Tag: science fiction

Notable books: January 2011

5th January 2011 / / 0 Comments

Towards the end of last year, I decided to look through some publishers’ catalogues, and make a note of any 2011 books that sounded interesting. I found more than I could have any hope of reading, so I’ve decided to introduce a regular feature where I highlight some books from the coming month that have caught my eye. Here, then, are my notable books for January:

Paul Bailey, Chapman’s Odyssey

A novel viewed from a hospital bed, where the protagonist lies as the voices of characters from literature and his life speak to him.

Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

A collection of six stories on the theme of memory. Sounds nicely wide-ranging.

Faïza Guène, Bar Balto

I’ve not read Guène before, but I understand that her work has been both acclaimed and successful internationally. This, her third novel, is a murder mystery told in multiple voices.

Ida Hattemer-Higgins, The History of History

This looks to have an intriguing combination of elements: an amnesiac woman trying to regain her memories, the history of Berlin, and a vein of fantastication.

Simon Lelic, The Facility

Last year’s Rupture was a fine debut, and this sounds an interesting follow-up, as Lelic writes of a near future in which laws have been tightened in the name of security.

Cornelius Medvei, Caroline: A Mystery

Of all the 2011 books I’ve learnt about so far, this may be the one that sounds the most fun — a story of a man who falls for a donkey.

Dinaw Mengestu, How to Read the Air

Technically a 2010 book, but, as its UK publication date was so close to the end of the year (30th December), and I didn’t actually realise, I’m going to include it here. It’s the story of a young Ethiopian-American retracing his parents’ journey, with (so I gather) a mixing of stories that sounds particularly interesting.

Sunjeev Sahota, Ours Are the Streets

I’ve heard good things about this debut, which examines what drives a young man from Sheffield to become a suicide bomber.

Kirsten Tranter, The Legacy

Apparently it draws on Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, which I’ve not read; but the idea of this tale about a woman travelling to New York to investigate the life of her friend’s missing cousin still intrigues me.

David Vann, Caribou Island

One of the most anticipated books of the whole year, as far as I’m concerned, never mind January. Legend of a Suicide was one of the best books I read in 2009, enough to make anything else that Vann writes essential reading. Simple as that.

Strange Horizons: 2010 in review

3rd January 2011 / / 0 Comments

Strange Horizons is kicking off the year with a look back at the previous one, as the site’s reviewers each contribute a few paragraphs on their favourite fantastic reads of 2010. That includes a contribution from me, which features some  books from my general list of year’s favourites, and some others that were bubbling under.

Read the full article on Strange Horizons here.

Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010)

18th December 2010 / / 7 Comments

One of the things for which fantastic fiction is particularly good is dramatising metaphors – and, more than that, creating texts that can be read equally productively at both metaphorical and literal levels (Mr Shivers by Robert Jackson Bennett is a good example from earlier this year). Charles Yu’s debut, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, does this, but it also goes further, dramatising science fiction itself as a literary mode.

Yu’s protagonist is himself named Charles Yu (from now on, I’ll refer to the protagonist as ‘Charles’ and the author as ‘Yu’), a time machine repair-man living in, yes, a science fictional universe – which is to say, one built so its inhabitants could enjoy the sorts of adventurous lives one reads about in sf, but which could never be possible in mundane reality. (The thing is, though, the construction of this minor universe was imperfect, and only those who can afford it get to live in the sf-nal part.) Charles has one of the ‘back room’ jobs needed to keep his universe running smoothly, and, when he’s not on a call, spends most of his time (such as the concept applies to someone who lives outside the usual chronological flow) in his phone-booth-sized TM-31 time machine, with no company but a dog that sort of exists, but only on a technicality; his time machine’s gloomy AI; and the occasional call from his boss, who’s virtual but doesn’t know it. He also reflects a lot on his relationship with his father, who invented the time travel technology, and has now gone… somewhere.

One of the golden rules of Charles’s profession is: if you ever see another version of yourself, run. Well, Charles has seen a future version of himself, but he shot him, thereby trapping himself in a time loop. Before he died, that future version handed Charles a book and told him that the key was inside. The title of that book was How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe…

In Yu’s novel, time travel is linked explicitly with Charles’s issues with his father; as he solves the problem of the time loop, the protagonist is simultaneously working out how to deal with and move forward from those personal issues. But How to Live Safely would be a pretty thin read if that were also there was to it; happily, there is much more. Yu, it seems to me, is examining the value and the limitations of both science fiction and ‘literary’ fiction (quotation marks because I don’t personally see those two as entirely separate, but we’ll go with the difference here, because science-fictionality and ‘reality’ are different in the novel). The time travellers who provide Charles’s bread and butter don’t have as much power as they think, because it’s not possible to change the past in the science fictional universe, however hard they try. The way Charles solves his problem is effectively a fusion of the two modes, as he relives his memories as an outside observer, before a return to science-fictionality slots the pieces together.

