Fragments of 2011 (and earlier)

[[Oh dear. Oh dear. Time to clear out some old junk.]]

[[I've been quite busy over the last year or so, and highly prone to displacement activities. Which has meant, among other things, that I've left a whole bunch of draft posts never being completed or posted. Well, we now have a new year, so I'm resolving (despite the fact that I do not do New Year Resolutions) to clear house a bit. These posts are highly incomplete, and they're going to stay incomplete - I'm just going to post them all in one go, as fragments and sketches falling out of my brain over that year or so. I may or may not have tidied, revised, or edited parts of them. Take them or (perhaps better) leave them.]]

[[The first actually goes right back to October 2010, oh dear...]]

Recent Reading: I Shall Wear Midnight
by Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett's "Tiffany Aching" books, in the "younger readers" sub-category of Discworld stories, have always suffered from the danger of falling into a fixed pattern. While wandering around her home chalk downlands area and developing her skills, young witch Tiffany Aching encounters a supernatural threat ...

... But Pratchett is too canny a writer to fall too deeply into too rigid a pattern, and this fourth and latest book in the sub-series appears - probably - to show him quitting while he's ahead. Tiffany has aged as a character through the series, and now she's sixteen ...

[[By June 2011, I noticed that I wasn't getting everything I meant to do, done:]]

Catching Up: Late June (Going to Extremes)

I've fallen way behind on my blogging, to the point where the next few entries won't represent diary entries so much as notes made before I forget everything. [[Hah!]] My Flickr photostream is quite a bit more up to date; tinkering with photos seems to work much better as a displacement activity than jotting down text. Yes, I seem to have been keeping busy.

Anyway, the first un-diarised event in question was a trip westwards. I hadn't been to Cornwall since childhood holidays; it didn't feel as personally resonant as Charmouth and Lyme, but it still felt odd not to have seen the place for quite so long. So we booked a few days in Falmouth.

Okay, so we were in a boutique hotel within sight of a branch of the Rick Stein empire. That wasn't terribly reminiscent of childhood caravanning holidays, but it did permit a few very nice dinners. (The first being very, very good fish and chips. I get the idea about good fried fish melting in the mouth, but this is the first time I've had to use the same phrase for chips.) The hotel was good, too, apart from a shortage of parking, and also the seagulls in the morning, which showed the limitations of the place's sound insulation. ...

[[A little after that, I barely started another post:]]

Theatre: All's Well That End's Well
Shakespeare's Globe, 30/6/2011

On a very occasional theme of trips to the Globe Theatre for lesser Shakespearean drama (i.e. plays by him that we haven't seen often if at all before) ...

[[In July, we got back up to London.]]

Literary Sources and Resources

British devotees of SF sometimes like to think that this country has a special place in the history of the genre. Well, it's true that we did produce Thomas More, Jonathan Swift, Mary Shelley, and H.G.Wells, so we have little to be ashamed of - but the "special" role of British SF is ultimately defined by a negative; we didn't create the pulp magazines (or their contemporary successors, the big-screen Hollywood FX action movies) that still define SF to so many people outside of fandom. Along with those founder-figures, though, we have also produced some extraordinary visionaries in more recent times. The British Library currently has a pair of exhibitions that illustrate all this, and on the 9th, we went along to both.

Why does the BL run such things? Oh, they have the resources - and we also took in their permanent exhibition rooms, which we'd missed out on before ...

[[The two exhibitions were a small one about Mervyn Peake and a large one about British SF in general, by the way. And they were interesting.]]

[[In October, I started blogging about our big antipodean trip. My Flickr photostream is covering that better, actually, albeit long after the event.]]

To the Far Side
October 7-???

... The trip began, on the Friday: taxi (to the coach stop)-coach (to Heathrow)-747 (to Singapore). That was with an afternoon start, so it was a night flight,  on which I finally got to see Green Lantern (some smart revisionism regarding goofy Silver Age comics conventions and metaphysics, fuzzy FX visuals in an attempt to get the Green Lantern power to look right, plot all over the shop thanks to Hollywood Oedipal obsession) and Paul (current British ubergeek auteur possibly slips over the edge into self-indulgence, certainly shows rather painful media-geek tin ear for the subtleties and niceties of written SF and its exponents). I also managed an hour or two's sleep before arriving in the future in mid-afternoon.

Well, I suspect that some people would like Singapore to be their vision of the future. It's a bit hot for me - but then, it does have plenty of air conditioning to compensate. The difference between indoors and outdoors is ... extreme. ...

... Tuesday was our one full day in Perth, so we tried to work out our personal highest priorities in the city. First stop was the Perth Mint, a former outpost of the Royal Mint set up to process gold from the gold fields. These days, it's been handed over to the Western Australian state government, it no longer handles gold coinage provision for much of the British Empire, and the refining and casting operations have moved out of town, but the city centre building still has some impressive-looking machinery and a few museum features - including the world's largest collection of gold bars. (Okay, just a couple of rooms' worth - but still.) It also has the facilities to cast a single gold bar, as demonstrated by one of the staff several times per day (using the same gold every time). Okay, so this is basically just a short fireworks display - but an expensive one.

Then we moved on to the city's museum district, to discover that the big Art Gallery no longer opens Tuesdays. Hey ho, the big Museum was open (some good info on the history of the region, Victorian stuffed animals, a pretty good collection of meteorites), and then came lunch in the Gallery cafe, then a short bus ride to big Botanical Garden ...

...
Wedenesday was packing, checking out, and heading out to the rail terminal to get on the Indian-Pacific rail service, departing eastwards just before noon. This is a pretty comfortable way to spend three days crossing Australia, albeit in a compact cabin ... but the food's pretty good. So we spent the afternoon making our way up the valley of the Avon River, and that night, the train stopped for a few hours in Kalgoorlie, so we took a one-hour coach trip in the dark. Much of this was about the driver being flippant about this mining town, but we did get to stop at the biggest hole in the ground in the world. Sadly, this open-cast mine wasn't very active this night, so all we got to see was a couple of distant (very distant) giant (very giant) trucks in patches of spotlight as they went about their gold-gathering business.

Then we hit our bunks to try and catch enough sleep before Thursday, when we were set to cross the Nullarbour plain. Okay, so I was a little disappointed on principle to see a few trees when I woke up, but we moved into a zone of arboreal nullity soon enough. ...

[[Then I got through to November before I started another post.]]

Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

... We must have seen many of these pictures before - they're on loan from museums we've visited over the years - but ... Among other things, we must have Vermeer's Lacemaker in the Louvre, but seeing it in the flesh felt fresh - and showed (or reminded) us that it's actually rather small; the reproduction print we have on the wall at home is actually twice as big. (Banners outside blow these pictures up to huge size; actually mostly rather small.) The Fitzwilliam clearly know what the selling point of this exhibition is ... despite title, only a couple of Vermeers in the show, but plenty of other good stuff ...

[[And there, I leave things and make a fresh start. Hmm, I never even started posting about the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival open air Macbeth, which was good, but which featured one big curious inversion of effect. The evening we went, the first half got played in daylight, while the second half was played in darkness. But the first half is where you get most of the serious plot darkness, as the two lead characters plunge into evil; the second half is basically a political thriller in which light is restored.]]

[[Oh, and in the unlikely event that anyone's wondering; I can no longer be bothered to even say anything about Doctor Who.]]

