science fiction – Page 49

The 2012 Clarke Award short list is out

Published on March 27, 20121 Comment

Remember a couple of weeks ago I tried to predict the Clarke Award shortlist? Yeah, It’s not looking good:

The six shortlisted books are:

Greg Bear, Hull Zero Three (Gollancz)
Drew Magary, The End Specialist (Harper Voyager)
China Miéville, Embassytown (Macmillan)
Jane Rogers, The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press)
Charles Stross, Rule 34 (Orbit)
Sheri S.Tepper, The Waters Rising (Gollancz)

That’s two out of six, with only one book out of the shortlist read (Rule 34) and one more on the to be read list (Embassytown). Not a very inspiring list, what with Bear and Tepper on there, both being Big Name American science fiction authors whose best work is decades in the past at this point. Coming after the nomination of a Tim Powers book last year that was a decade old, it seems “respectable but aging American novelists” is the Clarke’s version of Connie Wilis…

Sensawunda

Published on March 21, 2012Leave a comment

China Miéville on what weird fiction means to him:

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I’m teaching a course in Weird Fiction at the University of Warwick, so this has come up a lot. Obviously it’s kind of impossible to come to anything like a final answer, so I approach this in a Beckettian way – try to define/understand it, fail, try again, fail again, fail better…I think the whole “sense of cosmic awe” thing that we hear a lot about in the Weird tradition is to do with the sense of the numinous, whether in a horrific iteration (or, more occasionally, a kind of joyous one), as being completely embedded in the everyday, rather than an intrusion. To that extent the Weird to me is about the sense that reality is always Weird.

Sounds a lot like that old, much derided sfnal concept of sense of wonder, that moment of conceptual breakthrough you get when you’re shown what the universe is really like. In its most mundane form it’s achieved by plopping a Big Dumb Object in front of the reader (Ringworld frex), at its best it’s a literary thrill that no other genre can offer. Weird fiction is one of those genres that’s even less definable than science fiction, but it does have the same sensawunda, if in a more horrorific sense. The best example is H. P. Lovecraft with his dread and revulsion about the scale of the universe and the insignificance of mankind, the anti-science fiction writer.

Incidently, for a personal sort of horror, the opening sentence fragment, “China Miéville (1972 – )”, has it. Two years older than me and look how much more he has accomplished. Moments like that I appreciate where Michel Vuijlsteke is coming from when he talks about how much he had wanted to leave some sort of legacy behind. Work is alright but just work, at best an interesting and challenging way to make money, but not something people will remember you for or all that important in the scheme of things, while unlike Michel I also don’t see myself ever having kids and leaving my mark on the world in that way. There must be more to life than work and entertainment.

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.