…hang on, that’s not SF, is it? It’s respectable mainstream theatre, and there’s a production on in the West End. What’s it doing here?

The answer comes in two parts. First, my definition of SF can be more or less summarized as “things which are like other things which are SF”^[1]. (Whatever your S stands for. F is for fiction, mostly.) Arcadia makes a more or less perfect pair with To Say Nothing of the Dog, and a really interesting match with Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle.

Secondly – this is a play about science. It’s a wonderful, thinking, tingling play, and it gets both history and science perfectly. It is kind, true, and necessary all at once. It has a fascinating premise – what if a young teenage girl, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had understood iterative modelling and the Second Law of Thermodynamics? And what effect did it have on the people around her? Is that which has passed away truly gone?

This play is fire to the cool river water of To Say Nothing of the Dog. There’s passion, and love, and death, and literal fire; nearly everywhere in the play, something is burning. And in an ocean of ashes, there are islands of order; patterns arise from nothing.

[1] This is an iterated algorithm. If you knew the algorithm which would make a computer read SF and write an SF response and fed it back say ten thousand times, each time there’d be a book somewhere on the screen. You’d never know where to expect the next book. But gradually you’d start to see this shape, because every book will be inside the shape of this genre. It wouldn’t be a genre, it’d be a mathematical object.

Yet another exercise in sweet-ghu-those-people-are-taking-over-my-genre – well-known homophobe John C. Wright, author of such fine schoolgirl spanking fetish stories^[1] as Titans of Chaos takes a few pages to whinge about “perversity”, waggle his huge fannish dick around, and generally show off his insecurity.

He may well protest about “homosex activists” infiltrating other areas of life; I don’t know. That would involve reading more of his non-fiction writing^[2] than I absolutely have to. But it’s clear he feels very defensive and possessive about SF, probably because he feels himself to be the heritor of a Tradition.

The thing is… so does everyone else. The SF I grew up with is about strangeness, about encountering the Other and getting used to them and mastering your instinctive reactions, learning to find the similarities and celebrate the differences and learn from everything. It’s about challenging boundaries and preconceptions, and finding the alien within yourself.

And so much of it was written by people who didn’t fit in, who felt themselves alienated, who wanted to understand why or make other people understand that it happened.

I don’t know which SF Wright grew up with; it may have been about rich white middle-class American guys blowing shit up, discovering new worlds, and looting the inhabitants’ corpses. But one of the first examples that came to mind was a passage in ‘Doc’ Smith’s book First Lensman, where Virgil Samms talks to an incomprehensibly strange female entity from Palain Seven. The text takes great pains to explain how very incomprehensibly different she is… then explains how cool Virgil is, because he hadn’t any thought of her as an “it”, but instead as a woman. For its time, that’s pretty good.

And you know the thing about the authors who wrote that shit? They’re pretty much all dead, or not writing any more, or (best of all) writing interesting things instead.

And the future is us. It’s chromatic, LGBT, disabled, working-class, with complex hyphenated identities, and it’s too big for anyone (or any one clique) to control, or even to judge.

And yeah, they’re all entitled to their opinions, no matter how incorrect or repellent; but you’d think that one of the first things they’d learn from SF was that you don’t get to assert objectivity. The world is problematic, and if you as a narrator (and are we all not narrators?) look upon something and see that it is Bad and Wrong, that doesn’t tell us about it. It tells us about you. There are, after all, always other narrators.

[1] And later in the book, we learn that the schoolgirl is a hyperdimensional tentacle monster, and the headmaster is a Greek god (and we know what they’re like). I mean, it’s not as though there’s anything wrong with any of these things. Just… from what he’s whinging about, I’d tend to assume he did.
[2] He’s not actually a bad writer. The Chaos trilogy has some really interesting ideas. He just acts, all the time, as though he wants to be Heinlein when he grows up. And oozes self-satisfaction with his own rhetoric.

It’s difficult for me to know what to write about these books, as it always is when I love something so much.

YA sf about wizards – what’s not to like? And it’s definitely sf, not fantasy, despite all the, um, magic. There’s a good solid rationale behind it, there are laser guns, there are nonhuman aliens of any number of kinds, and the books are liberally strewn with meta-SF references. Urban SF, possibly, as opposed to urban fantasy.

When Duane does use realworld science to support her plot hooks, the results can sometimes be a bit unfortunate – for instance, in book 8 the world suffers from Thinning (and all the adult wizards go totally Susan, leaving the kids to save the universe – what a surprise!) because the amount of dark matter in the universe is stretching space too much and making everyone depressed and despairing. However, that’s a minor oddity, and this effect doesn’t turn up often enough to be problematic.