Doctor Who 2011-1

First off, to damn with faint praise, Doctor Who has been better this year than for a while. For much of this first half of this year's series, I have been able to watch it with actual interest, rather than feeling that I've been suckered by a title borrowed from a series that was significant to me in my teen years, and that I'm being insulted by self-indulgent junk. It's become light science fantasy with a bit of style, some functional plots, and decent characteristation.

Well, the first half of the first half, anyway.

The core problem with NuWho resurfaced in episode 5. It wasn't just the skimpy, predictable, but painfully implausible plot, the ropey science and the frenetic hand-waving; it was the sense that all of these things were familiar. They weren't just repeating Who-at-its-worst; they looked like an almost-conscious homage to Who-at-its-worst. In other words, this was Who written by someone who'd seen far too much Who, and who thought that repeating stylistic stuff from over the last fifty years with nary a thought to how stupid it might look today was the way to go. Given that, the decision to stretch the story out over two episodes, when  many better plots have been jammed into one, was just adding insult to injury.

(I notice that some more serious fans are complaining about moral inconsistencies in the Doctor's behaviour at the end of this story. This seems to me to be missing a large point. Before you can worry about moral logic, you need simple consistent logic - without any and all inconsistencies being hand-waved away.)

Then, strangely enough, along came episode 7. Oh dear.

You could say that this made a similar mistake, seeming at times to be paying homage to the worst bits of Davies-era NuWho. But I'd be simpler than that. This episode resembled nothing but the worst sort of fanfic.

It was overloaded with guest appearances that made less and less sense the closer you looked at them, and introduced a whole bunch of new characters who the writer thought would be cool (a sword-wielding Silurian detective in Victorian London!) or funny (a Sontaran nurse). Unfortunately, none of it was half as clever as it thought it was, and surely even the youngest of fans will noticed that they were being pandered to - ineptly - by the end?

Okay, I'll watch the second half of the 2011 series when it shows in a few months. I'm hoping that the nature of this war against the Doctor will be explained in more detail, and that his enemies' need for a baroque and implausible plan in order to create a bizarre weapon to use against him will turn out to have an interesting explanation, instead of just being another stupidly complicated attempt to destroy him (when they could have shot him or blown him up at various points during this episode). I'm hoping that the Headless Monks will have an interesting explanation and history, instead of just being another bunch of nursery-scary, stylish, faintly surreal Moffat monsters. (Actually, it's a terrible thing how nursery-scary, stylish, faintly surreal Moffat monsters have gone from being wonderful to being a cliché in a few short years). We'll probably get some half-decent episodes. But frankly, I think that I'm going to be stuck damning with very faint praise again.

Source Code

((Many thanks to the people who sent me copies of this article, after I failed to keep one and Google lost it.))

(More catching up on posts I should have made a month ago. I can just about remember what I meant to say...)

Obvious note; the problem with commenting on this movie is that it's hard to do so without spoilers. And it's honestly good enough not to deserve that.

But, okay, the reviews and trailers have (unavoidably) given away a bit. Not everything, though; a certain amount of layered revelation is part of this film's charm. It's widely described as a time travel story, but what emerges fairly early is that this isn't quite true - or perhaps it is, as it turns out. Choose your own definitions. More annoyingly, a lot of comments seem to describe it as complicated or hard to follow, which suggests to me that too many people's brains just shut down when they're confronted with skiffy ideas about time or any kind of game with causality, because I really didn't see much complexity at all. The explanation of how things seemed to work, and eventually of the film's conclusive twist, struck me as very straightforward, even linear, even if the protagonist did replay the same few minutes of apparent time repeatedly as he went along. Nor was the film quite as rigorous as comments suggested; several of the eight-minute replays that were necessary to the plot would have been too repetitive for any audience, and so were skimmed over.

(Anyone who finds this film unpleasantly hard to follow really, really needs to avoid Primer, by the way.)

In fact, the relatively rigorous approach to plot logic made this a true science fiction story (as opposed to "heroic fantasy in space" or "action thriller with extreme special effects", which is what Hollywood tends to mean by "science fiction" these days), and with Source Code following on Moon, it seems that director Duncan Jones has a genuine and fairly unusual interest in the genre. This isn't hard SF, mind; the core idea of the plot is handwaved fairly frantically, involving as it does multiple scientific and technological jumps far beyond anything that could be made to look hard-SF plausible in the modern-day setting.. In the end, it's using the word "quantum" a lot to justify a fairly arbitrary story with a large dose of wish-fulfilment, even if one could argue that what it does is opt for the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics without being so crass as to say so (or to even mention Schrodinger's cat).

Nor is the plotting entirely immaculate; looking back over the film, one can identify significant unanswered questions of both logic and morality. (What could one say about the fate of the original occupant of the body which the hero borrows, for a start?) Still, it is a film about an idea, even if that idea is a bit shaky.

The cast, by the way, are good, and the leads are given enough to get their teeth into. Jake Gyllenhaal makes an effective hero, confused and stressed, far from infallible but ultimately capable enough; Michelle Monaghan is an attractive overt object of desire; Vera Farmiga really carries the film, balancing professionalism with sympathy. Only Jeffrey Wright really has a problem - not that the actor isn't fine, but his character seems unfairly treated. He's vain and unsympathetic, to be sure, but I couldn't help feeling that a man who invented such mind-bending technology would have the right to a very large dose of vanity indeed, and even if that is his main motive for employing it and exploiting the hero, he is actually trying to save thousands or millions of lives in the process. Making the scientist into something of a villain, with silly physical preening to match his intellectual hubris, was the one place where this turned into cheap, bad Hollywood SF.

But if that's the one place, well, we can't complain too much, can we? This isn't the film of the year - probably not even the SF film of the year - but it's a film that I could wish a lot more films were like.

Dr Who 2010(a)

Generic criticism; "science fantasy" is a bastard genre that lacks any inherent discipline. If anything is possible, nothing means anything.

Case in point...

Oh, okay, the Christmas Special wasn't that bad. It was done with a certain amount of panache, and it had its moments. It was also interesting as perhaps the first Who Christmas Special that really tried to be about Christmas in some significant way - although I imagine that all the stuff about midwinter festivals may make it a hard sell in Southern Hemisphere markets.

But the structure was all over the shop. The snag with the 21st century Doctor-as-demigod pattern is that it's hard to present him with a truly worrying challenge, and this story got wildly arbitrary in the attempt to get around that. When your magic-wand-sorry-sonic-screwdriver can do anything to any machine, having it not work on some not-very-wizzy-looking contraption is just unconvincing. When your hero's vehicle has towed whole planets around, being unable to rescue one modest-looking spaceship which is crashing very slowly just looks incompetent. And when you're running round history as a plot convenience, having a heroine suffer from a 19th-century-opera terminal disease - one that gives her one day to live but no visible symptoms - is going to look plain goofy to even the eight-year-olds watching. Maybe it is incurable, in all of time and space, but somebody ought to think to try.

Which reminds me, general hint to TV writers; virtually everyone knows how long the programme they're watching will run for. Therefore, having someone announce that your hero has got "just under an hour" to solve a problem at the start of the episode slices suspension of disbelief into tiny bleeding ribbons. See Nick Lowe's The Well-Tempered Plot Device for further discussion.

Also on the matter of time; it's been observed before, by smarter people than me, that Steven Moffat really loves plots that play games with time and causality. Sometimes, this has produced very good stories (starting back with Coupling). But putting him in charge of a series about a guy with a time machine may be too much like putting a child in charge of a sweetshop. Sending the Doctor up and down someone's personal timeline is the kind of time-meddling that Doctor Who has customarily avoided - and allowing people to meet older and younger versions of themselves is usually, canonically, treated as a bad thing. This thing about time is beginning to look like Moffat's hubris.

