Adrift on the Sea of Rains by Ian Sales

A Cold War, alternate-Apollo programme story with some Nazi super-science thrown in – and it works! A group of American military astronauts are marooned on the Moon when nuclear war breaks out, and they seek return to Earth via a very unconventional (but documented) route. The main protagonist takes solace in the “magnificent desolation” of the lunar landscape; this in particular is very well done, as is the study of the same protagonist’s character and motivations. The story is peppered with NASA acronym soup, but this is necessary because that is how these characters would talk (and a glossary is provided – though readers of A Certain Age will remember some of these from the real Apollo newscasts). The ending is inevitable, given the central character, and tragic on a number of levels.

The author is a spaceflight enthusiast, and it shows. He also designed the rather striking and appropriate cover. This story is the first in a projected “Apollo Quartet”; I shall look forward to seeing more in this series.

Rocket Science; science fiction and non-fiction, edited by Ian Sales

An interesting collection of stories and factual pieces on a theme set by the editor, that of speculation on factual space travel in the near-ish future. As with any original anthology, some pieces work better than others. For me, the notable pieces were:

Leigh Kimmel – Tell me a story: an account of human expansion through the Solar System, told from a multi-generational point of view, using a child’s story book as a hinge. A simple but effective piece.

David Clements – Launch day; an account of the launching of the Herschel and Planck satellites, told by one of the scientists involved closely in the development of one of them. An effective piece of journalism, with a good sense of what this actually means to the people involved. (One reviewer has looked at this piece and reviewed it, unfavourably, as if it were fiction. Some people….)

Craig Pay – Incarnate: a story setting personal family tragedy within a very different society to our own.

Martin McGrath – Pathfinders; a powerful character study of individuals under pressure from their environment and their situation. The story has a fairly massive twist in it, and the events of the story are left unresolved; but that wasn’t really what the story was about.

Sam Kepfield – Not because they are easy: a very different alternative space programme results in a very different history.

Deborah Walker – Sea of maternity: growing up on the Moon is just as difficult as it is on Earth – for parents as well as teenagers.

Other stories and pieces were not such a hit, and a few stories, whilst fine in themselves, took the broadest possible interpretation of the brief for the collection; so Carmela Rafala’s ‘Slipping sideways’ and Helen Jackson’s ‘Going, boldly’, whilst fine stories, made me wonder quite what they were doing in this collection. Dunan Lunan’s item on new spacecraft design reads like a conference report in a technical journal, whilst Sean Martin’s ‘Dreaming at Baikonur’ is actually an historical story set against the glory days of the Soviet space programme.

Still, this is a worthwhile collection and serves well its editor’s aim of putting science fiction and writing about science firmly back in the real world, without cramping the writers’ style. It is to be applauded.

Vertigo by Bob Shaw

In this novel, Bob Shaw applied his practical but fertile imagination to an old sf trope, anti-gravity. What would society be like if everyone had a cheap, practical, personal anti-gravity harness? He builds this into a story about corporate intrigue set in Canada, a country where Bob lived and worked for a while. (Bob was adept at building personal experiences into his novels.)

The novel is a sequel to a short story he wrote which introduced the central character, his history and his psychological hang-ups. The story (variously known as ‘Dark Icarus’ or ‘A little night flying’) is not included in the Gollancz hardcover but is included in the Pan paperback.

Pushing ice by Alastair Reynolds

Another space opera from Alastair Reynolds. this time not set in his ‘Revelation Space’ universe. I was expecting a novel mainly about cometary mining, and whilst we get some of that just to set the scene, fairly quickly there is a change of gear as the protagonists are diverted to investigate a Big, (not so) Dumb Object – the Saturnian moon, Janus – that is behaving not as moons are supposed to behave. Very quickly, the characters find themselves in a situation going rapidly out of control.

It is the characterisation that drives this book rather than the events. Opinions have differed over how good the characterisation is in this book; I found it better than expected, and also I was suprised to find the characterisation being, for me at least, the key part of the book. The conflict between two powerful women for control of the ship, and their convincing turn and turn abouts as to just who is in the ascendant at ony one time I found very convincing and political.

I was also very taken with the way that Reynolds deals with a spaceship with a crew of 150 or so. Most writers, given this premise, focus on a handful of major characters and leave it at that, leaving the rest as mere spear-carriers. Not so Reynolds. Characters keep turning up and then disappearing, either through death or – more commonly – through just not being involved in that part of the story. They are named, they play parts, and the overall impression is just the same as working in any medium to large organisation; there are people you know well, there are people you deal with from time to time, and there are people you hardly ever speak to or hardly recognise in a corridor. This is one of the few novels to put that idea over in any context; and in a way it also underlined the Way of this particular future, where working on a spaceship mining comets in the outer reaches of the Solar System would be a job like any other.