Amusingly, these books score really high on the pagan-friendly chart, according to the Internet. But wizards… magic… references to Powers who were known by the names of pagan gods… talking animals! So why amusing? Well, the world is set up like this. Initially, things were created perfectly, we’re told. The universe is friendly, and loving, and yearns towards sentience and life. And then one of the Powers that served the One – the best and brightest of them – decided to create something entirely new. Entropy and death. Cast out, he became the Lone Power, roaming the universe cackling and twirling his moustache, tricking species into accepting his “gift”, and hating all that lives and grows in its own way. Sounding familiar yet?

How about if I say that sacrifice (especially substitute sacrifice) and redemption are the main themes of the series? Or that it keeps dropping hints that there’s a good and useful side to the Lone Power’s gift, and that by passing through its effects wizards (and species) can become wiser and stronger? Or that helping the Lone Power trick itself into accepting redemption is usually the way to win?

This isn’t just Christian, it’s outright Catholic. It isn’t Christian allegory in the style of CS Lewis, mind – watered-down Sunday-School-by-stealth. There aren’t any prissy English children wandering like tourists through a universe other people control, dancing on the author’s puppet-strings while he acts out a cute little Bible story. These are real people, worried about real and important things, thrown into a job the Powers That Be think they can do. Nobody’s special because of their genetics (though wizardry does seem to run in families) and sometimes it takes nonwizards to save the day. The viewpoint characters are more often female than not, and a fair proportion of them are non-white (it’s American, so Spanish names indicate PoC – I always have trouble remembering that) and there’s a heavily implied gay couple in a major supporting role.

Oh, and yet another thing that makes it work far better than either Narnia or Harry Potter? Families. This series presents realistic, three-dimensional families, with all the trouble and wonderfulness that they lead to. Being a wizard doesn’t get you out of living in the real world; indeed, quite the reverse. This isn’t escapism here.

I’ve started re-reading Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series, more or less concurrently with Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files books. I didn’t pick them as a pair deliberately, but they do have quite a bit in common beyond the wizards-in-cities schtick – they’re both fantasies of service.

A lot of people characterize SF as escapist, both as a positive and a negative term – it takes you away from the real world, it takes you to a better one, and so on. But there’s a definite tradition of engagement as well, and the whole it might be you trope isn’t always about Being Special, about being the One Princess Destined To Whatever. Sometimes it’s just about validation – the hope that one day, someone will turn up and hand you a magic sword, a talking horse, or the root password to the universe. And then they’ll say, It’s yours now. Do good with it.

Mercedes Lackey is a perfect example of this. If the Powers want you for a sunbeam Herald, they’ll send a shiny telepathic horse to kidnap you and be your best friend, and then you’ll jump into harm’s way for everyone’s good. Or from her urban fantasies, Diana Tregarde has the Guardian power – when she’s certifiably Doing Good, she gets an extra huge magic battery to plug into.

Duane’s Wizards do it a bit differently. Wizardry is, by definition, service; using magic reduces entropy and slows down the heat death of the Universe. It’s a choice you have to make for yourself, and one you have to keep on making, and the reward for a job well done is always another one.

What more could we wish for?

My beloved surprised me earlier this evening with a nice rant of a short-short story as a present.

She’s right, of course; SF conventions on planetary occupancy are generally Extremely Silly. Not always Planet of Hats-level silliness, but not far from it. A planet may look tiny and precious while you’re out in space, but once you get close enough to interact meaningfully with it it’s immense, and complex, and full of billions upon billions of incredible details, most of which could change your life if you let them.

Oddly enough, most SF writers have historically been interested only in the details with rayguns, or big pointy teef like dis, or which could provide new and interesting solutions to contrived engineering problems. This seems to be changing, but there’s still plenty out there to snark at.

SF, of course, is a fundamentally imperialist activity. In the Western-derived US space opera tradition, it’s all about the inevitable triumph of People Like Us (Campbell, passim) and then the reaction against that (eg. Longyear’s Enemy Mine) and the reaction against that reaction (the whole tiresome milwank crowd) and so on and on and on. In the more British scientific-romance tradition, it’s more about the hegemony of perspective, whether unexamined or forcefully advocated (Brin, passim). And the reaction against that, of course, whether by presenting obviously flawed and failsome perspectives or by forcefully advocating other ones alongside it.

And that inevitably means less interest in the true nature and character of the Other. SF purports to examine the Unknowable Other, but that’s complete bollocks; it’s all done with mirrors.

If the proposition had been put to me, prior to reading this novel, that it was even remotely possible for a text to be at one and the same time a time travel caper, a 1930s detective story, a deconstruction of the Country House Novel, and an extended meditation on modelling chaotic systems and the cosmological significance of jumble sales, I would (I freely admit) have been dubious.

