Soldier’s Home (1999)

If you’ve ever read William Barton’s When We Were Real and liked it, you might be happy to know that Barton has written more in the same setting. You might be not so happy to know that despite the Deus Ex machina-like happy ending of WWWR, that the further future of humanity in that universe looks much bleaker (not that WWWR was all that happy throughout). Thought, if you have been reading Barton for some time, you should have kind of expected this.

Soldiers Home takes place in that barren future. Humanity has been nearly wiped out in a war between two more advanced alien races, the Spinefellows and the Starfish. The Spinefellows used humans as cannon fodder to win the war, but afterwards the human race was in its death throes. All that remains are remnants of humanity, among them the soldier POV of the story. On a desolate habitat claimed by former artificial creations of humanity, he mostly plays the observer and tries to go on, despite having lost all purpose. The war is over and won, but there’s not much to do.

There’s a pretty similar story by Barton, “Engine of Desire”, that takes place in the same future and even has a similar plot. Lone human survivor trying to go on when he or the reader is not sure for what. Both stories feel like a melancholic swan song for the human race. We’ve learned from the earliest age that everything will end, but we rarely get this for ourselves until we are older. The same holds true for humanity in general. Barton’s story manages to cloth that idea, that we won’t be around forever, into a narrative that makes it easy to grasp, to feel what it means that our entire race and culture is gone. And then he shows us that even in the end you can go with dignity.

As simple as the plot is, as powerful is the writing here. It puts its hooks into you and doesn’t let go.

PS.: Sean Williams and Shane Dix wrote a trilogy called Echoes of Earth where two extremely powerful alien races, the apparently benevolent Spinners and the malevolent Starfish, destroy the races of our galaxy in a never-ending conflict, among them humanity. I wonder if the two read Barton’s story or if it was just chance.

3000 MPH In Every Direction At Once (2003)

This collection of stories and essays has a nice rhythm to it while reading. Non-fiction and fiction alternating and the song title from the Bad Religion album of the same title always in the back of your mind, making you wondering whether reality really is stranger than fiction or Mamatas merely playing with your fucking mind. Sure, his non-fiction seems more mundane than his fiction, but even there he deploys the high-octane word-attack that makes all pieces in this collection seem kind of restless, always on the move and as if the writer can’t rest for a minute. The title of the collection is really well chosen.

As for the fiction, this is actually the first time that I’ve read some of Mamatas fiction, despite having read his blog for years and reading various essays and his biting comments on the net for years. I wasn’t sure whether I would actually like his stories, and sure enough most of them feel overdone and just a little bit the side of meta and weird for its own sake. But every time I can walk away from a collection of stories where I really liked one that it was worth reading all the rest, is a good collection.

Here I actually liked two: Impression Sunrise about aliens stealing human art, which despite Mamatas jittery and satirical style actually gave a better reason for aliens coming to Earth than most alien invasion fiction does and on the whole was fun to read. But the real winner of the collection, which makes it worth seeking out just for that, was Time of Day. It’s about a highly connected world (headware with countless software agents and constant net access) and a main character who has to deal with a defective mind-jack that turns out to be much more. It’s really hard to describe without giving much away. Fascinating read, thought whether the ending will conform to expectation from readers of hard sf is disputable, but overall I think the story shows that Mamatas can write science fiction like the best.

I always had the idea that he was more a horror writer, but most of the pieces in this collection disabused me of that notion, possessing a clear sf bent. Thought its nice to see a writer with a seemingly different set of sensibilities than most sf writers I read who still knows how to write SF well.

Anticopernicus (2011)

The biggest mistake when reading Adam Roberts is when you approach him like your usual science fiction writer. This, I admit, seems sensible on the surface, since most of his fiction has a SFnal cover that make it look like one. This would be no problem if he were merely writing action adventures, as is the fortitude of so many other writers, but he likes to think about big stuff, big ideas and so on. Which might make him look like your typical hard SF writer, only that he prefers to think about big philosophical question without really thinking the science through.

In most cases, when it comes to the scientific underpinnings of his stories, it’s all just technobabble. Now, even someone like Greg Egan, the grand master of hard SF, has some very speculative content in his books, but there’s always the attempt to make it at least consistent with the rest of what we know, to make it fit to some degree with our present level of understanding.

The biggest problem with Anticopernicus is that it posits intelligence exists all over the universe only in singular form, with one exception. Earth with it’s overwhelming abundance of intelligent life has become the center of the universe due to the massive amount of minds observing the universe (Roberts uses quantum magic to explain this, name-dropping the observer effect, which shows that he really doesn’t understand or care about the underlying principles). Now, apart from the whole overuse of quantum everything in science fiction, one thing that really bugged me was how singular intelligences arose on other worlds. I can only assume that they popped fully formed into existence.

That said, some of the most outrageous ideas have been the basis for some of the best science fiction books. Lets just assume the universe in Anticopernicus works somehow. Even then Anticoperinucs fails to some degree, as Roberts doesn’t do anything more interesting with his premise. There’s no in-depth speculation about what it means to life in an universe where each civilization consists just of one member/person/being, how an accumulation of minds can warp the universe to some degree and so. Roberts just takes his premise, as outrageous as it is, and then does nothing with it apart from showing an extremely self-contained main character who re-discovers his humanity to some degree and thus the worth of life (like thousand if similar tales).

