Fantastika – Page 106 – Wis[s]e Words

Vellum – Hal Duncan

Published on March 24, 2008

Cover of Vellum

Vellum
Hal Duncan
501 pages
published in 2005

It’s rare that you get to read a book about which you can genuinely say that you’ll either love it or hate it. Usually this phrase is just hype, an attempt to make a book seem more controversial than it really is. Most books just bimble along without evoking either great hatred or great love in their readers. Vellum however is not such a book. It is genuinely a book you’ll love or loathe becauses, depending on your feelings, it’s either an incredibly stylish tour de force remaking of the fantasy novel, or self indulgent bloated nonsense, with glitzy prose masking a story devoid of any meaning. Myself, I can find some sympathy for both readings.

Hal Duncan is a new author; Vellum his first published novel. He seems to fit in loosely with that generation of fantasy writers that includes China Miéville, Justina Robson, Jeff VanderMeer and Susanna Clarke. I must admit he only appeared on my radar last year, when his
name cropped up on various science fiction blogs, which is why when I saw this book in the library I took a gamble on it. A gamble that paid off, fortunately. Vellum is an ambitious book, both in the story it tells as in how it tells it, that almost manages to fulfill its ambitions.

The Prize in the Game – Jo Walton

Published on March 21, 2008

Cover of The Prize in the Game

The Prize in the Game
Jo Walton
341 pages
published in 2002

I’ve known Jo Walton a long time, from before she became a succesful novelist, when she was “just” one of the most interesting posters in various Usenet groups like rec.arts.sf.written and Rec.arts.sf.fandom. You could therefore say I wanted this novel to be good. Fortunately, having read one of her earlier novels, The King’s Peace, I knew it was very likely going to be. And I was right.

Which reminds me that The Prize in the Game is actually set in the same world as The King’s Peace and functions as a sort of prequel to it, showing the background story of some of the secondary characters. You don’t need to have read it to enjoy The Prize in the Game however; it completely stands on its own. The quickest way to describe The Prize in the Game is as a coming of age novel set in a fantasy version of Celtic Ireland, in which some of the viewpoint characters may not actually come of age. Be careful though to assume too much from this; the island of Tir Isarnagiri differs from the real or even mythological Ireland in important ways. No leprechauns here.

Another winning moment for science fiction

Published on March 21, 2008

If, like me, you’ve made the mistake to read one or more of Larry Niven’s and Jerry Pournelle’s collaborations, you know they got a mighty high opinion of the abilities of science fiction writers. For example, in their alien invasion novel Footfall, they put in thinly disguised versions of themselves and their sf writer friends as advisors to the government on how to deal with the invasion, and actually got them listened to, while in Fallen Angels it was science fiction fans who formed the underground against the evil treehugging fundamentalist Christian feminists that rule America. A few years ago they actually gotten a real live version of their power fantasies going, when they created SIGMA, which apparantly is a group of a two dozen or so science fiction writers dedicated to giving the government national security advice, whether they want it or not.

Here’s an account of the group in action, showing by their careful, considered proposals how the science fiction community can help America cope with its problems:

Among the group’s approximately 24 members is Larry Niven, the bestselling and award-winning author of such books as “Ringworld” and “Lucifer’s Hammer,” which he co-wrote with SIGMA member Jerry Pournelle.

Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants.

“The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren’t going to pay for anything anyway,” Niven said.

“Do you know how politically incorrect you are?” Pournelle asked.

“I know it may not be possible to use this solution, but it does work,” Niven replied.

(Via James Nicoll.)

Arthur C. Clarke: 1917 – 2008

Published on March 19, 2008

Yesterday, at the age of ninety, Arthur C. Clarke died. He was the last of the Big Three of Golden Age science fiction –Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein– to pass away and as such his death is the end of an era. He was there when science fiction as a genre first crystallised out of Hugo Gernsback’s earnest attempts to predict the future, he answered John W. Campbell’s challenge to pull science fiction up by its bootstraps and raise it out of its pulp origins and he remained a constant presence in science fiction for over six decades, as fan, writer and science booster. He was there to see it develop from an almost cultish obsession practised by handful of enthusiasts to become so mainstream that most of the record grossing movies of the last couple of decades are science fiction. Of course, he himself was in large part responsible for making science fiction so
popular and even respectable.

Some of the things he should be remembered for:

The idea of stopping time and what opportunities and difficulties that brings with it
That he felt the need in childhood’s End to explicitely distance himself from the ideas in the novel
That actually, you can survive vacuum for a couple of minutes without a spacesuit
“Overhead, without any fuss”…
Inspiring Stanley Kubrick to film 2001 and especially its Pan-Am vision of the future
“the Star”
Geosynchronous orbits.

Clarke was one of the writers who got me into science fiction. I devoured his books when I was twelve and when I started rereading some of them a few years back, I was pleased to discover they still held up. Never known as a great stylist, Clarke nevertheless had a quiet charm all his own. I think Patrick Nielsen Hayden said it best, in his remembrance of Clarke:

in Clarke a practical science-and-engineering outlook coexisted with a mystical streak a mile wide. Indeed, much of his work establishes the basic template for one of modern science fiction’s most evergreen effects: the numinous explosion of mystical awe that’s carefully built up to, step by rational step. So much of Clarke’s best work is about that moment when the universe reveals its true vastness to human observers. And unlike many other writers who’ve wrestled with that wrenching frame shift, for Clarke it was rarely terrifying, rarely an engine of alienation and despair. He was all about the transformational reframe, the cosmic perspective, that step off into the great shining dark. He believed it would improve us. He rejoiced to live in a gigantic universe of unencompassable scale, and he thought the rest of us should rejoice, too.

Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut

Published on March 18, 2008

Cover of Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
215 pages
published in 1969

Back in the days when I read every book in the local library which had that little squiggle on it that meant it was science fiction, I read and reread a hell of a lot of Vonnegut. Books like Breakfast for Champions,God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slapstick and of course Slaughterhouse-Five. At the time I read them without any consideration of their literary status, but simply because Vonnegut was a science fiction author and I read science fiction, even if much of the Vonnegut novels I read weren’t quite science fiction. I liked them for their cynical black humour and inventive, seemingly slapdash plots.

Rereading Slaughterhouse-Five some twenty years later it’s easy to see why it made such an impression as a work of literature and why it’s so popular with generations of English students. It’s chock full of the sort of symbolism that makes it an easy book to dissect in a student essay. However, that also makes it hard to write about now, almost forty years after its first publication, because so much has been written about it already. I don’t want to write a review that comes over as yet another student paper.