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Farthing – Jo Walton

Published on September 5, 2010

Cover of Farthing

Farthing
Jo Walton
319 pages
published in 2006

At first glance Farthing seems to be a classic English cozy country house mystery, if set in an alternate England. There’s the locked room murder taking place during a weekend party at the Farthing country estate. There are the clues pointing all too neatly at one of the guests. There’s the doughty detective refusing to believe them and there’s the slow deduction of the real killer’s identity and motivations. It all feels like something Agatha Christie or Josephine Tey could’ve written — the latter’s unconscious class snobbery being consciously used here — but in the end Farthing turns out to be something very different from the cozy mystery or even alternate history tale it masquerades as. This is in fact a horror story, with the horror provided not by the plot or the characters, but through the setting. As Ursula Le Guin puts it in her front cover blurb: “If Le Carré scares you, try Jo Walton”.

Farthing grabbed me by the throat from the first page and didn’t let go; one of the very few books to have ever done that. As with any other alternate WWII story, part of that is due to what you know is going on in the background that the characters themselves do not know yet or only suspect. Every such Hitler wins story depends on the tension between what the reader knows happened historically and what the characters in the story know or do not know: sometimes this is done explicit, as in Fatherland, where the whole point of the book is to get the protagonist up to speed on what we as readers already know. In Farthing‘s case though things are kept implicit. What Walton does is let the essential horror of the setting speak for itself, keeping the swastikas and Gestapo goons offstage. What she does in fact is showing that England did not need these props to become a fascist state.

Big Planet – Jack Vance

Published on June 16, 20102 Comments

Cover of Big Planet

Big Planet
Jack Vance
158 pages
published in 1951

It’s always dangerous to reread books you fondly remember from your youth. As Jo Walton put it, between the time you last read it and your rereading it, a book might have been visited by the suck fairy, which has taken all the awesome bits you remember and replaced them with dullness. Worse, the racism or sexism fairy may have also visited… I was therefore taken a risk in rereading Big Planet, one of the earliest Jack Vance novels I had ever read. Would it still be the great planetary romance I remember, or would all the adventure and wonder have been sucked out of it?

It turned out to be a bit of both. Not as good or great an adventure as my memory had made it, but still worth reading on its own accord. What my memory had made of Big Planet was much more exotic and detailed than it turned out to be, the real thing much more sketched out than filled in and how could it not with only 158 pages to play with. Nevertheless Big Planet is an important novel in Jack Vance’s development as a writer, as well as influential on other writers, as it shaped the planetary romance subgenre. Planetary romance being any science fiction story which takes place on a single planet and where most of the book revolves around the exploration of the planet, the stage more important than the actors on it.

The Night Sessions – Ken MacLeod

Published on June 11, 2010

Cover of The Night Sessions

The Night Sessions
Ken MacLeod
324 pages
published in 2008

It was only when Ken ran a blurb on his blog for a promotion event for his new novel, that I realised that I hadn’t read his previous one The Night Sessions yet. So when my sweetie was running an Amazon order anyway and asked me what I wanted as a gift, this is what I asked for. Glad I did too, as it is of the usual high quality I expect from Ken.

You could call The Night Sessions a thematic sequel to The Execution Channel. That novel took place at the height of a decades long extension of the War Against Terror, while this takes place some decades after the end of what’s now called the Faith Wars in the US/UK, the Oil Wars anywhere else. Ended in a defeat for the coalition of the willing, it led to serious political repercussions in the west: the UK has disintegrated, the US is undergoing a second civil war (something Ken has used before) and in Scotland, as elsewhere religion is well and truly disestablished. There’s not just a separation of church and state, but an official constitutional police of no cognisance: the state doesn’t recognise priests, vicars, bishops, mullars or other religious offices, not even on the level of acknowledging their titles. It’s a world that fits in with Ken’s current hardline secularist attitude, as witnessed by his blog.

Second Foundation – Isaac Asimov

Published on June 10, 20101 Comment

Cover of Foundation

Second Foundation
Isaac Asimov
187 pages
published in 1953

Second Foundation is the third and last novel in the Foundation series, which popularised the notion of a Galaxy spanning empire in space opera. Originally published in 1951-53 and based on short stories from the forties, the series is now almost sixty years old, something to keep in mind when reading it. The series was revolutionary when it was first published, popularising not only the Galaxy spanning human empire, but also all the bagage associated with it. Asimov famously took Edward Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and transplanted it amongst the stars, with the background assumption that only an galactic empire could guarantee peace, yet it’s inevitable that it will decline into decadence and ultimately fall into barbarism. This became a staple of fifties and sixties space opera, with lesser writers uncritically using this for their own stories of galactic derring-do. It’s a very old fashioned concept now and its familiarity lesses the impact of the Foundation series.

The same goes for psychohistory, Asimov’s other great invention in the series, the use of mass psychology to predict the future actions of a large enough group of humans, with “large enough” being an entire Galaxy worth. What with quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle and chaos theory and all the other half remembered scientific factoids we’ve all absorbed over the past six decades or so, the idea that a group of scholars could predict human history now sounds absurd. And yet… As Donald Kingsbury showed with his 2001 novel Psychohistorical Crisis — which you could call Foundation fanfic — that these ideas in themselves are still valid, can even now be used to create an interesting story. The question therefore is, if approached with an open mind, is the original foundation series still owrht reading in its own right and not just as a historical artifact?

Foundation and Empire – Isaac Asimov

Published on June 6, 2010

Cover of Foundation

Foundation and Empire
Isaac Asimov
172 pages
published in 1952

Foundation and Empire is the middle book in the Foundationtrilogy, to which no sequels were ever written and suffers a bit from being a transitional book. The trilogy had originally been written as a series of short stories, published in Astounding before being fixed-up into novel form for publication by Gnome Press in the early fifties to prove that there was a market for science fiction novels. This fixup worked well in Foundation, but Foundation and Empire could just as well been split up between the other two books. The first half follows on naturally from Foundation, while the second half is continued in Second Foundation.

As seen in the first book, Hari Seldon was a psychohistorian who predicted the fall of the Galactic Empire and set up the Foundation to help limit the period of barbarism that would follow to a mere 1,000 years, rahter thann the 30,000 it would take otherwise for a new empire to rise. Through various crisises, predicted by Seldon and manipulated by him so that there was always only one choice for the Foundation to whether the crisis, it became a regional power in the periphery of the Galaxy, second only to the old empire. Now the Foundation faces its first direct confrontation with the empire, in the last crisis Seldon predicted correctly, while the second half of Foundation and Empire tells the story of the crisis Seldon didn’t predict: the rise of the Mule.