As negative as all this sounds, I still think it was worth the read, especially since I really like reading about gonzo ideas. It’s just annoying that Roberts built such a conventional tale around such an unusual idea. If you have the balls to posit an universe where Earth is really the center of the universe, then you should do something equally interesting with the plot.

The Girl With No Hands And Other Tales (2010)

The second short story collection by Angela Slatter mostly contains reworked fairy tales or at least stories that feature motives from fairy tales. Most authors, when trying this, go for some twist ending or for role inversion (the evil step-mother is actually good or something like this). Slatter’s approach is not completely different, but she’s a bit more subtle and her stories don’t rely on twists as much. Instead she focuses on the female characters, who in fairy tales are often nothing more than a McGuffing for the male hero, be it as a victim to infuse tragedy or someone to save, or as a trophy to win.

Slatter shifts the focus from the males to the females: daughters, mothers and sisters, trying to survive the usual grimness that often accompanies fairy tales. Sometimes they get their revenge on those who harmed them, sometimes they get their happy ending and sometimes all they get is to chose their own end. But what they get above all is to tell their own side of the story. Slatter deftly looks into their minds and gives all of them a voice of their own, that is all so often absent. And sometimes, she manages to surprise you with a, yes, a sort of twist, but one that doesn’t feel gimmicky, like the evil stepmother who comes to regret her act of murder or the Baba Yaga who is more than just an evil crone.

A Place So Foreign and Eight More (2003)

Doctorow’s fist short story collection. The themes that would later become synonymous with his entire career are only present in a major way in the last story 0wnz0red (thought arguably All Day Sucker and To Market, to Market incorporate typical Doctorow interests), which is definitely one of the high points of the entire collection, together with Craphound, the very first. The rest of the stories cover typical SF territory: time travel, aliens and the likes (only one fantasy story, and this is IMHO the weakest story in the entire collection). Doctorow always manages to give each of the stories a unique spin (e.g. time travel is slowly spreading advanced technology backwards in time), yet all of them sport good plots, often excellent ideas and most of all, well realized characters.

Actually that is one of his strengths as a writer, he starts with building instantly likable and compelling characters, and only along the way explores the setting and the ideas he’s interested in. It’s a good way to hook a reader, but it also demands a certain skill to establish a memorable character with only a few sentences from the get go. Thought, sometimes his hooks worked too good. Even after the story was over I wanted to know what happened next and I left the story with the feeling that there was much more to tell.

Overall, this feels like a collection where a writer at the begin of his career is trying out every toy in the toy box, before he has settled on the ones with whom he is really comfortable and before he even starts adding his own toys to the box. Yet even at this journeyman level do Doctorow’s stories show a craftsmanship that was beyond that of most of his peers.

Lightspeed Transmission to Tau (1986)

If I say my first love are books, that would only be partly right. I do not remember the first prose book I read, but I still remember my first SF book. I knew there were other books before, but nothing that had made enough of an impression to survive the ravages of time and faulty human memory. But my first SF book did. My father, always believing in tangible things, gave it to me because he had no idea what to do with it. Despite being heavily interested in technology, he really didn’t get the appeal and gave it to me (I must have been somewhere between 8 or 10 years).

It wasn’t an instant moment of transcendence, with my whole being transformed into the science fiction reader I’m today to the exclusion of so many other things. But the book had enough traction that I remember most of the stories, at least in fragments, to this day. At that time, I didn’t even knew the word science fiction. I grew up in the endgame years of the GDR, but there still seemed no unifying term for what is essentially called science fiction these days. They had futuristic fiction, Utopian fiction, scientific speculation or combinations of similar terms (often using the word Phantastik, that has no exact translation in English). I read mostly GDR authors or translations from other countries behind the Iron Curtain.

In terms of style, the two major modes of science fiction (thought obviously I’m simplifying here to some extend) where either heavily encrypted criticism of the system or a sort of campellian science fiction with a socialistic spin and of course the intersection between those two modes where things got a little bit strange. My first science fiction book – see cover (title roughly translated as Lightspeed Transmission to Tau) – was an anthology that worked mostly with the socialist campellian mode: optimistic, technophil, solution-oriented (or maybe that’s what I remember).

Like I said above, I had no major epiphany, but I was impressed enough to search out more stuff like that. Over time, this accumulated into a live-long habit of reading science fiction, thinking about science fiction and in the end, seeing it a the major defining element of my life. Even in years where only a small portion of the stuff I read is science fiction, it tends to be the stuff I remember in the long run and the stuff I think most about.

Lobsters (2001)

Accelerando 1/9

I’ve wanted to re-read Accelerando for some time, mostly because after my first read-through I stumbled upon a comment by Stross about how most of story, even the fate of humanity at large, was orchestrated by Manfred’s cat Aineko, which went completely under my radar. I wasn’t sure how I could have missed it and wanted to see how much of it could really be seen on a page-by-page base or whether Stross had been too subtle for his own good. So far, as the first story in the sequence is concerned, there’s isn’t much in regard to Aineko and her über-plot.

