defeat her father and overcome the racial and tribal perjudices of both her peoples.

Though this is what more or less happens, it doesn’t quite fit the mold though. Onyesonwu often is more pawn than hero and never escapes the fate that she sees in her initiation rite when the local sorceror master finally takes her as his pupil. At which point it also becomes clear to the reader, if it hadn’t already, that she’s narrating the story shortly before she will be killed by stoning. She’s at peace with this, as the same vision also revealed that her death would change everything for the Nuru, Okeke and Ewu.

But what really sets Onyesonwu apart from a Luke Skywalker say, is that once in full possession of her powers, she’s as destructive and vindictive as her father. When her friend is killed in one town, she blinds the inhabitants. Worse she inflicts on the Nuru capital, through killing every Nuru male in it, whil impregnating every Nuru female, avenging what was done to her mother a million fold.

This isn’t really the sort of behaviour we expect from our science fiction or fantasy heros. Sure, genocide is always the first option space opera protagonists reach for when things get difficult, but it’s supposed to be done rationally, not so emotionally as this. It also makes a mockery of the elegant structure of the prophecy she’s supposedly enacting, as her actions have already changed the world, her death just a coda.

And all through this I kept wondering why it felt so African to me when it was only on the very last page it was revealed it was indeed set in Sudan. Granted, the genocide and civil war reminded me of the South Sudan and Ruanda, but it could’ve just as well been Bosnia twenty years ago. Perhaps it was that curious mixture of what seemed like superstition mixed with actual sorcery embedded in a society that seemed organised on the village level, where high technology like computer tablets do exist, but seem external to village life. Maybe Who Fears Death is just deliberately designed to feed on our prejudices and stereotypes of “Africa”.

This wasn’t an easy novel to read, much more so than Lagoon was. I”m not sure it entirely succeeded in what it set out to to, or even what that was. If you’re new to Okorafor’s writing, perhaps Lagoon would be a better start.