The intervention of aliens, when it occurs about two-thirds of the way through the book, is interesting and the aliens themselves are well-drawn. They come bearing gifts, and like most gifts come with a price. The Musk Dogs in particular are very well realised.

The denouement was, for me, signalled a few pages in advance with respect to the fates of the two major characters, but that didn’t spoil the book for me. Sequels are possible, but none have emerged as yet; perhaps Reynolds is too busy spinning off new ideas for his current multi-book deal with his publisher to draw breath and revisit earlier works?

Star Trek; Star Fleet technical manual by Franz Joseph

This book sparked off a whole publishing sub-genre.

One of the things that made ‘Star Trek’ a noticeable tv series was the implied back story and “show bible” that Gene Roddenberry created for the series. Unlike earlier excursions into television sf, Roddenberry wanted to show a convincing organization and shipboard operations, so as to lend verisimilitude to the show and get writers to treat the subject matter with a bit more rigour than they were previously used to. Anyone viewing the original series now, especially shows from its first season, will see that he only had limited success – writers and network chiefs took some breaking in to this idea – but nonetheless one feature of the show was that the cast did the same things each time certain situations arose, making them more convincing as characters in a given situation. After all, in Westerns or war stories, everyone knew what was expected of a cowpoke or an army sergeant, even if they’d never been one, because the background was sufficiently well-known so as to be common knowledge – why not for an sf show?

The “Technical manual” was, effectively, the show’s “Bible” for writers, slightly enlarged and repackaged for the market. Consequently, both the later iterations of Star Trek, and other shows in the same genre, have gone down the same route. The idea that “it’s sci-fi, so you can do whatever you like” hasn’t entirely gone away; but we have to thank Roddenberry for trying his best to make that happen.

Zero History by William Gibson

Gibson’s last three books have just got better and better. In ‘Zero History’ we are back with Hollis Henry, former lead singer with The Curfew; Milgrim, the damaged shady operative; and Hubertus Bigend, who is beginning to look ever more like someone bigger than just a media and marketing guru. Indeed, part-way through this novel, there is an incident which made me think “What IS a marketing guru doing with hardware like THIS?”. By the end of the book, some of Bigend’s motivation is coming clear, and the words “Bond villain” are attached to him, only partly in jest. And parts of it I found laugh-out-loud funny.

Gibson has fallen in love with London, but he still sees it through the eyes of an outsider; speaking through Milgrim, he constantly expresses surprise at how London differs from daily life in the USA. And there is some sort of resolution for his characters; even, perhaps, some happy endings, not something you’d normally associate with Gibson.

This is now a novel of Today; for one thing, since reading it, I’ve done a double-take whenever I’ve encountered a Toyota Hilux pickup on the road. My one question is this: where does Gibson go from here?

The machine stops by E.M. Forster

This small volume contains two stories; ‘The Machine stops’ (1928) and ‘The Celestial Omnibus’ (1911).

“The Machine stops” is a dystopian tale of humanity’s underground automated future life, isolated from each other save via telecommunications; and what happens when they turn their collective backs on human interaction and the pursuit of what might in those days have been called the “practical arts”. In the end, society breaks down, the Machine stops, and all die (except for isolated groups of humans who actually live on the surface). In 1928, this probably seemed like almost pure fantasy; today, it’s not difficult to read it as a cautionary allegory of our modern situation.

‘The Celestial Omnibus’ is a slight tale of a little boy who discovers a mysterious bus that takes him to a realm of fantasy where the figures of myth and art live and have discourse. A doubting adult accompanies him, and his doubts are his downfall (literally). It is slightly reminiscent of Saki, with whom it was contemporary.

Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds

Eight stories set in Reynold’s shared universe. In his Afterword, Reynolds writes about how the concept of future history story arcs seized his imagination as a teenager. It seems that many writers go through this stage, only to abandon the concept when either their ideas no longer fit into the established story arc, or they require too much bending of the facts and action to make that happen. (The solution, which Iain Banks seems to have worked out, is to leave the historical and factual basis of his universe pretty loose, enabling him to write a range of different stories set in and around the Culture… but that’s another matter altogether.)

Most of these stories set up features of Reynolds’ future history, and reading them as an afterthought filled in a lot of details for me (although Reynolds himself acknowledges that some of the stories were written before his future universe was fully fleshed out; hence some of the details don’t entirely gel with later stories.) Whether I would want to read them in advance of a re-read of the novel sequence is another question.

