science fiction – Page 88

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.

Ammonite – Nicola Griffith

Published on March 8, 2008

Cover of Ammonite

Ammonite
Nicola Griffith
386 pages
published in 1993

Nicola Griffith is a writer I’ve heard a great deal of but so far had never read anything by. Ammonite was her first novel and immediately made a strong impression on publication, winning both the James Tiptree Award and the Lambda Award. As these awards confirm, Ammonite is a classic feminist science fiction novel, straight in the tradition of writers like Ursula Le Guin (Left Hand of Darkness), Joanna Russ (The Female Man) and Sheri Tepper (The Gate to Women’s Country).

The world created in Ammonite is also a classic feminist science fiction trope: that of a world without men. In this case, it’s the colony world of Jeep where an alien virus killed off all men and a large percentage of women, leaving the survivors to rebuilt their societies on a one gender basis. How they’ve managed to do so is the central mystery of Ammonite, which is partially a puzzle story and partially a leisurely planetary romance as our protagonist, anthropologist Marghe Taishan, travels the planet in search of answers. Marghe is working for SEC, the government agency that was set up to safeguard the interests of indigenes of rediscovered colony worlds like Jeep from exploitation by the Company, which has a monopoly on space exploration and which whom Marghe has some unpleasant history…

It’s David Brin’s Earth; we’re just living in it

Published on February 26, 2008

Yesterday Norway officially opened what’s been called a “Noah’s ark for plant life”:

Dug deep into the permafrost of a remote Arctic mountain, the “doomsday” vault is designed by Norway to protect the world’s seeds from global catastrophe.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a backup to the world’s 1,400 other seed banks, was to be officially inaugurated in a ceremony Tuesday on the northern rim of civilization attended by about 150 guests from 33 countries.

The frozen vault has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples from around the globe, shielding them from climate change, war, natural disasters and other threats.

For those of us that have read David Brin’s 1990 novel Earth, this sounds eerily similar to the “Arks” he used as part of the background, wildlife refuges for animal and plant species that were dying out in the wild. Brin set his novel in 2038, but reality seems impatient. Brin must’ve been particularly well inspired when he wrote Earth, as these arks are far from the first “prediction” from it that have come true, as the Wikipedia article linked to above shows. What’s more, Brin put them together into a coherent vision of the near-future that to some extent seems to be coming true. Not in all particulars of course; science fiction cannot predict the future after all.

Brin wrote his novel at a time when, like now, environmental awareness was high. Acid rain had been known since the early eighties at least, while the disappearance of the ozone layer was common knowledge at the end of the decade and was finally acted upon then, decades after it first had been discovered, while global warming and the disappearance of biodiversity were just entering public awareness. That was a time when a fair few science fiction novels, unlike now, tackled climate change.

Coincindentally there’s a recent thread on torque Control on why it is that so few sf authors currently seem unwilling or unable to tackle climate change other than as background fodder. Perhaps because most of us, other than hardcore denialists, seem convinced it is happening and it can’t be stopped only migitated. Climate change as part of the consensus future, too big to ignore but also too immediate to make writing about it fun perhaps, unlike fifteen-twenty years ago.

The Execution Channel – Ken MacLeod

Published on January 23, 2008

Cover of The Execution Channel

The Execution Channel
Ken MacLeod
307 pages
published in 2007

The Execution Channel is MacLeod’s newest science fiction novel and a return to the sort of book he made his name with, after several more traditional sf novels: intensily political, near future novels in settings that seems to flow logically from our own times and as a reaction to contemporary political developments. In science fiction the urge to respond to current events often results in shallow, cliched tripe, but that’s never the case with Macleod, largely because he’s a better writer than that, but also because he doesn’t as much respond to a single event as to the general direction politics is taken. In his Fall Revolution novels he was partially responding to the accelerating pace of globalisation and the role of the US as a caretaker superpower, here it’s the War on Terror and the emergence of the hypersecurity state and the increasing brutalisation of our societies as a result of this, made visible by the concept of the execution channel. Which is exactly what it sounds like, a tv channel dedicated to showing state sanctioned killings.

MacLeod has been at his best so far when he’s writing near-future science fiction and The Execution Channel is about as near-future as you can get, set perhaps ten years from now, perhaps only five. It’s a future in which all the fears we’ve had and still have about the War on Terror have become true: American and British troops not just in Iraq and Afghanistan anymore, but all over the Middle East, while in Britain itself the security state has taken over, terrorism is rampant and this in turn has led to pogroms against Muslims. And then a military airfield, RAF Leuchars, is hit by what looks like a nuclear attack. From there on things get worse.