The novel’s dialogue between modes is also reflected at the level of prose, as Yu blurs the line between the scientific and emotional aspects of his book by using scientific language in his descriptions. For example:

Our house was a collection of silences, each room a mute, empty frame, each of us three oscillating bodies (Mom, Dad, me) moving around in our own curved functions, from space to space, not making any noise, just waiting, waiting to wait, trying, for some reason, not to disrupt the field of silence, not to perturb the delicate equilibrium of the system. (p. 34)

Yu creates some quite powerful effects in How to Live Safely. One scene that I think works particularly well is when Charles visits his mother, who is currently living in her own repeating hour-long bubble of time, and there are echoes of a parent’s being abandoned in a home (‘I don’t like it in here,’ Charles’s mother tells him. ‘Why did you stick me in here? Can you please take me out? I don’t like it in here’ [p. 81]). And such moments are nicely balanced out by the playfulness elsewhere in the book, the humour in Charles’s situation, and the way Yu handles the self-referentiality of the book in our hands purportedly being one that Charles himself has written. There’s a lot to enjoy in How to Live Safely, and a lot to think about afterwards.

Elsewhere
Radio interview with Charles Yu on KCRW
Adam Roberts reviews How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe in The Guardian

On the Clarke Award

13th December 2010 / / 0 Comments

Tom Hunter, Director of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, has posted an open letter at Torque Control , asking for feedback on questions relating to the Award’s future direction. I’ve  sent in my comments by email, but also wanted to take the opportunity to highlight the discussion here, and to say something about what the Clarke means to me.

The Clarke Award is important to me because it stands for things that I believe in: it champions the best science fiction as a serious literary form; and it looks beyond genre publishing for relevant titles. I think the latter sets a good example for the book world in general:  too often, literary institutions can be unhealthily insular; only yesterday there was yet another article that advocated putting content ahead of quality in judging a book (an article nicely dismantled by Steve Mosby here). The Clarke is refreshing in that it faces outwards, and  brings excellent books to the attention of people who probably wouldn’t otherwise know about them. We should treasure it for that.

New Stories from the Mabinogion: Lewis and Griffiths

10th December 2010 / / 5 Comments

Gwyneth Lewis, The Meat Tree (2010)
Niall Griffiths, The Dreams of Max & Ronnie (2010)

These are the latest two volumes in Seren Books’ series reworking the medieval Welsh tales of the Mabinogion. I don’t really know those myths, but, luckily for me, there’s a handy synopsis at the back of each book that helped me get up to speed. However, when I read the synopsis in Gwyneth Lewis’s The Meat Tree (based on the fourth branch of the Mabinogion, the story of Blodeuwedd), I thought, how do you make a novel out of this, when it’s so disjointed by comparison?

Well, Lewis tackles that issue head-on and has come up with a fascinating solution. The Meat Tree is set in 2210 and focuses on Campion, an ‘Inspector of Wrecks’, and his apprentice Nona. They investigate a ship which has apparently come from Earth, though surely it’s too well-preserved, and there’s no sign of what happened to the crew. In the hope of gaining some clues, Campion and Nona turn to the virtual reality system placed prominently on the ship; this plunges them into the tale of Blodeuwedd – but what was its significance to the crew?

Representing the myth as a VR game addresses its episodic nature, as the protagonists experience it episodically (‘the progression of the plot can feel very uncomfortable,’ says Campion [p. 37]). But, more significantly than this, it also puts a distance between the myth itself and our viewpoint characters, which allows Lewis to interrogate the myth as she goes, as well as retelling it. The text becomes something of a live laboratory, as Campion and Nona try to puzzle out what the story might have meant to the people who told it (both in their immediate fictional context and, by implication, to the original medieval tellers); they explore issues such as the symbolic representation of gender and power in a way that doesn’t feel at all forced.