(Also, I guess having the special effects shark spring forward with jaws agape may just have been a conscious reference to Back to the Future 2, but if so, it was tempting fate. Who FX aren't so good these days that you can afford to remind people of famous lines about crap special effects.)

But regarding science fantasy... The defence of such things, when they're compared to science fiction, is that (like most competent fantasy) they invoke poetic and emotional truths rather than brute rationalism. Well, maybe. But aside from the fact that, when you're deploying the rationalist paraphernalia of science fiction, this is in danger of looking like mawkish tosh, the fact is that you have to make the poetic truths convincing. Chucking in a lot of carol singing and a carriage pulled by a flying shark doesn't cut it.

In other words; Bah, humbug.

(The trailer for next year's episodes after the credits looked moderately amusing, by the way, with no daleks or cybermen even. But I did glimpse a bloody ood. Unless we're going to get a story in which an arch-villain intervenes in their evolutionary history to transform them into the most stupid race in the history of biology, I shall be very cross.)

Recent Reading: Rainbows End

by Vernor Vinge

I picked this up a few months back, but I took a while to finish it, with various interruptions - which may be a sign about how much enthusiasm it didn't inspire in me, but could of course just be a sign of the men-over-45-don't-read-many-novels syndrome.

I was interested in it because I've quite liked some Vinge I've read in the past, and I was curious as to what he would do, as a fairly seriously hard SF writer with an interest in genuine futurology, with a near-future setting. The problem, perhaps, is that what he does is a bit too much like some of his far-future stories. He wants to tell a sprawling multi-stranded tale of wonders, but he tries to cram it into the more constraining bounds of an international espionage tale and a school story.

Yes, both. The plots are also crammed together with a story about an aged Alzheimer's victim who turns out to respond exceptionally well to new medical treatments, and who therefore finds himself more or less restored to youth. The strands are interlocked moderately competently - the restored geriatric is obliged to attend the school in order to learn his way around the brave new world of 2020-ish, allowing for a certain amount of low key touring of the balloon factory, while his family become the key to a multi-layered espionage plot - but there's a sense of excessive coincidence, and some moderately odd behaviour from one or two characters that mostly happens to drive the plot. Vinge plays with some interesting ideas about near-future developments in computer interfaces and large-scale networked decision support, but this leads to some odd, unexamined problems; for example, if a character is engaging in a deeply secret, incredibly illegal and morally dubious long-term project, could he really maintain a large network of online consultant-advisers without worrying whether one or two of them might, you know, work out what they're involved in and blow the whistle in a fit of conscience?

In fact, the human elements are some of the least convincing parts of this story. The central character, the rejuvenated geriatric, comes across as an annoyed hard-science academic's parody of an annoying, self-indulgent artist-intellectual, and is only patchily convincing, either in himself or in his response to his situation. We also get the bizarre situation of a school full of teenagers, plus some elderly people in newly youthful bodies, one of them that self-indulgent, emotionally manipulative poet-intellectual, where nobody even seems to think about sex for almost all of the book. I wasn't look for soft porn or bad comedy, but I was looking for either plausible human behaviour or some explanation why human norms might have changed so radically by this point in the near future. But answer came there none. Libido suppressants in the water supply, maybe.

Vinge's view of the information-saturated future isn't that deep, either. After most of the book has talked about such matters, the climactic scene is largely driven by someone's attempts to extract a physical object from a sealed location - a physical maguffin whose information content is all that matters, really. Also, about half-way through the book, some of the characters discuss whether one of the others might be, well, something which William Gibson established as a bit of a cyberpunk cliche decades ago. The characters dismiss the idea out of hand. It's not giving away much to say that it seemingly turns out to be correct. How this could have come about in the time between now and the novel's present isn't very clear to me, mind, but that's another of Vinge's problems; he wants all these wonderful things to have come into existence in the near future, but his plot needs them to have been around for a fairly long time, so that they can have had consequences. (It also needs a few moderately substantial political shifts, such as India becoming a global power player.)

The novel does have some decent ideas, and one or two characters it's possible to care about, for good or ill, even if a lot of them are a bunch of smug, shallow technocrats. But then, in the end, it shambles to a slightly confused and incomplete conclusion, leaving the fate of some of those characters unclear and with enough semi-loose ends that I wonder if we're supposed to be looking for a sequel. I'm not, though, really; I suspect that Vinge is at his best when he looks into the far rather than the near future. It's a shame; I was hoping that he could write short, snappy books that I could enjoy, as well as his interesting but physical-strain-inducing doorstops, and I hoped that he could do some good near-term futurology. But he's really not as sharp or convincing as, say, Greg Egan, or the better cyberpunks; for all his forward-looking pose, he's an older-generation skiffy writer, and it shows.

Doctor Who 2010

So I've finally got around to watching the last episode of this year's season of Dr Who (definitely no question mark as it seems these days), by which time all the serious fans have already blogged about it, sometimes at extreme length and occasionally with useful insights. So anything I'm going to say is going to feel deeply superfluous.

But since when did that stop a blogger?

One thing that those fans spotted was that this season seems to have been largely about Steven Moffat doing the sort of things that Russell T Davies previously did with the show, but doing them well. Now, while this is vastly preferable to many other things (such as, doing them the way that Russell T Davies was doing them), it wasn't what some of us were at heart hoping for (which was, at minimum, him doing Steven Moffat things well). Still, this approach produced some episodes that I enjoyed well enough... Until the last two.

Though the two episodes in the story in question were annoying in different ways. The first was just padded - okay, so bits of it involved classic Who thrills, but all the stuff with the Romans felt rather desperate, and when you're playing for these stakes, some running around and screaming with one (1) damaged Cyberman feels a bit feeble. It also involved some amazing incidental mental thickness; okay, the Doctor might somehow might be expected not to notice the obvious about his little speech about what was in the Pandorica, but you'd have expected one of the two smart-arse companions present to react with "sounds like you".

The plot felt cobbled-together and implausible, too. Okay, hoping for plausibility in a Who plot is a bit forlorn, but there has to be some kind of break point, some chance that stuff might be explained in such a way to make one go "ah!". The Alliance of Enemies had some credibility problems, too; there's infinite comic potential in trying to imagine their planning meetings ("THIS MEETING IS CALLED TO ORDER!" Later. "We have a cunning plan. He's going to cause the end of the universe because of these crack thingies, so we're going to raid his assistant's brain through one of these cracks, construct a hideously complicated plot to attract his attention, and then capture him." "And then we exterminate him?" "No, we lock him in a box that any idiot with a sonic screwdriver can open." "Can't we exterminate him a little bit?" Later. "What are the Silurians doing here? We thought that he liked you lot." "You mean, apart from giving us a scientific name that puts us in the same genus as those monkeys?" "Yes." "Well, he put us into hibernation, and set the timer so that we woke up in the 31st century - just when he knew damn well that solar flares would be sterilising the solar system...").

The second part, on the other hand, showed the severe difficulties with fairytale-style wild science fantasy, by just not doing it very well. If anything is possible - anything that fairytale magic might bring about, anything that wide-screen baroque space opera might conceive - then the most that you can get on screen is pretty pictures and over-acting. This was all-too-Daviesian NuWho, the Doctor as a demigod who can save the entire universe with a bit of dubious technobabble and some pained claims about self-sacrifice, and the assistant du jour as the mostest important magic girl in all the universe who can restore things which have been wiped from history by wishing hard enough. It just wasn't satisfactory.

