SF and Fantasy wot I ave been reeding

[Famous Mortimer]

"Chaos Terminal" by Mur Lafferty

The second in the Midsolar Murders series (I read the first one last year). Like the front cover says, it's Murder She Wrote crossed with Babylon 5, if Jessica Fletcher was slightly hornier.

I'm not sure if Lafferty is bad at describing the layout of Station Eternity or I'm not reading it closely enough, but I've got no idea what it looks like, how it's laid out, or where anything is in relation to anything else. Not the biggest issue, but it does occasionally bubble to the surface.

Structurally, it's largely the same as the first one. The giant sentient station has a problem  which renders it either unable to help or actively hostile to the residents; Mallory (our hero) has to solve the murder of someone she has some "coincidental" link with; and the various alien races help or hinder, as is their nature. Perhaps the most glaring structural similarity is the lengthy flashback to someone who's several degrees of separation from Mallory; in the first book, it was someone relating to her friend Xan's brother; in this one, it's the husband of the elder brother of her best friend from high school.

Perhaps this is common in murder mysteries, at the cozier end of things? Not a genre I'm familiar with. But it is odd, and there's a sense that no matter how good the writing is, I'd rather be getting on with things.

[Norton Canes]

Just about got to the halfway point of Dan Simmons' The Fall of Hyperion. The neat Canterbury Tales framing of the seven pilgrims' journeys in its predecessor, Hyperion, have been jettisoned as the narrative expands to encompass the battle between the Hegemony of Man and the hostile forces of the Ousters. Space opera on an epic scale and the threat of the terrifying Shrike appearing from nowhere at any moment keeps things tense. Also it has some nicely prescient future-building for a novel of 1990

Finished now. Bit of a let-down, by the end. Expected quite a bleak denouemement, perhaps along the lines of Simmons' The Terror. Instead most of the threats seemed to be resolved, with the caveat that further meta-powerful godlike gestalt entities might be lurking. Particularly disappointed by the manner in which

Spoiler alert

the Shrike is despatched (for the time being, at least), which isn't explained.

[close]

Might plough on with the two Endymion sequels at some point, perhaps.

7/10, needed more Keats.

[touchingcloth]

I've just finished Ursula K. Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest and loved it.

Humans (ish) populated planets around several stars, and after a million or so years with no contact some humans from Earth raid a planet 50 light years away to strip it for lumber because Earth has already been stripped.

It's an anti-colonialist and pro-ecological screed, sort of like Cortés meets Moctezuma but with the Aztecs making a good job of fighting back. In space.

Will the stupid, naïve alien humans beat the greedy Earthlings?

Spoiler alert

Sort of. But they ultimately lose because they have learnt to act like Earthlings.

[close]

I didn't get on with Earthsea when I read it last year, but this was much more up my street and I'm going to check out more of the Hainish books. Maybe The Dispossessed next, which seems to split opinion, including in this thread.

[touchingcloth]

I read this, and thought people in this thread might enjoy it.

Ursula K. Le Guin - A Rant About Technology

In an interesting and favorable notice of Changing Planes (which you can find elsewhere on the site, in Spanish and English), the Argentinean reviewer asserts that since Le Guin isn't a hard science fiction writer, "technology is carefully avoided." I stuck a footnote onto this in my translation of the article, and here is the footnote expanded — because this business is really getting my goat.

'Hard' SF is all about technology, and 'soft' SF doesn't have any technology, right? And my books don't have technology in them, because I am only interested in psychology and emotions and squashy stuff like that, right?

Not right. How can genuine science fiction of any kind lack technological content? Even if its principal interest isn't in engineering or how machines work — if like most of mine, it's more interested in how minds, societies, and cultures work — still, how can anybody make a story about a future or an alien culture without describing, implicitly or explicitly, its technology?

Nobody can. I can't imagine why they'd want to.

Its technology is how a society copes with physical reality: how people get and keep and cook food, how they clothe themselves, what their power sources are (animal? human? water? wind? electricity? other?) what they build with and what they build, their medicine — and so on and on. Perhaps very ethereal people aren't interested in these mundane, bodily matters, but I'm fascinated by them, and I think most of my readers are too.

Technology is the active human interface with the material world.

But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources.

