Fantastika – Page 63 – Wis[s]e Words

The Better Part of Valor — Tanya Huff

Published on March 4, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of The Better Part of Valor

The Better Part of Valor
Tanya Huff
411 pages
published in 2002

Once I had finished Valor’s Choice, I knew I was going to have to go back to the bookstore I’d found it in and get the other two Tanya Huff books I’d saw there too. To be honest, I hadn’t even taken me as long as finishing the first two chapters to decide this. I’m always on the lookout for good, intelligent military science fiction and Valor’s Choice was just that, which meant I had to get the sequels too. What I especially liked was the absence of the sort of nasty rightwing politics souring me on so many other mil-sf writers.

The Better Part of Valor starts with staff sergeant Torin Kerr just back from her mission in Valor’s Choice. Having had words with general Morris, who was responsible for said mission, she is immediately sent out on another one by him, without her own platoon even. Whether this is punishment or reward she isn’t sure, but it turns out she will join a new marine platoon put together from scratch to protect a scientific expedition to an “unidentified alien vessel drifting dead in space”. She hopes it will be an uneventful recon mission, but after the last one she was sent on by general Morris, she isn’t hopeful.

This year’s Clarke Award

Published on February 28, 20121 Comment

The Clarke Award (founded by Arthur C. hisself) is given each year to the best science fiction novel first published in the UK the previous year. It’s a juried award, unlike both the Hugo and Nebula, for which any publisher can submit novels it thinks eligible. This year’s submissions longlist has just been made public at Torque Control; so farof the sixty entries, I’ve read exactly one of them, Charlie Stross’ Rule 34. Which I think is also the only sf or fantasy novel published in 2011 that I’ve actually read.

Which won’t stop me from entering Torque Control‘s guess the shortlist game however. Below are the six entries I think will be on it and why:

Embassytown, China Miéville. China is a multiple Clarke Award winner and this novel created quite a lot of buzz early last year, so I think this is a shoe-in.

The Islanders, Christopher Priest. Another easy guess, as Priest has also won the Award previously, while this novel is a return to his old Dream Archipelago series of stories.

Reamde, Neal Stephenson. The Clarke Awards in the past few years have had at least one American nominee in the shortlist and this is the obvious candidate; if we’re unlucky it will be one of the two Connie Willis novels instead.

Osama Lavie Tidhar, which I’m currently reading. This is the one I’m the least sure about, but it seems to have had a fairly large p.r. push (helped by Tidhar making the e-book edition free a while back, which is when I got it), it tackles a big, important theme and it’s somewhat on the literary side of the science fiction genre, which ticks all Clarke boxes for me.

Rule 34, Charles Stross. A good book, an important British sf writer, who has been nominated before.

The Fallen Blade Jon Courtenay Grimwood. He has been shortlisted a few times before, so is a likely candidate for this year as well.

An all male lineup, which would not be my preference so much as me looking at the list of nominees with no other information than what I already knew about the writers and books listed. We’ll see at the end of March how right I was.

The Cold Equations

Published on February 27, 2012Leave a comment

Existence required order, and there was order; the laws of nature, irrevocable and immutable. Men could learn to use them, but men could not change them. The circumference of a circle was always pi times the diameter, and no science of man would ever make it otherwise. The combination of chemical A with chemical B under condition C invariably produced reaction D. The law of gravitation was a rigid equation, and it made no distinction between the fall of a leaf and the ponderous circling of a binary star system. The nuclear conversion process powered the cruisers that carried men to the stars; the same process in the form of a nova would destroy a world with equal efficiency. The laws were, and the universe moved in obedience to them. Along the frontier were arrayed all the forces of nature, and sometimes they destroyed those who were fighting their way outward from Earth.

That’s the message that “The Cold Equations“, Tom Godwin’s best known story (to be honest, the only story he really is known for) wants you to take away from it. It’s the melodramatic story of an emergency dispatch ship (EDS) pilot who discovers a stowaway on board and knows he has to immediately shove him out of the airlock, or otherwise he won’t have enough fuel to reach the colony he’s on his way to, his ship having just enough fuel to reach that. But then it turns out the stowaway is not some swarthy space bandit but *gasp* a young, innocent girl wanting to visit her brother in the colony. Our hero now has a moral dilemma, but the cold equations of space leave no other room than for the girl to sacrifice herself to save the ship.

For all its melodrama it’s an incredible effective story, if you don’t think too much about it, pitting a certain science fiction reader’s desire to be the kind of hard man who knows some sacrifices are unavoidable against the very same fan’s belief that there always is a solution. Even now, almost sixty years after its first publication it’s still a subject for debate as so many people want to deny its central message, that the laws of nature have no place for human values, that some deaths are unavoidable.