This series has also given too damn many hostages to fortune. Another thing that some proper fans noted about the whole series was that Steven Moffat seems to like time travel stories - that is, stories in which stuff happens in the wrong order, cause and effect are chopped up for dramatic or comic effect, and so on. Actually, I think that the time travel is just an excuse, a convenience; Moffat simply has a lot of fun tinkering with causality within narrative structures. My favourite script of his, ever, anywhere, remains episode 1 of season 4 of Coupling, "Nine and a Half Minutes", which is essentially Rashomon as an urban sex comedy. However, Who has usually been a little bit careful about time travel stories, in this strict sense; to this show, time travel is just a way to get our heroes into an infinite variety of places and times, and any suggestions about going back in time to stop bad things have been clubbed down with pronouncements about the Laws of Time or Causal Loops. And there are several good reasons for this caution, given Who's nature as a mass-market TV show; time travel stories tend either to confuse casual viewers by being difficult to follow, or to bug the bejasus out of attentive geek types by being sloppy and illogical. Furthermore; they present huge problems for the long-term design of the show, in the way that excessively powerful technology does; if the Doctor can use time travel to solve one problem, to determine which flat to rent to find the monster of the week, why doesn't he use it every time a problem is serious enough to, say, involve the deaths of a few dozen people? The rule has been broken on occasion, of course - Davies broke it once or twice - but Moffat seems happy to plain ignore it. It'll come back and bite him, I tell you.

Anyway, Steven Moffat is definitely engaged in reinvigorating a classic British popular culture hero for television in the 21st century, and doing a fine job of it from what I've seen so far. Unfortunately for this blog post, the hero is Sherlock Holmes. This jury of one is still out on his work on Who; let's hope that, now that he's worked through the unhappily established conventions of 21st-century Who in his first season, the second will do something really worthwhile. The presence of, for example, an actual married couple on the Tardis (a first, I think) does at least suggest that we might get some proper Moffat foibles instead of the tired old Davies foibles.

Recent Reading: Oceanic

by Greg Egan

I have a considerable fondness for Greg Egan's work, dating back to fairly soon after he started selling to Interzone, but it sometimes seems that his flavour of hard SF is like rock and roll; it works best in short form. He needs to just punch you in the face and then stop. Sprawling concept albums may have a certain technical interest value, but they're not the point of the exercise.

So when Oceanic appeared, it went on my wish list (despite the fact that it contained a number of stories I'd already read), and duly showed up in my Christmas stocking. It took me a little while to get through it, thanks to various distractions (but then, one can easily forgive oneself that with a short story collection), and yes, it's taken me a while to get around to blogging about it, but anyway...

An obvious thing about Egan's stories is that a lot of them feature a generic Egan narrator/protagonist: intelligent, humanistic, highly ethical, maybe deracinated, arguably a bit chilly, sometimes romantically engaged but not exactly demonstrative about it - as much of a standardised construct as H.P.Lovecraft's similarly intellectual protagonists, but younger and (of course) more optimistic. There are a few of them in this book, but fortunately for its variety, there are some other character types in lead roles too. I've already commented on the first story, "Lost Continent", elsewhere after its earliest appearance, and I'm afraid that it still doesn't quite work for me, but it still shows a hugely admirable sympathy for the underdog (motivated by Egan's own work for good causes), and by taking the much-mauled underdog as its lead character, it avoids the sense of trad-hard-SF competent man nonsense that can become so tiresome after a little while. Likewise, the last story in the collection, "Oceanic", may feature a highly competent scientist as its protagonist-narrator, and may be rather schematic in its extended critique of religion, but at least it gives that scientist a serious and difficult journey by way of a plot. One gets the feeling that, while Egan still has no time for superstition, he is developing a little more sympathy for the emotional and social complications that take people there.

Between those two, there are ups, downs, and oddities. "Dark Integers" is an oddity in that it's a sequel to one of Egan's best past exercises ("Luminous", to be found in the like-titled collection), but I rather wish it wasn't, because that's what makes it into a down; it isn't actually bad in its sketch of unwanted responsibilities and duelling universes, but in its details, it sucks most of the beauty out of the earlier story. "Luminous" had a computer built of light, and beings of uncanny power and unknowable personality living in the shimmers of a breeze and the twist of a cloud, on Earth but also on the far side of a flaw in mathematics; in "Dark Integers", the technology is less wondrous, and it turns out that those beings are a lot like us, can talk like (and to) us and play politics like us, and the other reality where they live is just a sort of parallel universe with its own planets and suchlike. When the meeting between two worlds ends on a slightly but not overly downbeat note, less seems to have been lost than might have been the case.

"Crystal Nights", which I'd seen before in Interzone, begins with a peculiar dummy, as one of Egan's standard lead figures comes in for a few pages and promptly refuses to play any further part in the story, because it's largely about the ethics of creation, and she's too ethical. It makes a point, I guess, but not too well. (I'm not sure that beginning a story with "More caviar?" to establish someone's levels of wealth is too slick, either.) After that, well, it's a pretty good Egan story, although as so often, Egan is worrying at ethical questions that only (currently) exist in his fictional world. The line about how rival billionaire transhumanists might end up, "throwing grey goo around like monkeys throwing turds", is funny, though, and the story has a certain left-field optimism to it.

"Steve Fever", on the other hand, shows a kind of posthumanist breakthrough gone badly awry, without collapsing into total catastrophe - a sort of Blood Music where the microscopic brains have less smarts but more built-in ethics. The question of where desperation and the survival instinct might lead with a sufficiently advanced science is certainly interesting. "Induction", on the other hand, is in danger of being a bit dull, if only because it features one of Egan's simpler optimistic futures, short of either sensawunda or conflict - having been written for a special issue of the academic journal Foundation, and hence for free, may or may not be a consideration here.

"Singleton" is another one I remember from Interzone, and here we are definitely back with one of those Egan protagonists - someone who can get worked up about existential problems arising from quantum physics. The vague possibility that our hero may actually be mad as a fish doesn't slow the plot down, and the plot eventually expands from near-future plausibility to transhuman wildness, spilling off a character who then, very oddly, shows up again in the next story.

This is "Oracle", which has the look of a tale dreamed up after reading too many biographies of a couple of 20th century figures - with those figures renamed for arcane reasons (and placed in an alternate history). I don't know enough about these people to judge all the details properly, but I'm not sure that Egan quite catches the tone of mid-century English discourse or the manners of the mid-century British intelligence community right. The not-Alan Turing certainly looks a bit too much like another stock Egan hero; maybe I shouldn't have expected Derek Jacobi, but the Turing of Breaking the Code would probably have been more interesting. I feel even less qualified to comment on the not-C.S.Lewis, but he has me somewhat convinced most of the time; however, I really can't see a Lewis-analogue, having sought to engage an opponent in public debate on a crucial matter of moral philosophy, first choosing to make the debated question something rather tangential  to his great concern, and second, basing the thrust of his argument on something like Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.

Incidentally, can anyone identify who the "dark-haired young man" who coaches not-Lewis on Godel is meant to be? I assume that one should be able to guess, but I haven't a clue.