On a narrative level, though, The Meat Tree is also fascinating. The story is told entirely through the medium of Campion’s and Nona’s ‘synapse logs’ and ‘joint thought channel’, so that’s layer another of perception to add to all the rest. The protagonists’ identities shift and accrete (for example, near the beginning, we have Nona and Campion in the game playing male characters who have been turned into animals, one male and one female – and how well Lewis handles the writing of it), and even eventually bleed out of the game. There are also moments that bring the bare details of the myth sharply off the page, such as when Blodeuwydd (a woman created magically from flowers) realises that she is ‘a flower made of meat’ (p. 173).

Towards the end of the novel, there is perhaps too much of a sense of the two protagonists slotting everything together conveniently – but, then again, what else was going to happen? It would be too much of a let-down if the mystery of the ship stayed a mystery, and there’s no one else to do the figuring-out. Whatever, The Meat Tree is a spectacular work of the imagination.

***

After that, Niall Griffiths’ (relatively) more conventional retelling of two dream stories in The Dreams of Max & Ronnie pales a little in comparison, perhaps. But, still,

The first and longer of Griffiths’ novellas, ‘Ronnie’s Dream’, is based on the Mabinogion story of Rhonabwy, whose dream was a vision of King Arthur and a vast gathering of knights. Griffiths’ Ronnie is a squaddie about to set off for Iraq; the leader he meets in his dream is not Arthur, but an analogue of Tony Blair. Reading ‘Ronnie’s Dream’, I felt the limitations of not having read the Mabinogion; a synopsis is fine, but it can’t give me the sense of the original tale. Griffiths’ version is a satire, primarily on the Iraq war, but it doesn’t quite work for me on that level. For one thing, it feels like a bit of a grab-bag – mostly stuff on the war, but it also squeezes in some swipes at celebrity culture and some social stereotypes – which dilutes the focus somewhat. For another, as targets of satire, these issues seem to me quite well-worn, and I’m not sure that this tale says much about them that is fresh.

This is not to say, though, that ‘Ronnie’s Dream’ has no bite. Some aspects certainly have, such as the Blair-figure’s stock speech (‘By my actions have I answered questions. The time has come for an end to talking…’ [p. 68]), which is repeated until ground down into empty rhetoric. In addition, the contrast between the poetic style of Griffiths’ narration and the more modern, colloquial dialogue is very effective; and there’s general interest in seeing how the author adapts details of the myth for the present day.

Griffiths’ second novella is ‘The Dream of Max the Emperor’; originally the story of Maxen Wledig, a Roman emperor who goes (or sends his men) in search of a beautiful woman he saw in a dream, here Max is a Cardiff crime boss. He eventually finds his beauty in north Wales, but all is not as it seems; for example, the castle in his dream turns out to be a film set. This theme goes deeper into the story; one of Griffiths’ best effects in the novella is the way he portrays the Wales outside Cardiff as a place that’s as strange to Max’s men as any land of myth would be:

They travel out of the city limits and each one feels a small falling-off as they enter a land they don’t recognise, through valleys between dark slag-mountains and past heaps of refuse and rotting industrial machinery, past rusting pitheads and smelters and quarries and all of it a-crumble. Over a plain. Across big green bumps on the world’s face. (p. 127)

Something that both Griffiths and Lewis manage to do in their respective books is evoke a true sense of fantasy, the disquieting and disorienting sense that (at least within the pages of the book) the world is not as you thought. In doing so, they show just how much vitality these myths still have.

Elsewhere
Seren Books
Gwyneth Lewis’s website
Sam of Cold Iron & Rowan-Wood reviews The Meat Tree
Annabel Gaskell reviews The Dreams of Max & Ronnie and The Meat Tree
Paul Kincaid reviews the first two New Stories from the Mabinogion for Strange Horizons

This review (half of it, anyway!) is posted in support of ‘women and sf’ week at Torque Control.

A discussion about Lightborn

9th December 2010 / / 0 Comments

Niall Harrison, who has been hosting a theme week at Torque Control on women writers  of science fiction, invited me to take part in a discussion about Tricia Sullivan‘s latest novel, Lightborn. The book examines the aftermath of the collapse of a neural-enhancing technology, which leaves most adults damaged, and everyone else to fend for themselves.

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of Lightborn when I’d finished it, and the subsequent discussion suggested to me that I’d missed quite a lot of Sullivan’s reference points. Consequently, I wasn’t able to take part as much as I’d have liked; but I’d recommend the novel, and I hope you find the discussion interesting. (The other participants were Niall, Nic Clarke, and Nick Hubble.)

The discussion is posted on Torque Control here. Do have a more general browse while you’re there, as Niall has been posting a lot of interesting stuff.

