science fiction Archives - Page 6 of 9

The Mercenary — Jerry Pournelle

Published on September 13, 20081 Comment

Cover of The Mercenary

The Mercenary
Jerry Pournelle
223 pages
published in 1977

The Mercenary is one of those books in my collection I’m a bit ashamed of. Not because it’s so badly written, but because its politicsare so embarrassing. Having it on my bookshelves is a bit like owning a collection of books about the nazis and the Second World War; you can be genuinely interested but it still looks bad to see a row of red and black bookspines with swastikas plastered all over them. Yet it’s precisely because of its politics that I kept it when I was purging my collection a few years back and why I reread it now. The Mercenary is a book that stands at the root of one of the more succesful –and distasteful– science fiction subgenres: mil-sf and in it can be found a lot of what makes the genre so awful so often.

Science fiction has always had a large conservative, rightwing streak running through it and Pournelle falls squarely in this tradition. This in itself is not a problem; some of science fiction’s best writers, like Poul Anderson, H. Beam Piper or Robert Heinlein were conservatives or had rightwing sympathies and you can still enjoy (most of) their stories without necessarily agreeing with their politics, even when they’ve made them explicit. What makes Pournelle different is that he goes beyond this. He’s not just a conservative, but a reactionary. His politics as shown in The Mercenary have fascist overtones, though I don’t believe he’s a fascist himself. No doubt if you asked him he would describe himself as an American conservative and believer in a strong democracy, though weary of the wisdom of the average voter, but what comes across here is his deep pessimism and mistrust of democracy and his yearning for a saviour to safe democracy from itself.

The Voyage of the Sable Keech — Neal Asher

Published on September 6, 2008

Cover of The Voyage of the Sable Keech

The Voyage of the Sable Keech
Neal Asher
506 pages
published in 2006

On second thought, this might have been the wrong Neal Asher book to start with, being a sequel to an earlier novel set in an universe that itself has been worked out over the course of a half dozen or so novels. But it was the only book I had with me, so I persevered. Fortunately The Voyage of the Sable Keech was standalone enough not to be completely opaque. The reason I wanted to try out Neal Asher’s work was because he kept being compared to people like Ken MacLeod, John Meaney, Alistair Reynolds and Liz Williams, part of that whole generation of late nineties British science fiction authors I like so much. Happily he didn’t disappoint, even if this was a bad book to start with.

What I liked about The Voyage of the Sable Keech wasn’t so much the plot, as that was fairly confusing since I had not read The Skinner, which this was a sequel to. What got me was both the inventiveness of the world Asher created as well as the matter of fact way in which he presents his world. In some ways it’s easily as baroque as some of China Miéville’s novels, but Asher’s writing style doesn’t draw attention to it the way Miéville’s does.In some ways The Voyage of the Sable Keech reminded me of Steven Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon, as it has a simular outrageous mix of technologies and powers, just in a science fiction setting rather than a fantasy one.

New Skies — Patrick Nielsen Hayden (editor)

Published on August 4, 2008

Cover of New Skies

New Skies
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
275 pages
published in 2003

I didn’t know this was meant to be an “anthology of today’s science fiction” for a “new, younger generation of science fiction fans” until I got this home from the library, as I only got it because Patrick Nielsen Hayden was the editor and I was curious to see what his tastes were like. I thought New Skies was an anthology of new science fiction, but instead it’s a showcase of science fiction stories from the last twenty years, aimed at an audience new to the genre. Still, it’s as good a test of Patrick’s tastes as any, as not only did he have to select his entries from over two decades of stories, but he also had to select them to show off the width and breadth of the genre, be not too long and accessible to younger reader. A huge task indeed.

Since I’ve been reading science fiction for quite some time now, I’m not exactly the target audience for New Skies; I don’t know how some thirteen year old kid would like this book, but I enjoyed it. New Skies does a good job of representing how much different kinds of science fiction stories there are and how much fun they can be. None of the stories were the kind that makes your hair stand on edge, but they’re good representations of what you can expect in science fiction and they’re accesible.

Swiftly — Adam Roberts

Published on July 19, 2008

Cover of Swiftly

Swiftly
Adam Roberts
359 pages
published in 2008

I’m not a great fan of Adam Roberts, as my reviews of his first two novels, Salt and On, as well as his first book on science fiction show. He has a style of writing that is too flat and detached for my liking, a penchant for using unlikeable characters as his protagonists, some difficulty in creating a good story and a view of science fiction I don’t share. In both Salt and On Roberts had created interesting settings, but fell down on providing the characters and story to do justice to them.

Swiftly, not to be confused with his earlier collection of short stories also called Swiftly, is Adam Roberts’ latest novel, a continuation of Jonathan Swift’s classic proto-science fiction novel, Gulliver’s Travels. Roberts takes Swift’s satire on early eigthteen
century Britain and Europe and imagines what could’ve happened if Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa and the Houyhnhnms were real, what the world could’ve looked like almost one and a half centuries later, in 1848. Now there are huge armies of Liliputians (or rather the more reliable Blefuscudians) working in England’s industries, bought and sold as so many animals. The Houyhnhnms have been enlisted as His Majesty’s Sapient Cavalry, while the Royal Navy has killed most of the Brobdingnagians as a menace to the British Empire. There’s another war with France going on, one England is winning handily, laying siege to Versailles.

British Summertime — Paul Cornell

Published on July 13, 2008

Cover of British Summertime

British Summertime
Paul Cornell
404 pages
published in 2002

British Summertime was a novel I didn’t have high expectations of, but which pleasantly surprised me. It was one of the first books I picked up on my latest library run, as something that looked good enough to take home if I didn’t find anything else. Although I did find several other, more promising novels that day (including Ink and Swiftly, I still took it home with me, read a couple of pages and banished it to the bottom of the stack. It was only when I’d finished all the other novels I’d picked up that I started on this and to my amazement found myself utterly captivated. I was all the more surprised because it quickly turned out that this was a deeply Christian novel, while I am anything but.

Usually, religion is politely ignored in science fiction, apart from the occasional made-up pagan rites to spice up some space opera or other. And when it does appear, it’s usually because the author has an axe to grind. It’s rare to find genuinely Christian characters in science fiction without them being stereotypes, but British Summertime has them, as well as a plot revolving around the literal truth of Christianity and manages to do so without me throwing the book against the wall. Not a mean feat, that. It works because Cornell treats it as just another interesting science fiction idea to play with.