This is not an acceptable use of the word. "Technology" and "hi tech" are not synonymous, and a technology that isn't "hi," isn't necessarily '"low" in any meaningful sense.

We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called "technology" at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers — as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe...

One way to illustrate that most technologies are, in fact, pretty "hi," is to ask yourself of any manmade object, Do I know how to make one?

Anybody who ever lighted a fire without matches has probably gained some proper respect for "low" or "primitive" or "simple" technologies; anybody who ever lighted a fire with matches should have the wits to respect that notable hi-tech invention.

I don't know how to build and power a refrigerator, or program a computer, but I don't know how to make a fishhook or a pair of shoes, either. I could learn. We all can learn. That's the neat thing about technologies. They're what we can learn to do.

And all science fiction is, in one way or another, technological. Even when it's written by people who don't know what the word means.

All the same, I agree with my reviewer that I don't write hard science fiction. Maybe I write easy science fiction. Or maybe the hard stuff's inside, hidden — like bones, as opposed to an exoskeleton....

— Ursula K. Le Guin, 2005

[Mr Trumpet]

Has Le Guin ever been wrong about anything

[Pranet]

If she had any say in her book covers, quite frequently.

I do miss how grumpy she was.

[All Surrogate]

She missed a trick by not mentioning language, a piece of tech over which she had mastery.

[touchingcloth]

She missed a trick by not mentioning language, a piece of tech over which she had mastery.

Maybe writing rather than language would fit her own definition of "the active human interface with the material world" better than language?

[Famous Mortimer]

"This Is How You Lose the Time War" by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Two agents from either side of a vast, multiverse-spanning war to shape all of history/reality, between the techno-utopia of the Agency and the environmental utopia of the Garden, start sending each other snarky letters which quickly develops into love.

I really liked the story, and the way it was told, presumably with one author taking on "Red" and the other "Blue", even if I do feel the leap from antagonists to gushing messages of love was perhaps a little too sudden. But that's pretty small potatoes for a clever, funny story that won't take you more than a day to read. Oh, and it won the Hugo and Nebula for best novella, so you don't need to take my word for it.

El-Mohtar doesn't seem to have written anything novel-length since, being mostly a reviewer and teacher, and Gladstone is a writer-for-hire, apparently working on the longest book series that no-one has ever read, George R R Martin's "Wild Cards".

[Jack Shaftoe]

I like Wild Cards! Although I think I've only read the first three in the series, must go back and give it another go. Max Gladstone's interesting, I like his ideas and he's a good writer, but I can never quite click with his stuff for some reason. Feels like he's somehow just a little bit too pleased with his own ideas and world-building to have fun with it.

Currently going back to reread Neal Stephenson's earlier stuff, 'Snow Crash' and 'The Diamond Age', after his more recent stuff starting leaving me feeling a bit underwhelmed. Still absolutely cracking stuff.

[Alberon]

I've been reading Wild Cards off and on for decades and am actually reading one right now. It must be one of the longest running shared worlds around.

Fairly undemanding stuff (and some of the more recent volumes were quite bad), but this one has short stories from Paul Cornell and Charles Stross which helps.

[Famous Mortimer]

Retracted - it was a joke based on old GRRM troll message boards where everyone claimed to have never read it. I'm not even entirely sure what it is. Superheroes?

[Alberon]

It's about the effects of an alien virus spread decades ago. Most who get the virus die, most of the rest are hideously mutated (bigotry from the unaffected portion of humanity is a long-running theme) and a very few get superpowers. IIRC the line between Jokers and Aces (as they're styled) is a bit blurry. One character got angel wings which is techincally a Joker effect, but because she looked beautiful (and could fly) she was treated as an Ace.

[Dayraven]

Which adds up to a superhero series in the sort of semi-rationalised setting that a lot of 80s indie superhero comics also had, going by the few Wild Cards stories I've read.

[touchingcloth]

Anyone read Peter Watts' Blindsight? It seems like it'd be up my street.

[Dayraven]

(Note: might sound like heavy spoilers below, but it's all established quite early.)

Good, with qualms. The story sometimes seems more like special pleading for the unimportance of consciousness than a thought experiment about it. The rationalised vampires don't quite fit with the hard SF style elsewhere — I don't buy the extremes of adaptation in what has to be fairly short evolutionary time, and a lot of the vampiric traits 'explained' are only prominent in recent versions rather than older folklore.