I’m one of them. Because the situation that “The Cold Equations” sketches is avoidable and as a result the story ends up not to be so much a parable for the cold, uncaring cruel laws of space as it is a demonstration of the necessity of good health and safety laws.

Lets start with basics: you have these huge space cruisers that fly between colonies which have a couple of EDS ships on board in case a colony not on the itenary needs urgent help. These EDS shuttles are sent out with the bare minimum of fuel needed to reach the colony. Even without the problem of stowaways, there are other situations in which a ship might need more fuel than the bare minimum to reach its goal; why skimp on this safety margin? But worse is that the story makes clear that there are no real safety measures to keep passengers on the cruiser to reach an EDS, or any real attempt to discover stowaways before the EDS leaves the cruiser. Sure, there’s a sign saying that the EDS is off limits to unauthorised personnel, but that’s hardly a real safety measure…

And this is not because the (fictional) company running these spaceships is sloppy and negligent, but because Tom Godwin, the author, needs this to setup the situation he wants of the innocent girl stowaway doomed to die because at that point the harsh laws of space permit no other outcome. But before this situation can be set up he therefore has to omit a lot of common sense safety measures that would’ve prevented it from arising in the first place.

And if you’re trying to prove a political point by arguing that the laws of physics make certain measures necessary, that killing some people is sadly necessary for the greater good, it behooves you to make sure that the situation you’ve chosen to illustrate this harsh fact is in fact not completely avoidable with some common sense precautions.

Dragonflight — Anne McCaffrey

Published on February 20, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of Dragonflight

Dragonflight
Anne McCaffrey
303 pages
published in 1968

Because I’ve been running my booklog since 2001 I know it’s at least a decade or more since I’d last cracked open an Anne McCaffrey novel, yet once upon a time her The Dragonriders of Pern series was very important to me. Like so much science fiction and fantasy I discovered the Pern books through the local library, first reading them in Dutch, then continuing in English after I discovered the later books were only available that way. Over the years I devoured everything of McCaffrey I could lay my hands on, but I got less and less enjoyment out of her later novels, until I stopped reading them all together. Which is why I hadn’t read her in more than a decade and why it took her death to get me to reread the Pern novels. Which is a shame, as rereading them now makes clear how good McCaffrey at her best really was.

And Dragonflight was the best story she ever wrote. The two novellas that form the first twothirds of it, “Weyr Search” and “Dragonflight were rewarded with a Hugo and a Nebula Award respectively and are worth it. I had remembered Dragonflight as a fairly light novel, but it actually starts out quite dark, with Lessa, its heroine being the sole survivor of a coup against her family, plotting revenge as a kitchen drudge against the evil lord Fax who had taken over her hold. She’s not a nice person at all at the start of the story, completely focused on getting her own back and on making the hold as miserable as possible. But she also has a secret, a bond with the watch wher, a telepathic reptile like animal used as a watchdog. Little does she know that this is a hint to a much greater destiny for her…

SF Mistressworks nominated for a BSFA Award

Published on February 15, 20121 Comment

The British Science Fiction Association (BSFA for short) has just announced the shortlist for its 2011 awards. And amongst the nominees for best non-fiction is a website I’ve contributed too, Ian Sales’ SF Mistressworks blog. Ian set the blog up last year as part of his attempts to get more coverage of female science fiction writers, inspired by the discussions about the gender imbalance in science fiction in general and British sf publishing in special. For the same reasons last year I had my own reading project, to correct the gender imbalance in my own reading.

The SF Mistressworks blog is intended as a showcase for all sorts of science fiction written by women, to demonstrate that,
as Ian puts it:

a) women have been writing science fiction since the genre’s beginnings,

b) many of their books should qualify as classics, and

c) many of their books are, in fact, better than “classics” by their male counterparts, and have at least aged better.

Such a showcase being necessary because more so than their male counterparts, female sf writers run the risk of being written out of the genre’s history, even when they were incredibly popular. For instance, around the time that Ann McCaffrey passed away, I remember reading a rant by somebody annoyed that a high profile review of Christopher Paolin’ Eregon books talked about the influence of Tolkien on them, but said nothing about the obvious Pern influences[1]. For various reasons, it’s much easier to construct male orientated histories of the genre, to talk about Verne-Heinlein-Niven-Egan-Stross, not so much to talk about Shelley-Moore-Le Guin-Cadigan-Williams.

I’ve contributed several reviews to the site, reprinted from my own booklog, for books I considered fitted in well with its aims[2]. As such I can’t help but be proud to see Sf Mistressworks recognised for its contributions, though obviously its success is mainly due to Ian Sale’s hard work and dedication. It’s a great initiative and I hope this recognition will help it continue its good work.

[1] If anybody recognises this article, let me know, as could I find it today? Could I buggery.
[2] E.g. The Sign of the Labrys, Ammonite, The Sword of Rhiannon and The Female Man.