There are so very many things I would like to say about this book, but it will take another half-dozen readings at least for me to understand it properly. That is, however, a chore I will undertake with equanimity.

Normally, I would encourage all of you to read this book immediately; however, that would be wrong of me. You must, if you have not already, read Three Men in a Boat (though The Wind in the Willows will do at a pinch), The Complete Jeeves and Wooster, By His Bootstraps, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, William the Conqueror, and at the very least The Nine Tailors and Gaudy Night. Then you must read this book.

I was a little disappointed when I worked out one of the central mysteries long before the protagonists did; but then again, it was (in retrospect) inevitable, and I suspect Willis would have been disappointed if a genre-aware reader hadn’t been expecting that.

The book is gentle, witty, poignant, and more than occasionally side-splittingly hilarious. It runs on cheerfully, like the ever-flowing stream which forms such an eminently Victorian metaphor for time, but – like the stream – there are all sorts of interesting eddies and crosslinks inside the flow. Nothing is insignificant, the story tells us. Nothing gets ignored or passed over; not bulldogs, Oxford Dons, kittens, spinster ladies, or the most egregiously hideous Victorian decorative ware. All Nature is but Art.

This is his first book, and completely unlike the others – interestingly, it’s the only one where he published as Mike rather than Michael. It’s fairly standard early 1980s if-this-goes-on SF – the Cold War became hot, the Earth is run by a hereditary bureaucracy, and the Big Bad polity is “the African junta”. Pleasantly, though, the only dark-skinned characters we see are good guys.

What it most reminded me of, from the blurb, is McCaffrey’s Decision at Doona – brave throwbacks escape a crowded, repressed, enervated Earth for the stars. It’s not a fair comparison, though, and not only because it’s very much a 1980s vision of the future rather than a 1960s one – the focus of Run for the Stars is almost entirely on the preparations to leave, and on opposing the evil bureaucracy who don’t understand the Importance Of Space, and they don’t even get to the colony planet before the end of the book.

It’s also a first contact novel of sorts, though the only contact they have is a short exchange of maser-radio messages and a couple of missiles. It’s a downbeat sort of book, given that the take-home message seems to be that civilizations decay and change, and that alien governments can be paranoid and evil too. Pleasantly, though, we have sympathetically drawn pacifist characters (religious pacifist, at that) and the one space battle is to preserve rather than to destroy.

Overall verdict: slight, but interesting enough.

This is a peculiar book. It’s got a really stunning idea at its heart, which is a corollary of quantum entanglement communications: the idea that, denied anything but perfect virtual telepresence on an alien world, humans could well turn into despotic psychopaths, lording it over their own colonial subjects.

However, for reasons best known to himself, Palmer has chosen to cloak it in the trappings of a comic space opera – the kind of story usually described as a Zany Caper and lovingly wrapped in a cover by Josh Kirby (mayherestinpeace). The story opens with a ragtag bunch of misfits pursuing a career in piracy and kidnapping – IN SPACE! Complete with a kidnapping victim who isn’t what we think… but then that was the pirates’ plan all along, and it turns out they’re not just pirates but revolutionaries, and the story unfolds from there.

The end product reads as though Terry Pratchett, at the point when he first sat down to write The Dark Side of the Sun, had instead been hit by a stray particle of inspiration intended originally for the creative imagination of Alastair Reynolds. The first comparison I thought of was Rob Grant; or taken a little further, darker, more intense, it might have been Deathstalker. It’s almost certainly significant that all these examples are very British writers.

Palmer’s very good at pacing his revelations out, and we get a good idea of the backstory through the self-absorbed maunderings of Lena, the kidnapping victim, who is less an unreliable narrator than a flagrantly incompetent liar with intermittent flashes of self-awareness.

On the other hand, it’s hard to care. The characters aren’t exactly two-dimensional, but I’m up to page 346 (I write these reviews as I go along) and the only one I couldn’t summarize in a twitter-length is Lena. This is quite likely deliberate, of course – it’s absolutely standard for the comic-space-opera form that the characters don’t matter any more than the set, and what’s important is the mad hijinks and narrow scrapes.

The science is mostly based around string theory, though “rubber band theory” would probably be a more accurate name. This isn’t a criticism; I appreciate a good line in technobabble, so long as nobody cares if I skim-read it and get back to the interesting bits. The military strategy, on the other hand, is devastatingly incompetent. Sacrificing millions of soldiers to win a battle, without any narrative explanation of why a sneakier tactic wouldn’t work? That’s one thing. Doing so when you’ve already established that your civilization has more than enough skills and resources to build throwaway robots by the million? Oh, dear.