The sequel, Echopraxia, doesn't have nearly as good a central story to hold it together.

[surreal]

If she had any say in her book covers, quite frequently.

I do miss how grumpy she was.

There's a decent documentary about her if you can find it somewhere - I paid up to the kickstarter for it at the time. 

https://youtu.be/gynLfdNVVHs?si=tmwTmyLa4v8EM4or

https://worldsofukl.com/

[Pranet]

I downloaded it off the iplayer when it was on BBC4. It looks like it is on Amazon, in a version that is about 15 minutes longer.

[bgmnts]

Is Michael Moorcock worth getting into? I understand he's one of the daddies of the fantasy genre and has obviously written so much I wouldn't even know where to start.

Or is it all dated and have we moved on since?

[dontpaintyourteeth]

His best work is on the Hawkwind albums tbh

Seriously though I don't know really. I've only read Behold the Man, which is fine but you'll guess where it's going before the end of the first page.

Got a big pile of his books from a charity shop the other week as it happens. I'll post again if any of them are actually any good.

[Alberon]

A lot of his early stuff was, IIRC, books written in about a weekend to help keep the New Worlds magazine afloat. I read enough of it to fill about two foot of bookcase, but this was decades ago.

His later work is reasonably well regarded though I've not tried any of it.

[Dayraven]

He's not only written a lot, but with highly variable levels of literary ambition. The stuff that's been most influential on the fantasy genre, Elric and such, probably hasn't aged that well. The Jerry Cornelius books hold up rather better as the good sort of of-their-time, and Dancers At the End of Time probably the best of the lighter ones.

[earl_sleek]

Dancers is good. I like the Hawkmoon books (I like the setting a lot, an alternate / future Europe under threat from an evil English empire), and the Elric ones I've read (the first ones). Also really liked the first Von Bek, but IIRC the next one was not so great. Haven't been able to get on with Corum, and though I think I'd like the Cornelius stuff I've never got round to it somehow.

[Famous Mortimer]

He's not only written a lot, but with highly variable levels of literary ambition. The stuff that's been most influential on the fantasy genre, Elric and such, probably hasn't aged that well. The Jerry Cornelius books hold up rather better as the good sort of of-their-time, and Dancers At the End of Time probably the best of the lighter ones.

I read the first volume of the collected Elric and had no particular desire to move on to the second one. Not saying it was bad, it just wasn't much of anything. Perhaps it is an age thing, as it is with music and "gatekeepers" who are from generations previous assuming that what they liked is what everyone should like. Or maybe it's just me.

[Gladys]

Mother London was ace although not fantasy or SF. The follow up novel - King of the City was less interesting.

I liked the Jerry Cornelius stuff years ago and Behold the Man is good but i haven't really read much else. Apart from a huge hippy Hawkmoon comic I had when I was a kid in the 70's.

[Alberon]

Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Mr Three-novels-a-year has another one out.

Professor Arton Daghdev has been exiled as slave labour to the planet Kiln by the repressive Mandate - a dictatorship that has '1984' levels of control and very strong ideas of what is acceptable and unacceptable in scientific discoveries.

There Daghdev finds a world teaming with very alien life. Here symbiosis reaches new levels and apparent species are always made up of several smaller separate parts. For instance one type might specialise in sense organs which it gives to the composite creature in return for sustenance. This causes all sort of problems for Mandate controlled scientists because this sort of thing just isn't allowed under their rigid belief systems. The labour camp itself is built around a ruin, clearly made by an intelligence, which is one of many dotted around the planet. Who made them, and more importantly, what happened to them is a central question. Apart from the ruins there is no evidence of any tools, other relics, civilisation or even bodies.

Daghdev joins the resistance among the slave labour but there is always the constant threat of an informer selling them out as always happens back on Earth. The novel revolves around the very different ways Kiln-life and Earth-life approach the universe around them.

As usual, the author's training in animal science pays off in a vividly depicted truly alien world. There are thematic links to earlier works, such as 'Cage of Souls' and the 'Children' trilogy but it's an enjoyable book in its own right.

[Famous Mortimer]

I like a good sci-fi about finding long-dead alien civilisations.