"Border Guards", the next story in the book, is yet another Interzone story, featuring an imaginary game that may appeal to physics geeks, set in a universe that's been made more hospitable to humanity than mere quotidian reality. It's interesting in a way, but it's minor key stuff. "Riding the Crocodile", on the other hand, is set in a Utopian future of our galaxy which also features in Egan's most recent novel, and raises questions in a prequel-ish fashion. However, its problem is its unconvincing depiction of a society of immortals. Years, decades, centuries pass while a couple of people sit around in the ultratech equivalent of a tiny cottage, doing some rather limited academic research, with no apparent sign of needing broader cultural inputs or other company, no emotional evolution, like a couple of postgrads locking themselves up for a week to crack a thorny calculus problem. Perhaps they've adjusted themselves or just gradually adapted to this sort of life, but if so, the setting is far more dehumanised than I think Egan wants it to seem. It's a problem that his Utopian futures do suffer from; I fear that the idea of depicting a believable culture of well-rounded immortals in convincing depth would seem to him like a crass distraction from the really cool physics, so we may be stuck with these pale cyphers.

Last off, "Glory" and "Hot Rock" are set in the same future, the galaxy of the "Amalgam", but feature visits to less-developed planets where locals have stuff of interest to Amalgam society. (The first visit is accomplished by a display of technology so egregiously sophisticated and refined that it tips over into silliness.) Both involve discoveries of potentially galactic significance, but both are actually interesting because they feature exercises in the imagination and depiction of alien worlds. Not surprisingly, Egan turns out to be pretty good at this, even if the worlds may seem a bit sparse and schematic. I was sometimes made rather unhappy when his plots dragged my attention back from his aliens. Very old-school skiffy of me, I fear.

So - not prime Egan, then. But even sub-prime Egan is more Egan than anything else. Still, perhaps he needs to take a break from the benign, enervated, post-human futures that aren't going to convince any of the unconverted, and allow himself a bit more of the moral passion that features in "Lost Continent", the ambiguity of "Steve Fever", or the world-building of "Hot Rock". Egan has the more-than-potential to be one of the greats, but he may need to hold back on the (atheist) preaching and actually allow himself to be a little bit more of a science fiction storyteller.

Expand, Contract (19) (and an apology of sorts)

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 9: Summoners is now out. And while this is, yes, a Dungeon Fantasy supplement, I'd like to think that its treatment of summoning magic, stats for spirits, and so forth might just make it moderately interesting to GURPS fantasy gamers in general.

Meanwhile, I've also recently had sight of much of the next issue of Pyramid, because this'll be the Transhuman Space issue. If I say it looks very promising, it's not just because it includes an article by me.

(And, on a completely unrelated matter, if anyone wonders - no I haven't been able to summons the enthusiasm to review the last couple of D[octor]r Who[?] episodes, although it might yet happen. But honestly - a ridiculously over-qualified array of thesps grab all those bit-parts and cameos so they can expand their CVs and look cool to their grandchildren without actually having to do very much, characters sprout super-powers for no particularly good reason other than plot, and we get subjected to the most protracted and hyper-active death scene in the history of time and space... Is anybody inspired?)

Doctor Who no particular date special, November 2009

Well, it was better than the last one. It had a fairly substantial plot, and an opportunity for some acting (from both the lead and the guest stars), and some decent special effects and some references for the old fans to catch. It even attempted some semi-serious hard SF details in its depiction of the near future, with a Mars station that looked like it might work, built at a date when such a thing might well happen. (The chance of keeping NooHoo's future history anywhere near KlassiKoo's skimpy near-future timeline is of course zero, thanks to the passage of time, and the Time War can be safely assumed to have sent waves of borrowed DC Comics cosmic korflu over history.) The attempts at robust logic didn't last long, mind you; we couldn't really expect any sensible depiction of Martian gravity (not on this budget, kid), but when we were told that there were serious mass constraints on what could be shipped to Mars, it was just plain annoying for the station to have big echoing voids and walls that were allegedly made of six feet of steel. (Err, what? I mean, Mars has radiation issues, but six feet of steel?) Nor did the character logic hold up; we had a first human colony on Mars, which suddenly and inexplicably found another (seemingly) human being on its doorstep, and within minutes horrible catastrophic things started happening, and yet after a token comment, nobody tried to blame or interrogate the impossible stranger...

But that was kind of the point. The Radio Times asked rhetorically if this was the scariest Who ever, but it was really just the most Doctor-Who-scary Who that the writers and director could manage - a very, very stock-classical Who plot, in basic, skimpy form. Station in deep space, the Doctor arrives, bad sh*t goes down (thanks to a monster whose nature remained under-explored, but which manifests as a variant on the modern shambling-zombie stereotype, yawn), the Doctor assists the humans as they're picked off one by one; all this was only padded out to an hour by the Doctor's recognition that he couldn't help this time, because this doomed station represented one of those graven-in-stone historic events, and his struggle with what this might really mean to him, particularly in the still-unshaped context of 21st-century NooHoo mythology.

From the start, NooHoo has spent (too) much time attempting ironic deconstructions of 20th-century KlassiKoo tropes; this episode attempted to escalate that deconstruction into actual classical tragic form, with a flawed hero escalating rapidly to Hubris and a flash of blue light as the Nemesis that strikes down his spirit. But what this really meant was just a script that gave David Tenant an excuse to engage in a lot of acting and some wild shifts of supposed motive, and a setup for the two-episode Christmas Special.

Ah yes, the teasers at the end. NooHoo has previously displayed a superhero-comic-style willingness to drag fan-favourite characters back despite having closed them out with loud assertions that they were gone, gone, sealed off by the laws of the multiverse and gone forever, really. Nobody took that claim seriously with regard to the Master, of course; he's just too coolly complete an antagonist for our hero, and there was a hint or two even at the time. But Donna (and her irritating grandpa)? Oh, come on guys; however skimpy the plot logic of her write-out, can't you stand by the integrity of your own closed-loop tragedy, for once? It's not like you had the unbearable pressure of the teen romance fanwank demand that brought back bloody Rose.

Oh, and at the end of the episode, we had a glimpse of an Ood - yes, the wettest alien race in the history of NooHoo or KlassiKoo (wetter by far than this episode's monsters, ho ho). Jeebus. That, after an episode which had mentioned perhaps the most interesting Who-aliens ever, aliens who haven't reappeared in NooHoo. Couldn't we have, say, a Who-New-Space-Opera exploration of the history of Mars, please? A fudge to explain what a high-tech culture was doing there a mere 10,000 years ago and how the same race came to be part of that multi-species commonwealth in the future, plus a CGI treatment of the freeze guns and cryonic technology?

No, of course we can't. Not this year. That would require a bit of cool-headed seriousness. But next year, the show gets a producer who has shown some capacity for seriousness and a real sense of style (even if it also gets an infant Doctor). So I guess I'm hanging in there, for now.

District 9

First, this being a fairly major film at a commercial-chain cinema, there are the trailers for various upcoming SF-ish blockbusters. These always make me feel old and cranky these days, and I assume that anyone with flicker-sensitive epilepsy just no longer goes to the cinema. Even the moderately interesting-looking Surrogates gets flattened down to the level of the rest. After a while, they all run together - explosion, dark corridor, explosion, flickering light giving glimpse of threat, explosion... oh, grow up.

(SF fans are forever whingeing about ignorant mainstream writers who deny that their stories venturing into the topics of time travel or genetic engineering are science fiction. But remember; this is what "science fiction" means these days.)