But as the first part of the whole book/sequence, Lobster is off to a great start. What distinguished Stross’s take on the singularity from others in the field was that he didn’t merely waved his high-tech magic wand, but that he convincingly started of with the basics instead of jumping to the main event. This involved experiments with uploading less complex animals (relatively speaking) and the ethical and especially the legal ramifications of how to handle these uploads. Lobsters is not about the singularity per se (this is only a speculative argument at this point), but about the rights we grant intelligent beings, irrespective of their substrate.

It’s fascinating how Manfred’s successful attempt to save the uploaded Lobsters feels like a victory and yet is, in hindsight, the first step toward the destruction of the human race. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and all that (thought it’s not clear, in the context of Stross’s setting, if the singularity could have been avoided at all, as this seemed to happen to all intelligent races in our corner of the universe).

Verthandi’s Ring (2007)

The New Space Opera 2/18

Ian McDonald’s story is pretty close to what I consider space opera, thought it shares the same problem as the previous entry in tNSP, in having the right scope when it comes to the setting and the backstory but with a plot that doesn’t cover the same scale. Honestly, I think the main problem is size. Space opera is a mode of narration that needs (massive) space, whereupon short stories by their very nature don’t have it. It’s like squaring the circle.

I don’t think you can do space opera well (or at all) with these size limitations, the closest you end up with is a story that is a highly compressed info-dump, which Verthandi’s Ring constitutes. As a story, it reads pretty cold and detached. You don’t really feel any connection to the characters, nor their culture. The best I could muster was little bit of rage at how McDonald presented the whole situation and the solution to the whole conflict.

The depiction of interstellar conflict as something inevitable, something that would have happened anyway, whoever shot the first shot, is pretty debatable, even in the context of the story. To depict life as a struggle in tooth and claw, something beyond morality, an absolute that never changes, isn’t just morally questionable, it’s not even supported by facts. There are no extinctions campaigns in nature, and there’s no need for them among intelligent beings. If they actually arise, they aren’t inevitable, but the consequence of stupidity, arrogance and malice. If a writer sizes this type of argument, I always see it as a cheap short cut to not properly develop the backstory, which in this case brings us back to size. If you have to write space opera at short stories lengths, you have to compress, both the content and the setting. Saying that war between interstellar cultures is a given, is just such a compression artifact.

This might read like I didn’t like the story, but you would be wrong. Despite my qualms with the underpinnings of the story and with solving a problem by dumping genocidal aliens on another universe, I like the scale on which the story operates and the future culture depicted. But it feels too much like there’s a longer novel trying to crawl out of this story, one that could have been much better given the right amount of space to grow and mature.

Saving Tiamaat (2007)

The New Space Opera 1/18 (the story is online here, looks like the author’s website)

Gwyneth Jones story is a perfect example for the confusion between setting and plot when it comes to space opera. The setting might have the right scale, but the plot itself doesn’t. That said, I actually enjoyed the story immensely. A small scale political intrigue as part of bigger political machinations that in many ways reflect contemporary global Realpolitik and yet told a SF story in its own right. If the rest of the anthology offers the same quality, I probably won’t mind if most of the stories aren’t even space opera.

One thing that actually annoyed me: like in his Year’s Best Of Gardner Dozois always has a small encapsulation of what the story is going to be about after introducing the author. These always read clever and insightful, until you actually read the story and realize how stupid they are. And he does this all the time, which makes me wonder whether he pitches these lines half-asleep, because he can’t be bothered. A better line in this case would have been: Don’t try to anthropomorphize aliens, it will always bite you when you least expect it.

The New Space Opera (2007) – Part I

The New Space Opera is a book that doesn’t wait long to completely abandon it’s mission (?! marketing) statement. If you bought the book because you expected to get modern short stories that are part of the space opera sub-genre (like me), you have probably been duped. Thought, even if Dozois and Strahan tried to only include space opera, their short history of this sub-genre in the introduction shows that they have only a limited grasp of what space opera is (which I doubt, since they’ve worked in the field for years) or they work with a definition that is so inclusive that it’s completely useless. For them, apparently, everything with space ships in it is space opera.

For me, space opera always operates on a big scale, which means galactic empires most of the time. The solar system alone, with a few exceptions, doesn’t manage to convey the multitude and scale needed to be space operatic. Neither is it enough to have an immense setting, you need to have a plot who actually covers the same distance (e.g. Hyperion isn’t space opera, it’s sequel The Fall of Hyperion is). A planetary romance that takes place in a galactic empire setting isn’t space opera (Dune). And so on.

Thought, while I’m forewarned (I just read the introduction) I still hope that there are a few space opera stories inside. Maybe even good ones. But my expectations are severely diminished after reading the introduction. If Gardner/Strahan just wanted to collect “great new stories by some of the best writers working in the field” (and they make it clear the field is science fiction, not space opera), they should have done it with a title reflecting that.

To be continued… (when I’ve finished the anthology)