Mack Reynolds & Dean Ing- "Deathwish World"
Reynolds was a socialist and wrote sci-fi with that perspective in mind - the protagonist for this is an organiser for the Wobblies (an excellent opening scene where he speaks in front of a pretty small crowd indicates he was fairly honest about his own chances). There's a thing where you can get "illegal" insurance which means you have access to a million dollars at all times, but the insurance company send assassins after you, hoping you die before the premiums take all their profit away.

Roy takes the deal so he can buy airtime on the all-dominating TriDi to spread a socialist message, and ends up surviving way longer than expected, so WorldGov get involved. It's a great idea for a book and it works super-well, even if some of the language is a bit jarring - published in 1986, but from a guy who'd been writing since the early 60s so even though he was definitely on the right side of the things he was talking about.

There's all sorts of details I'm missing, obviously. Reynolds seemed really interested in building the world, and perhaps as this was his last novel he wanted to get it all out there. It's got an ugly-looking modern reprint but should be easily found in second-hand places.

[Famous Mortimer]

I wrote that post above about halfway through the book, and the rest of it was equally as good. The one thing I think it missed was some action - from the description, you'd think it'd have to have some shootouts or something in it, but it rapidly becomes a standoff between the forces of organised labour and the people trying to exploit them, with neither side prepared to give an inch. There are debates among the ruling class as to whether to be nice to the proles or not, and there's even a fair society for our protagonists to escape to.

Definitely more an ideas book than a rip-roaring adventure book, but it'd also make a fantastic TV series or movie. I feel like there's one character they'd have to make a change to -

Spoiler alert

the wealthy (white) international playboy who has the technology to turn himself into a black guy and is one of the main agents of the anti-racist group in the book

[close]

- but otherwise you've got good characters, intrigue, colourful locations, all of it.

[Norton Canes]

Got Dave Hutchinson's Europe in Autumn today (along with Batavia's Graveyard) - was going to save it for holiday in a few weeks but might dive straight in

[Alberon]

Theft of Fire by Devon Eriksen

Followed a couple of random recommendations to this first time author's novel.

The lone owner/operator of an outer solar system mining vessel arrives back from the space station he's docked to to find a diminutive businesswoman from a very well connected family has acquired his debts and effectively, but legally, hijacked him and his ship. Her family's wealth is built on the back of alien tech discovered on Sedna. Now she's discovered something new in orbit around that dwarf-planet and plans to acquire it for herself.

A couple of reviews have said it reminds them of 'The Expanse' series which I've still not read yet, but to me the main influence on this book (which was the first of a trilogy, but is now a quartet) goes back to Larry Niven's Known Space series which I devoured when I first discovered it back in the Eighties. As far as I know the term 'Belters' for people who live and work in space mainly in the Asteroid Belt comes from there. There's also a couple of terms also lifted like 'Flatlander' (slightly repurposed in meaning here) and 'Torchship'.

The book only has three main characters (who all feature on the cover). Marcus Warnoc is the Belter point-of-view narrator, Miranda Foxgrove is the businesswoman (and while he's not named she is heavily implied to be Elon Musk's granddaughter). Rounding out the cast is Leela who Warnoc only discovers after the voyage to Sedna has begun.

As a first novel it's fine, there are some significant issues, but the book is self-published so the author is flying solo on this. One of the main arcs of the novel is the relationship between Warnoc and Foxgrove which, obviously, starts very antagonistically and proceeds to him almost strangling her after he's finally disabled her two robotic protection spider. What's worse is that this comes with a slight added sexual element. After that their interaction slowly improves, but there is a little too much repetition of the same arguments running around until the action filled final sequences where they finally start admitting their true feelings.

Warnoc seems to be from the more libertarian end of the political spectrum, though I've no idea if the author is. Warnoc despises the idea of nations for instance, but the companies in charge are clearly portrayed as even worse.

The entire book is set within the confines of his ship, which I wonder if it could be an attempt to make a film or TV series an easier prospect to sell. Though he's probably missed the peak TV window.

But for all it's faults it does flow along easily enough, but the middle sections are probably the strongest. It's not particularly deep or meaningful and doesn't break new ground, but I will look to try the second volume when it appears.

Devon Eriksen's website says he's personally working on the audiobook version which will have three voice actors for the main roles rather than a single narrator so that it leans more to being an audio play rather than an audio book.