But after a while, we did get District 9. This has a few explosions and even some flickering lights, especially in the later sections which - as every critic and blogger has noted - shift into conventional action movie shoot-out mode - but the aesthetic is mostly a bit more sophisticated than all that. It's also amazing squalid. For years, SF film-makers have been working on the principle that, if they make their imagined futures a bit shabby and scruffy, they'll look more plausible, but here, things tip right over the edge. District 9, the South African slum where a giant spaceship's load of mostly idiotic aliens has been deposited, is basically an inhabited rubbish dump. The segments taking place in human society gleam by comparison, although they're mostly set in chaotic offices, scruffy burger bars, and fading domestic housing; anyway, they're heavily punctuated with gross incidents drawing on the traditions of body-horror movies.

This shabbiness is part of the film's half-hearted attempt at a verite style; early on, and at times later, it pretends to be a documentary about events in the recent past of its alternative history, including footage originally filmed for a documentary about the company responsible for relocating those aliens from their slum to a camp up country. But that conceit simply doesn't hold; to tell its story, the movie keeps switching to scenes which no one could have filmed, and which don't have the quality of "dramatic reconstruction". It's also been described as a modern treatment of the classic B-movie form, presumably because of some of its themes - alien incursion on Earth, horrific transformation suffered by the protagonist - but this doesn't hold either; actually, the film owes more overall to the modern popcorn-movie form, with its run-and-shoot thriller scenes, extensive use of special effects, extremely rubbery and arbitrary "science", significant convenient plot holes, and use of a totally amoral and high-tech-weapon-obsessed corporation as its primary villain.

But it's definitely a highly eccentric sort of modern SF thriller, pushing itself forward as an indictment of man's inhumanity to prawn while not letting anybody off the hook - almost all of the humans present, of all races and nationalities, are bastards of one stripe or another, and most of the aliens are violent morons. There have been some discomforted debates about the extent to which the movie's refusal to grant any group unambiguous heroic status is really Swiftian satiric savagery, and how much it's just unrestrained prejudice; well, I dunno, but all I can say is that if any Nigerians are really concerned about their nation's image, they can leave this film alone for now and start by doing something about all those scam e-mails oozing out of Lagos. And anyone paying attention at the end will note that one fairly major character who proves something of a hero (and who seems to be facing punishment for it) is in fact black.

Yeah, District 9 is an oddity, probably completely unique, schlepping in devices, themes, and techniques from all over genre movie-making and reality in order to raise questions - and then running away in the ensuing chaos, leaving its surviving victims with a face full of something worrying, unidentified, and just possibly transformative. Not my favourite film of the year, personally, but possibly the most interesting thing we'll see in a twelvemonth.

Moon

So, D. Jones launches a promising career with a tale of alienation suffered by a solitary astronaut...

"Planet Earth is blue, and there's nothing I can do."

It is nice to see someone attempting a lightly updated stab at a '70s-style "thoughtful SF" story, complete with model-based effects rather than CGI. It's not really very hard SF, despite the early reference to He3 mining to prove that somebody has read some popular science in the last decade; the movie mostly depends on the usual middleweight SF blend of implausibly advanced handwaved technology (to drive the plot) and other technology that's barely changed since 1965 (to keep the plot on track and the special effects budget down). Moderately regular SF readers (or even viewers) will guess most of what's coming after about twenty minutes, and the film doesn't really pretend to be a mystery - the big reveal, such as it is, comes about half an hour in - but I'll be polite and not give away too much. I will just note that, for an operation that's being run on a tight-fisted budget, Lunar Industries has constructed a remarkably spacious base, and even shipped out an old leather armchair for no clear reason, and no, neither is ever explained.

For that matter, there's little or no attempt to convey the fact of lunar gravity, and no consideration of communication lags over Earth-Moon distances. But, you know - white corridors, clunky spacesuits and lunar rovers, existential angst, no guns. Heading back to 1970, in a good way, means taking the clunky with the cool. Young Jones clearly has a brain as well as useful friends; his career may be worth watching.

Recent Reading: The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows

edited by Jonathan Strahan

Original anthologies of SF short stories seem to be a bit of a rarity these days, perhaps due, I gather, to some catastrophic misjudgments by publishers a couple of decades back. However, my taste for moderately literary SF was initially nurtured by some good anthologies (Out of This World, if you want the series title that comes to my mind), so I'm quite prepared to encourage such things.

And, okay, I discovered that this one had original stories by both Greg Egan and Neil Gaiman in it. Anyone who wants to know about my tastes should be able to deduce enough from the effect that those two names can have on me.

I got the impression from somewhere that this collection is aimed at the slightly younger end of the market, and while that doesn't seem to be stated anywhere in the book, it's believable. The stories are light on sex or gratuitous darkness, and many of them have youthful protagonists. The dearth of gratuitous splatter could also be explained by the simple fact that this is an SF collection, and Strahan seems to have been largely successful in keeping his contributors to that brief, which makes a pleasant change from some "original stories" anthologies. Not that everything is saccharine, mind; Garth Nix's "Infestation" is comparable to, say, an episode of Buffy for its gruesomeness, while throwing in some stuff about religion that's left for the intelligent-teenage reader to work out from broad hints. Mostly, though, this is a collection that explicitly takes '50s magazine SF as its model, and proves that one can do intelligent modern stuff within that framework.

Although it must be said that writers who cleave too closely to the model can come a cropper. I've never been a big Stephen Baxter fan, and his "Repair Kit" here shows how his emulation of the classics is one of his worst habits, all hard SF puzzle story clunkiness with too little of the formal ingenuity and none of the ironic flair of his stated model, Robert Sheckley. Nor does the Greg Egan story, "Lost Continent", quite come off, despite not being very much of a '50s pastiche; Egan spots a very interesting SF metaphor in the painful realities of the modern world, and supplies some admirable compassion to the story which uses it, but the metaphor never becomes quite concrete enough, never strengthens the story by virtue of distancing estrangement, while at the same time, its presence weakens the story as a depiction of real-world injustice. And the modernity is sometimes incomplete; Walter Jon Williams's "Pinocchio" has some interesting ideas and good characterisation, but doesn't work through the implications of the transhumanist technology of its setting; bodies can be swapped for less than the price of a bicycle, death is temporary, international travel is cheap - but mostly, the world looks and feels like a cheerful version of early 21st century California

The Gaiman story, "Orange", is fun, if slight, by the way, as Gaiman tends to be when writing quick pieces to fulfill a promise to a friend in the business. An account of an incursion of strangeness into reality, told entirely in the form of answers to questions which the reader has to infer (although that's not hard), it achieves its goals, if not a lot more; by the end, it's at least quite sweet. The other stories are generally pretty good; Margo Lanagan's "An Honest Day's Work" is odd and disturbing (in a good way), for example, while Cory Doctorow's "Anda's Game" continues Doctorow's interesting and worthy, if quixotic, moral reinvention of the SF canon.

So, yes, this book is definitely to be encouraged. It's probably way out of its time, but maybe it'll help keep the SF short story flame alive for another generation.

Star Trek (the 2009 movie)

London, 25th May 2009, part 2.

I was never a huge Trek fan, I think. I watched it with the enthusiasm of a young-adolescent proto-geek when it first came up on British television around 1970, to be sure, and then I caught an episode or two when it came round again about 1980 and realised just how clunky it was. I didn't bother very much with The Next Generation, and if I liked Deep Space 9 - which I did - it was partly for having the courage to deconstruct and challenge so much about the Trek that went before. Likewise, I'm not any kind of J.J. Abrams fanboy - I never picked up on Alias, and I was comfortable enough giving up on Lost when it switched from terrestrial to paid satellite channels in the UK, suspecting it of being all flash and no substance.

