Fantastika

The Raw Shark Texts – Steven Hall

Published on April 11, 2010

Cover of
The Raw Shark Texts

The Raw Shark Texts
Steven Hall
427 pages
published in 2007

The Raw Shark Texts was marked as science fiction in my local library, which is why I glanced at it while browsing the fiction shelves. “Mindfuck” would be a better classification howeve, one of those books that break down the realities of your world and has you looking for monsters out of the corners of your eye. Reading it on a long, delayed train journey with nothing else to distract me while it was slowly getting dark helped a lot as well.

Steven Hall sucked me in from the first two sentences: “I was unconscious. I’d stopped breathing.” I should quote the first three and a half pages to show how Steven Hall builds up the scene from there, as his hero wakes up in an explosion of coughs and deep breaths, takes stock of his situation and then realises he doesn’t know where he is or who he is. He pats his pockets, locates a driver’s licence and tastes the name it gives him: Eric Sanderson. The scene ends with that discovery, with a new scene opening in a therapist’s sitting room, as she explains what’s been happening to him. While she explains, flashbacks explains how Eric got there: going downstairs from the bedroom he awoke in, he found a letter by the telephone, a letter from “the first Eric Sanderson”: who tells him to go to this therapist.

Black Man – Richard Morgan

Published on April 4, 2010

Cover of Black Man

Black Man
Richard Morgan
630 pages
published in 2007

This was too much of a rerun for me. Black Man (published in the US as Thirteen for obvious reasons) has much the same plot as Morgan’s first novel Altered Carbon. A worldweary, cynical but ubercompetent mercenary is blackmailed into going after a murderer and in the process uncovers a far greater and more horrible truth than he suspected existed or his employers necessarily wanted him to find out. As with every Morgan novel I’ve read so far it’s an edge of your seat thriller, keeps you engaged to the bitter end, but five minutes later you’re thinking “that’s all“? I got the feeling Morgan was going through the motions, his heart not in it and it just seemed too slight to be worth a Clarke Award.

One big reason for the discomfort I felt was the silly worldbuilding. Morgan is excellent at creating a “realistic” sounding world, using infodumps, incluing and jargon to create an image in his readers’ heads, but it doesn’t work when he bases his future on the infamous Jesusland map. Remember 2006, after Bush had started his second (stolen) term and before the Congressional midterm elections, and how many of the liberal leaning blogs were despairing of their country? How it really seemed for a moment the US was split in two, with progressive coasts and an ignorant flyover country? Yeah? Remember also how fast that changed once the Democrats actually won an election? Well, it’s this that Morgan bases his future on: the Jesusland maps and books like Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas. It was already dated when he was writing it, now just feels hopelessly silly. It makes it hard to take the world Morgan created seriously.

Altered Carbon – Richard Morgan

Published on March 9, 2010

Cover of Altered Carbon

Altered Carbon
Richard Morgan
534 pages
published in 2002

Altered Carbon is Richard Morgan’s first novel. It made a strong impression, winning the Philip K. Dick Prize for best novel in 2003, as well as being optioned by Joel Silver, the sale of the movie rights enabling Morgan to become a fulltime writer. Since then Morgan has written several more novels, part of the same generation of British science fiction writers as Alastair Reynolds, Neal Asher and Jon Courtenay Grimwood. I knew of him, but had not read anything of his until last year, when I read Broken Angels and was sucked in from the first page. So not for the first time I started a series in the wrong way, as that was actually the sequel to this book — not that it mattered, as all they shared was the hero, Takeshi Kovacs.

Whereas Broken Angels was a Dirty Dozen type war romp with the cynicsm turned up to eleven, Altered Carbon is more of a Chandleresque film noir story. It starts with Takeshi as amercenary on Harlan’s World being caught and killed in a police dragnet, to wake up on Earth minus one partner and forced to solve the murder of Laurens Bancroft, which everybody but the murder victim in question thinks is suicide. If Takeshi refuses to cooperate or fails in his task he’ll go back in storage for the next couple of centuries or so.

Broken Angels – Richard Morgan

Published on March 7, 20103 Comments

Cover of Broken Angels

Broken Angels
Richard Morgan
490 pages
published in 2003

Richard Morgan is a British science fiction writer, who debuted in 2002 with Altered Carbon, to which Broken Angels is a sequel. It can however be easily read on its own, considering I just did that with no trouble at all. The only thing it has in common with the earlier novel is the protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs. I’d been aware of Morgan as a hot new writer, but hadn’t sampled him yet. Reviews of his work had been mixed and I hadn’t been interested enough to seek his books out. Which may have been a mistake, judging from Broken Angels.

From the reviews I’d read and the remarks made by friends who had read his novels I had gotten the impression that Morgan let his leftwing politics overwhelm his stories, while he was also accused of having a lot of unnecessary violence in his stories. I found neither of these allegations to be true in this case. There is a political undertone to Broken Angels, but certainly no dozen page rants; there’s violence, but it’s not at all reveled in the way John Barnes sometimes does. It reminded me in fact of Neal Asher, another author often accused of excessive use of violence, in that neither shy away from showing the consequences of violence, that being shot hurts and what it exactly does to a body. But where Asher’s descriptions are very organic, dripping with ichor and blood and bodily fluids, Morgan’s is very clean, sharp, bright and clinical but not at all detached. His characters feel their pain. And they get plenty of opportunities to feel this pain.

William Tenn (1910 – 2010)

Published on February 8, 20102 Comments

At age eightynine it was to be expected, but hearing about the death of William Tenn aka Philip Klass was still not a nice way of starting the day. Especially coming so soon after the news of Kage Baker’s death a week ago. I can’t say I knew either of them, but they were both writers whose books I read and enjoyed and would’ve liked to read more of. Kage Baker especially, because whereas Klass had long since retired, she was still busy writing, becoming better with each novel she wrote. You’d wish her a long and happy career but sadly the cancer intervened.

But if I’m honest, William Tenn’s death hit me more. He wasn’t the first science fiction writer I read, but he was one of the first authors I noticed whose stories were noticably better written than average. Whereas most sf stories I read back then had little appeal beyond the neat idea(s) they contained, Tenn’s stories went beyond that. Stories like “The Liberation of Earth” or “The Brooklyn Project” only look like typical sf stories, with the central idea easily told in a few sentences, but the language use and the sharp, satirical insights are unique to Tenn. As Theodore Sturgeon put it, slightly over the top:

It would be too wide a generalization to say that every SF satire, every SF comedy and every attempt at witty and biting criticism found in the field is a poor and usually cheap imitation of what this man has been doing since the 1940s. His incredibly involved and complex mind can at times produce constructive comment so pointed and astute that the fortunate recipient is permanently improved by it. Admittedly, the price may be to create two whole categories for our species: humanity and William Tenn. For each of which you must create your ethos and your laws. I’ve done that. And to me it’s worth it.

(From Wikipedia.)