Ian McDonald, The Dervish House (2010): The Zone review

9th December 2010 / / 0 Comments

Now online at The Zone is my review of Ian McDonald’s excellent new novel The Dervish House, a chronicle of six interlocking lives in an Istanbul of seventeen years hence. When readers of science fiction talk about the Booker’s lack of interest in sf, it’s because there are books like this in the world. The Dervish House is beautifully conceived, written, and executed — easily one of the best books I have read all year. Put it on your reading list.

Click here to read the review in full.

Further links
Some other reviews of The Dervish House: Nic Clarke for Strange Horizons; Tony Keen for Vector; Aishwarya Subramaniam for The Sunday Guardian; Dan Hartland.

Pam Bachorz, Candor (2009)

6th December 2010 / / 1 Comment

The Floridian model town of Candor is a picture of wholesomeness, its children impeccably behaved. It’s all thanks to Candor’s founder and mayor, Campbell Banks, and the subliminal Messages that he pumps out underneath the town’s ever-present music. Families pay a hefty fee to move to Candor, but the deal they make if life-long; once you start hearing the Messages, even a single night away from them is fatal, and anyone showing signs of deviance may be subjected to a programme of complete mental reconditioning in the ‘Listening Room’.

The only kid who knows about the Messages is the mayor’s son, Oscar who has trained himself to resist, and now maintains the pretence of being a perfect child of Candor, whilst covertly arranging escapes from the town (and supplying clients with CDs of his own counter-Messages) . At the start of the novel, Oscar meets Nia Silva, an edgy new arrival in Candor, as yet unaffected by the Messages; he soon becomes attracted to her, and it’s a race against time for him to keep her as she is – not that the attraction is entirely mutual.

I’d characterise Pam Bachorz’s debut as an interesting novel that doesn’t quite live up to its promise. On a narrative level, Candor is efficiently told, and the multiple iterations of will-they/won’t-they are very nicely handled; there’s no shortage of page-turning tension. But what I find missing is a true sense of the strangeness of this place. That narrative efficiency is perhaps a little too efficient to really build up the atmosphere; yes, I felt the chill of what it means to live in Candor at a couple of plot pivots, but it wasn’t there as a constant note in the background.

Similarly, the novel makes some examination of ethics, but it only goes so far. Campbell and Oscar Banks represent two opposing ‘ sides’, but it’s made clear that both have their rights and wrongs – yet I don’t feel the issues these raise are examined as fully as they merit. Campbell is the villain of the piece, and, though we do learn the reasons behind what has done in Candor, it never really prevents him from being unambiguously a bad guy.

This matters less, though, than the case of Oscar, where I think the novel is aiming for a more firmly ambiguous portrait, and doesn’t quite get to the heart of it. Though he is the novel’s narrator and ‘hero’, Oscar is hardly the most sympathetic character, because he is so self-serving. The question is raised of just how much better he is than his father – after all, Oscar is not above manipulating others for his personal gain, and not always with the excuse that he’s helping them escape. Yet, though the question is asked, it’s not explored in detail, and I think that Candor misses out on some depth as a result.

In sum, Candor is a fast read, and a rather engaging debut – a good way to spend a few hours – but it doesn’t truly linger.

Elsewhere
Pam Bachorz’s website

This review is posted in support of ‘women and sf’ week at Torque Control.

Surveys and wolves: Vector, Autumn 2010

4th December 2010 / / 0 Comments

The latest issue of the BSFA‘s critical journal, Vector, has been mailed out to members — and it’s the first  issue which has contributions from me. There’s a transcript of the Eastercon panel in which I took part earlier this  year, on the BSFA’s author surveys; and a review of M.D. Lachlan‘s impressive Viking fantasy Wolfsangel (well worth a look even if epic fantasy is not your usual bag). Of course, there’s plenty more to read in there besides these; if you’re at all interested in fantastic fiction as a literary form, you should check the BSFA out.

Margaret B. Simon, ‘Troot’ (2010)

17th November 2010 /

In the aftermath of a future war, a woman approaches narrator Tullis, asking for the ‘troot’ (truth) of what happened to her daughter. Truth being a rare commodity in his world, Tullis must decide whether to reveal what he knows. Simon sketches her future efficiently (the story is only three pages long), but ultimately I feel that the prose doesn’t have enough density to compensate for the brevity of the piece.

Rating: ***

Archives

Browse posts by author, original language of book, or post category

© 2025 David's Book World

Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑

%d