Of the stories, “Great Wall of Mars” and “Glacial” held my interest the best for filling in the back story of Nevil Clavain; whilst “Weather” was probably the most affecting story. “Grafenwalder’s Bestiary” was rather reminiscent of George R.R. Martin’s 1970s stories about Havilland Tuf (especially “A Beast for Norn”). but draws on the events of “A spy on Europa”.

All in all, a strong collection that is essential reading for anyone already acquainted with Reynolds’ ‘Revelation Space’ novels.

Salt by Adam Roberts

This is a story of space colonisation that goes dreadfully wrong, as two dominant groups of colonists go to war on a hostile planet.

The bulk of the story is told from the points of view of two of the leading characters in each faction. Back story is filled in seamlessly. The method of reaching the colony is convincingly told, as is the description of the world itself, which turns out to be extremely hostile through being mainly comprised of – well, salt.

The two colonists’ factions are well drawn out, as are the characters of the main protagonists. The only problem I had was that I found it difficult to engage with any of the characters. Because the same events are described from two different viewpoints, each account is laden with the prejudices of the p.o.v. character; and neither are that likeable. The anarchist character just wins here on a personal level; but his anarchist society comes over to me as an unpleasant place; Roberts has sat down and thought through a number of libertarian viewpoints and extended them to their logical conclusion in an attempt to depict a workable society. The result is a society which to me, at least, seemed uncaring and unnecessarily violent. The only thing is that the opposing group of colonists, which appears to be a hierarchical, capitalist society riven through with religious imagery that many on the Christian Right would recognise, seems worse. The attitudes of the ruling hierarchy in this society seem straight out of Tory Central Casting; the leader of the colony is either massively hypocritical or heavily self-deluded (and possibly both at the same time).

The final chapter of the novel changes the p.o.v. character yet again, to a diplomat sent (earlier in the action of the book) to the anarchist society. It is told as flashback, and that character comes out of it rather better than either side painted her earlier in the course of the action. However, that character’s embassy struck me as one of the weaker parts of the novel, as the diplomatic mission was set up with minimal preparation or aforethought, and as a result it turned into political disaster. However, given that the diplomat was sent as a pretext to insert a military force into the anarchist colony, or (equally likely) set up to fail and provoke an incident, this may well have been the idea in the first place.

So: we have two barely likable protagonists, representing two diametrically opposed and unpleasant regimes. Why would anyone want such a novel? Well, the premise is interesting; the world-building well worked out; and the writing describing the world itself – especially when seen through the eyes of the anarchist protagonist – is lyrical. That the character has the ability to appreciate the awful majesty and terrible beauty of his adopted homeworld is one of the things that helps redeem him for me; and for that alone, ‘Salt’ is a worthwhile book.

On by Adam Roberts

A bit of a let-down, this (especially after Roberts’ debut, ‘Salt’). The setting is intriguing; a world where everyone lives on ledges on a massive wall, which is all the world seems to consist of. The sun rises in the morning from downwall and sets upwall. The main protagonist falls off the Wall, but survives and has a number of picaresque adventures before finding out the secret of the Wall and the world.

Sadly, there is little resolution in the book; a shame, since we find at the end that there are other players involved who seem to have a better handle on what is happening and seem to be trying to intervene to improve the world. But the novel comes to an abrupt halt before this can be explored in any meaningful way (and indeed, whilst we, as science fiction readers, appreciate the explanation of the world, the main protagonist doesn’t). The book ends on what would be a cliffhanger if Roberts were any sort of commercial writer trying to sell a sequel; but he isn’t a commercial writer and he has felt no need to go back to this world or this story.

There is some surprisingly clumsy writing in the book. We are introduced early on to the idea that there are different levels of technology in this world; but then the main character’s adventures take him to societies that are fairly firmly set at an 18th-century technological level and we lose sight of this aspect of the world-building. So when he is catapulted into a high-technology society in the last quarter of the book, there is a lot of explaining to do because the character seems quite comfortable with the level of technology he is encountering. The most glaring example of this is the fact that this character is quite familiar with video screens, though we have barely seen any evidence of such technology being present in the world. Roberts has to insert a fairly major info-dump as a flashback at this point, which could easily have been put in the early part of the book to reinforce the differing levels of technology in the society and to remind the reader; instead, we get nearly two pages of recapitulation that changes our view of the society. I would have expected something better of Roberts or his editor. A pity, really; I wanted to enjoy this book.