science fiction – Page 9

The Night Sessions – Ken MacLeod

Published on June 12, 20101 Comment

Cover of The Night Sessions

The Night Sessions
Ken MacLeod
324 pages
published in 2008

It was only when Ken ran a blurb on his blog for a promotion event for his new novel, that I realised that I hadn’t read his previous one The Night Sessions yet. So when my sweetie was running an Amazon order anyway and asked me what I wanted as a gift, this is what I asked for. Glad I did too, as it is of the usual high quality I expect from Ken.

You could call The Night Sessions a thematic sequel to The Execution Channel. That novel took place at the height of a decades long extension of the War Against Terror, while this takes place some decades after the end of what’s now called the Faith Wars in the US/UK, the Oil Wars anywhere else. Ended in a defeat for the coalition of the willing, it led to serious political repercussions in the west: the UK has disintegrated, the US is undergoing a second civil war (something Ken has used before) and in Scotland, as elsewhere religion is well and truly disestablished. There’s not just a separation of church and state, but an official constitutional police of no cognisance: the state doesn’t recognise priests, vicars, bishops, mullars or other religious offices, not even on the level of acknowledging their titles. It’s a world that fits in with Ken’s current hardline secularist attitude, as witnessed by his blog.

Second Foundation – Isaac Asimov

Published on June 10, 2010

Cover of Foundation

Second Foundation
Isaac Asimov
187 pages
published in 1953

Second Foundation is the third and last novel in the Foundation series, which popularised the notion of a Galaxy spanning empire in space opera. Originally published in 1951-53 and based on short stories from the forties, the series is now almost sixty years old, something to keep in mind when reading it. The series was revolutionary when it was first published, popularising not only the Galaxy spanning human empire, but also all the bagage associated with it. Asimov famously took Edward Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and transplanted it amongst the stars, with the background assumption that only an galactic empire could guarantee peace, yet it’s inevitable that it will decline into decadence and ultimately fall into barbarism. This became a staple of fifties and sixties space opera, with lesser writers uncritically using this for their own stories of galactic derring-do. It’s a very old fashioned concept now and its familiarity lesses the impact of the Foundation series.

The same goes for psychohistory, Asimov’s other great invention in the series, the use of mass psychology to predict the future actions of a large enough group of humans, with “large enough” being an entire Galaxy worth. What with quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle and chaos theory and all the other half remembered scientific factoids we’ve all absorbed over the past six decades or so, the idea that a group of scholars could predict human history now sounds absurd. And yet… As Donald Kingsbury showed with his 2001 novel Psychohistorical Crisis — which you could call Foundation fanfic — that these ideas in themselves are still valid, can even now be used to create an interesting story. The question therefore is, if approached with an open mind, is the original foundation series still owrht reading in its own right and not just as a historical artifact?

Foundation and Empire – Isaac Asimov

Published on June 6, 2010

Cover of Foundation

Foundation and Empire
Isaac Asimov
172 pages
published in 1952

Foundation and Empire is the middle book in the Foundationtrilogy, to which no sequels were ever written and suffers a bit from being a transitional book. The trilogy had originally been written as a series of short stories, published in Astounding before being fixed-up into novel form for publication by Gnome Press in the early fifties to prove that there was a market for science fiction novels. This fixup worked well in Foundation, but Foundation and Empire could just as well been split up between the other two books. The first half follows on naturally from Foundation, while the second half is continued in Second Foundation.

As seen in the first book, Hari Seldon was a psychohistorian who predicted the fall of the Galactic Empire and set up the Foundation to help limit the period of barbarism that would follow to a mere 1,000 years, rahter thann the 30,000 it would take otherwise for a new empire to rise. Through various crisises, predicted by Seldon and manipulated by him so that there was always only one choice for the Foundation to whether the crisis, it became a regional power in the periphery of the Galaxy, second only to the old empire. Now the Foundation faces its first direct confrontation with the empire, in the last crisis Seldon predicted correctly, while the second half of Foundation and Empire tells the story of the crisis Seldon didn’t predict: the rise of the Mule.

Foundation – Isaac Asimov

Published on May 30, 2010

Cover of Foundation

Foundation
Isaac Asimov
189 pages
published in 1951

If you’ve ever been in the Netherlands on 30th April than you know we celebrate Queensday (the queen’s birthday party, held on the birthday of the previous queen but don’t ask) by holding massive flea markets/car boot sales. Ideal opportunities to pick up a lot of books fast and cheap. This year it included a lot of Asimov books, from a guy selling off his science fiction collection, including all the good Foundation series books: Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation. These were orginally written as short stories in the forties, then reworked into novels in the early fifties, among the first science fiction novels to be sold as such. Much much later Asimov would write new sequels to these three books, but those were .. not good.

The originals though were, if not the first Galactic Empire stories, the ones who popularised it and set the pattern for a flood of imitators (see for example Brian Aldiss’ two anthologies, Galactic Empires volume I and volume 2). Influenced by Edward Gibbons History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Asimov basically transplanted the Roman Empire to Outer Space and had it rule the Galaxy, a Galaxy devoid of any other intelligent life and in which it was axiomatic that humanity should be united under one emperor and ruled from one planet and anything else would be barbarism. Yes, these are all utterly clichéd and wornout concepts now, but don’t forget that this was first published in 1951 and based on stories from the forties, in other words, this is some seventy years old. You may therefore wonder if Foundation is worth reading for anything but historical value. Certainly Asimov’s reputation as a not very good writer doesn’t help — you don’t read his stories for his sparkling turn of phrase.

And yet…

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.