Which is really just a way of explaining why I took a while to get around to catching this movie, and only really did so in the end to round off a day up in London. With no great commitment to the thing, I could enjoy it well enough as a contemporary Hollywood skiffy action movie, with chase scenes and space battles and ice monsters and stuff exploding. It also got bonus points for finding a cast who, in some cases, inhabited the personas of the original crew unnervingly brilliantly (while giving Uhura a serious job to do, so not all of the Galaxy Quest flashbacks were too painful). I could respect the time travel-based reboot as the smartest solution yet seen for a perennial old-media-property problem. (It raises questions about inconsistent depictions of the nature of time and history in Trek, but who cares? It also solves a basic inconsistency in Kirk's character, in Hollywood-conventional terms; why should the non-rebellious child of a successful career Star Fleet officer turn into a smug jerk with minimal respect for higher authority, albeit also an intuitive tactical wizard, like Kirk? The new Kirk now has Childhood Trauma to explain his jerkiness.) But oh my, the problems that occur to anyone when they stop to think about this movie for a minute afterwards.

Most or all of these have already been hashed out elsewhere on the Web (see, e.g., Twenty Sided), so I won't add to the geekery by listing everything I happened to think of in detail. Some of them may be covered when some kind of director's cut DVD appears (What's with the hole in the middle of Idaho? How long is the journey from Earth to Vulcan supposed to take?), some probably won't (the whole Planet Plotdevice sequence, with its perfect view of Vulcan and Scotty's long-range transporter and all), some are just so deeply embedded in the Trek pseudo-mythos that no one is going to touch them (How good is interstellar communication, and why doesn't Star Fleet issue direct orders to the Enterprise in moments of interstellar high catastrophe and why doesn't the Enterprise warn Earth about what's coming?), and some will only matter to people who know that pseudo-mythos well (How come any Federation citizens at this date know what Romulans look like?). But, well, really.

I've seen it complained that the original Trek was at least sometimes a drama about ideas, whereas this movie is all explosions and no thought, and I might sympathise with that - except that the ideas in the original series were generally pretty simplistic and clumsily handled, so it didn't hurt me to see them lost in favour of a lot better special effects. I guess I worry a bit more about movies in which people see dozens of their personal friends and billions of other people slaughtered in front of them, and get over it quite so quickly, but in the end, action movies are what they are; the Cosy Catastrophes of the video game generation. (And talking of video game style, what the hell is up with Romulan starship design? Naval architecture inspired by the Mines of Moria, complete with no hand rails?) If this thing generates sequels, I may well go see them, if only to discover what if anything Saint Simon Pegg of the Geeks eventually works out to do with Scotty. But it'd be nice if Abrams eventually decided to do something for people who think after the titles stop rolling. Not that I want the sterile puzzles and fake depth of Lost in Trek, of course, although that might be an interesting train wreck.

Recent Reading: Iron Sunrise

by Charles Stross

Having finally got around to reading Charles Stross's first novel, I was engaged enough to get hold of the follow-up/sequel. This turned out to represent a mildly curious sidestep on the part of the author - a slight but definite shift in tone and focus. I think that many people would regard it as an improvement and a case of stylistic maturation, but I didn't really take to it as much.

We're in the same universe as Singularity Sky, about which one or two things are indeed now explicitly clarified - for example, that the humans scooped up and transplanted from Earth by the whimsical not-God-honest Eschaton were moved one year back in time for every lightyear they were moved from home - and indeed, things start in the aftermath of that story. Or rather we would, except that we have to flash back a little. After a brief glimpse of one of the novel's heroines in action - an adolescent girl with a very useful invisible friend who we may remember from the earlier book - we are shown the Iron Sunrise of the title; the destruction of of the inhabited world of New Moscow by the explosion of its sun, accomplished by some sort of very advanced technology. (This destruction is depicted rather well, if perhaps with a bit of unintended glee.) Most sensible people in the setting seem to assume what many readers will think is logical; that this sort of apocalyptic-scale technology is more or less solely the province of the Eschaton, and hence that New Moscow must have angered not-God. We're also told, later in the book, that it involves causality violation, pretty much the one thing that the Eschaton prohibits, although how it's any more a violation of causality than many things which the Eschaton permits isn't clear to me. However, established readers will also know that the Eschaton, while capable of significant and violent destruction when it feels the need, is maybe more of a trickster than a destroyer at heart, and some characters who we like work for it; at the very least, it's not clear what New Moscow would or could have done to inspire such wrath. Stross has set up a puzzle.

Anyway, our attention now turns back to Rachel Mansour, agent of Earth's light-handed government, heroine of Singularity Sky, and sometime kickass righteous super-woman of a type rather common in recent genre fiction. (At least she's less enthusiastic about killing people she doesn't approve of than, say, many of Warren Ellis's creations.) After a brief bit of bureaucratic comedy of the sort that Stross found a better home for in the early "Laundry" stories, Rachel briefly reasserts her heroic status by dealing with an insane nuclear-armed performance artist (yes, really), and then sets off, husband-from-the-earlier-book in tow, to deal with the big plot.

As this may suggest, Iron Sunrise features one of those cross-cutting, multi-protagonist structures that do so often appear in modern genre thrillers. Given their popularity, I assume that many people must like them, but I just find them a bit tiresome. Certainly, they are associated more with thrillers than with mysteries, and this book soon proves more interested in the how and the gosh than the who or the why; the maguffin of the central plot isn't so much the knowledge of who killed New Moscow as it is access to the command codes for some relativistic deterrent weapons which were launched in the wake of new Moscow's destruction, and which will kill a lot more people if not stopped. Someone is killing the diplomats who can issue a recall... But even the identity of that killer isn't as important as sorting out the practical problem, as it seems.

The use of the multi-thread stucture here could be seen as Stross showing off how he's in command of his resources, but I think that he's lost something along the way. All the hard work fitting the thriller plot together certainly loses much of the darkly satirical humour of which Stross is certainly sometimes capable, Rachel's earliest scenes aside.

And while the multiplicity is handled fairly well, there are glitches. For example, we soon meet another of his plot's heroes, a "journalist" of another popular recent-genre-fiction type. Although he seems to embody the setting's manifestation of the London Times, he owes much more to Hunter S. Thompson than William Howard Russell; most of his "reporting" consists of furiously angry op-ed pieces in which the F-word features prominently. However, after this appearance, the character disappears for long stretch, as Stross evidently can't think of much to do with him until he's needed for a couple of specific purposes. Still, he does provide an introduction to the book's leading proximate villains, the ReMastered. These look at first like cartoon Nazis, singing patriotic songs in bars and being blond; they are soon shown to be much more serious Nazis, with a penchant for concentration camps and generally brutal dictatorship; then they are revealed to be something a more original and distinctly creepy, ruthless Nietzschean-Teilhardian posthumanists with a vicious fondness for applied ultratech neurosurgery.

And so the various characters and threads move towards each other and an eventual showdown on a big, lush interstellar liner, with some gunplay and explosions along the way. I'm not convinced by some of these elite secret agents, lethal special forces types, and high-powered journalists, though; many of them seem amazingly ignorant about things that one might expect them to have studied very carefully, and not just so that the reader can be subjected to useful info dumps, while a potentially crucial (and deeply implausible) detail of the assassinations of the diplomats simply goes ignored by everyone except the half-alert reader. Characters who should know better also seem notably sloppy about searching prisoners for concealed weapons. Still, Stross manages some fairly clever twists and turns before the story ends.