What we never see, throughout the whole book, is any of the Enemy. The Cheo (and yes, that is derived from “CEO”) we see at a distance in Lena’s diary-excerpt flashbacks, but only her descriptions – nobody else so much as gets a line or a name. Having finished it now, I get the impression Palmer was aiming to do a character-focused piece all about Lena, but didn’t know how to write anything SFnal except Red Dwarf episodes. That’s an unfair and sweeping generalization, I freely admit, but it’s abundantly clear from the tenor of his writing, and especially from his afterword, that he’s new-come to SF writing. I’m not sure how far his reading stretches; he namechecks Verne, Asimov, Orwell, Heinlein, Bradbury, Sturgeon, and “a host of others for creating the genre that is now the playground for a whole new generation of writers”, and more interestingly he names a couple of planets after Pohl and Kornbluth.

“It is a novel full of exaggeration and hyperbole. Spaceships travel amazingly fast, antimatter missiles are thrown like water bombs, some humans are genetically modified to swim like dolphins or run like panthers, the battles are astonishingly vast in scale, and anyone who doesn’t die horribly in combat can live for centuries in a state of perfect health and simmering libido.”

See, that’s someone who’s just discovered SF imagery and really wants to share it with everyone, but doesn’t realize that there are thousands of people in his own country alone who read hundreds of SF books a year and might well read nothing else. It’s so sweet!

I adore the Stainless Steel Rat books. I grew up with them – my father’s old Sphere paperbacks, and then 2000AD serialized The Stainless Steel Rat For President in 1984/5. (I was 8. I was in heaven.)

Slippery Jim DiGriz has always been the epitome of the fast-talking, high-living, straight-shooting trickster hero (and First Person Smartass), and what’s more he never kills people. He’s rather the Technical Pacifist, though, and it’s stated fairly unambiguously that this is down to his not wanting to kill people rather than, you know, not wanting them to die. And I don’t have a problem with that… it’s more honest than the A-Team version, where they very carefully show everyone escaping from the burning building or the car crash. And Jim rarely sheds a tear (except in a melodramatic smartass kind of way) for the mooks who do insist on dying. This happens a lot around his wife Angelina.

Speaking of Angelina, though… she’s a former psycho killer mastermind, who was born Extremely Ugly and had herself reshaped into ravishingness. She and Slippery Jim fell in love, and he had top Patrol doctors surgically implant a conscience in her. This is possibly a littlIe too close to Taming Wild Women for my taste, but, well, 1972 SF.

Speaking of 1972… well, 1975 really. This is one of that odd sub-genre of SF where the protagonist travels to the author’s time (or timeline) and generally place, and we’re supposed to derive some enjoyment from their attempts to understand our world or their gleeful rampage through it. And, of course, from recognizing things they don’t.

It seems to be closely related to that odd sub-genre of SF set in a fantastical world which halfway through turns out, with a nod and a wink, to be a postapocalyptic version of our own.

I suppose you could call them reverse portal-quest stories; there’s probably a case for understanding them as a kind of mooreeffoc story, with the same abrupt disruptive perceptual shift in the Way Things Are.

On the other hand, the past is a different country, and 1970s America even more so; I feel that that perceptual shift trivializes and distances the interestingness of it. Which is probably useful in context, since that lets us focus on the characters and the capers instead of the scenery.

This is a beautiful, spare, wrenching story, about a generation ship populated by Quakers. They’re approaching their destination, and need to decide whether to leave the ship for the new world, and whether they can. It’s one of those stories that probably couldn’t be told without being SF.

Reading it is like eating good bread – warm, slightly sharp sourdough, good nourishing plain food well made – with the occasional piercingly strong black olive of a perfectly turned phrase.

The title is a quotation from a Walt Whitman poem. Surprisingly, the poem (Gloss uses excerpts from his poetry, up to half a dozen lines, for chapter headings) talks about turning away from the dazzle of day, and using the darkness of the night to see the stars. Quaker metaphors often use the term ‘light’ to describe, well, anything important, and often this is sunlight… but every star is a sun, no matter how far away, and the inside of the Dusty Miller is lit by xenon lights. The lights, like everything else in the artificial biosphere, are maintained with the same fierce, uncompromising dedication that the Friends in this book bring to maintaining their own interpersonal relationships.

It’s not a happy religious utopia; there are conflicts, struggles, unhappinesses, the occasional mean-spirited gossip about people perceived to behave wrongly. But people work with mindfulness, and we see that reflected in the things around them; a tool, a ceramic bowl, a crematorium furnace. A world. Two worlds.

When I was thirteen or so, I learnt a good word: apotropaic. Standing against the darkness. One of the questions this book leads into is about being strong enough to stand in the light.