Which it does rather abruptly, leaving only one significant extra twist for the epilogue. But several of the mysteries which the book threw up despite itself remain unsolved, and the solutions which it offers for others are sometimes tentative and unconvincing. Even the Eschaton seems uncertain what's going on, even at the end. In short, Stross seems to have left a lot for a very possible sequel or two - but no such book has appeared since this one, in 2004. If he's given up on the setting, fair enough; I don't believe in whipping authors into bored sequel-grinding just to answer anyone's need for neatness. But that doesn't make this book complete. The smart ideas earn it points for effort, but the execution doesn't match the inspiration.

Recent Reading: Singularity Sky

by Charles Stross

Yes, I've only just got around to Charles Stross's first novel, from 2004; terribly disorganised of me. Anyway, I'm doing some catching up.

For those who are further behind than me, a little scene-setting. Some time in the 21st century, humanity's computer systems apparently bootstrapped themselves into a state of nigh-godhood called the Eschaton. Being a near-god, the Eschaton is evidently ineffable and barking mad, but friendly to authors looking for plots; it promptly scattered most of humanity onto habitable worlds across thousands of lightyears, and also across thousands of years of time. Faster-than-light travel is thus shown to be possible, and therefore so is causality violation, but the Eschaton, apparently understandably worried that someone might use time travel to prevent its own emergence, declares an absolute ban on the sort of dangerous misbehaviour that it's just shown to be highly feasible, and drops large rocks on people who don't follow its rules.

(Characters in this book keep saying that the Eschaton isn't really a god, but blimey, it acts like one, doesn't it?)

Anyway, a couple of centuries later (in their frame of reference), we meet the New Republic, one of the ad hoc human colonies created by this event. It was founded by a bunch of future-shocked Central European technophobes who go in for place names like New Austria and New Prague, but whose style is pretty solidly Czarist Russian - all else aside, they perform a pretty fair re-enactment of bits of the Russo-Japanese War in the course of this novel, and we get a brief appearance by a Colonel von Ungern-Sternberg, which is of course a bad sign. Despite their rampant technophobia, the New Republic has somehow vaguely sustainable imperial ambitions, and a small handful of conquered or colonised worlds. In the prologue, one of these is invaded by the Festival, a peripatetic civilisation-thing which evidently originated in a human culture which the Eschaton dumped thousands of lightyears from Earth and thousands of years into the past, and which travels between the stars in small packages of computer technology, reconstructing itself as a wacky ultra-tech parody of the Edinburgh Festival whenever it arrives in a new solar system. The Festival starts granting wishes for the inhabitants of the colony world, scattering ultra-technological gifts around in exchange for new information (stories will do); the New Republic, objecting to having its colony occupied and forcibly kicked up by a millenium or so's worth of technological progress, launches a counter-invasion fleet, and the novel's plot is underway.

Except that Stross despises the New Republic too thoroughly to allow any of its citizens to serve as story protagonists on the fleet, so a couple of people from Earth attach themselves to it for various purposes - one engineer from an arms cartel which sold the New Republic some spaceship technology, and one diplomat/military observer. Both have hidden agendas, the engineer's being more arcane (for a very experienced agent, the diplomat/observer doesn't do much of a job of secrecy; she appears to be using her own, well-known name much of the time, even when she needn't); they also rapidly become a couple. Actually, they represent Stross's default protagonist-couple-type, as seen in Halting State and some of the "Laundry" stories, among other places - a geeky but technically competent man, and a tough, self-assured, sexy woman who can handle any butt-kicking that's required. Frankly, it looks like fan service, if not wish fulfillment, and hearts being in the right places doesn't excuse it.

But anyway... It should be said that there's a decent comedy somewhere inside this book, looking to get out; just for a start, the New Republic is a pretty good parody of the quintessential political reactionary mind-set. The trouble is, the book would like to say a bit moe than that, but it isn't sure how. The New Republic is a portrait of a bad society, crippled by its reactionary impulses, but once we've seen the secret police in action, the poverty in the streets and military stupidity - and once our protagonists have been repelled and appalled by the place for a paragraph or two - there's really nowhere more for that strand to go, and the joke has turned slightly sour. So we follow the military expedition as not a huge amount happens, except that some obnoxious products of the system plot not very effectually against the heroes and worry about the technological superiority of the enemy they're supposed to fight - albeit not enough, as it predictably turns out.

Meanwhile, the invaded colony world is going through a technological singularity - an explosion of wishes come true and strange and sometimes nightmarish things happening. But because the population suffers from their New Republic upbringing, they fail to handle this at all well; not one single inhabitant of the world thinks to ask for information rather than material goods, not even the relatively clued-in revolutionaries who've been dumped there as exiles in best Russian style. The trouble is, I'm not at all sure that Stross has a very clear idea of what's happening here either. So we get a string of scenes, some of them funny or macabre, and occasional conversations, but no great sign of changes that can't be folded away in an instant.

Then the New Republic's fleet shows up, and gets casually defeated, but some people make it down to the planet, and then the book shambles to an end of sorts in a flurry of speeches and very minor revelations, leaving a clutch of unresolved plot strands and unexplained stuff. It isn't a disaster, or even a disappointment; it just fails to gel.

I think I'll look at the sequel (Iron Sunrise) sometime, though, if only to see if Stross refines his technique a bit in that. Too much like this would lead me to give up, but one book might lead on to better things later - and the later Stross books I've read do also have their moments.

Recent Reading: Gun, With Occasional Music

This book has been sitting on my shelf for a while, but I finally pulled it down while in search of reading matter the other day, remembering or being reminded as I did so that it was Lethem's first novel, and that he seems to have acquired a lot of semi-mainstream literary credibility in the years since it came out.

The blurb and interior review quotes lead me to expect a mixture of hard-boiled detective story and dystopian SF, which I got, but the book is perhaps even more significantly an example of School Of Philip K. Dick. Dick's influence on a certain sort of highbrow American genre SF writer is huge, and Lethem here has exactly that Dickian tone of faintly surreal, sun-bleached futurism, and a very large dose of the Dickian (literary) interest in mind-altering drugs. The blurb also lead me to expect something funny, which I didn't get; the Dickian quasi-surrealism, and especially the talking animals which loom large in the plot, might have a certain Pythonesque quality, but any laughs are lost in the noir-meets-dystopia looming darkness of the setting.

The detective story elements, by the way, reminded me of the movie Brick; they treat numerous tropes of the classic Hammett/Chandler movies as a kind of modern Commedia Dell'Arte framework, to be reused on the assumption that the audience will recognise them. Though I have to say that I enjoyed Brick more. Nor is the mystery plot especially strong; eventually, the hero solves his case, but mostly by coming up with a story which arguably fits the facts marginally better than anything else available, and which is more satisfying to the lead characters' sense of the world.

I should also note that the SF elements of this novel are, in true Dickian style, subservient to the other aspects; the dystopia is low-key and mostly a matter of a world slipping down to noirish moral corruption, and the furniture is very consciously retro. Even in 1994, when this book appeared, the complete absence of mobile phones and the limited use of computers - all accessed through monochrome terminals rather than PCs - must have looked a little odd. But futurism isn't the point here. Anyway, it's a smart book, but not one I can love.