These actually are ‘books received’ (apart from one that I bought from the splendid Book Depository) — several competition prizes, a review copy, and the magazine was a complimentary copy.
Some interesting stuff there, I think.
Tag: science fiction
Cern Zoo: Nemonymous Nine (2009)
Nemonymous, that annual extravaganthus of unattributed fiction curated by Des Lewis, returns for a ninth outing. As ever, the authors involved are listed only on the back cover; they are: Rosalind Barden; Gary McMahon; Amy Kinmond; Tim Nickels; Bob Lock; Lesley Corina; Jacqueline Seewald; Dominy Clements; A.J. Kirby; Brendan Connell; Daniel Ausema; Gary Fry; Mick Finlay; Robert Neilson; Steve Duffy; Geoff Lowe; Stephen Bacon; Rod Hamon; Lee Hughes; Lyn Michaud; Tony Lovell; A.C. Wise; Roy Gray; and Travis K. Weltman. But as to who wrote what, we can only guess for now.
The stories in Cern Zoo are a nicely eclectic bunch; this is true not only of their subject matter, but also of their relationships to the anthologys title, which range from close to non-existent (as far as I could see). Some tales take inspiration from CERN and the Large Hadron Collider, such as ‘Being of Sound Mind’, whose retired narrator finds one day that a young girlk has inexplicably appeared in his house. He tries to work out what’s going on, whilst struggling against the tide of suspicion — and we readers have our own bit of detective work to do, to understand why the narration switches between first- and second-person. I think it’s fair to say that CERN aspect feels a little ‘tacked on’ (though it’s necessary for the story); but the rest is beautifully disorientating — to the very end, we can’t be sure whether all this is just in the narrator’s mind.
Other contributors base their stories around zoos. ‘The Lion’s Den’ tells of strange happenings in a zoo, beginning with a boy throwing himself into a lion enclosure. Of course, he’s set upon and killed — but no trace of him remains, not even a speck of blood. Then the lions are seen outside their enclosure, in places where it would be impossible for them to be — and so on. The zoo-related material in this story is fascinating; if based on actuality (as I assume it is), it reveals aspects of working life in a zoo that I had never really considered. And the events of the plot — and their implications — are powerful, all the more so because they remain mysterious.
Some of the tales use the image of chalk figures like the Cerne Abbass giant. One such story is ‘The Rude Man’s Menagerie’, in which Rebs, working on the remains of her late father’s Michigan tree farm, discovers the chalk figure of a man who appears to have drawn various animals to himself. The man appears malevolent, and Rebs resolves to free the animals — but how? This is a satisfying piece of fantasy that runs on its own internal logic; by the time reality comes gently free of it moorings, one is happy to go along.
In still other stories, ‘Cern Zoo’ (if it features at all) is really just a name. ‘The Ozymandias Site’ takes us to the Moon, where some future species (from the world of Cerne) has travelled to investigate the ‘giant leaping creature that once accompanied [them] in the universe’. No prizes for guessing that we are those long-gone beings; and the expressions of human folly in the story are rather unsubtle. But what makes this talew shine is the way it’s told, as it takes you into the minds of these strange creatures who have five-part personalities in the same body. I don’t think I grasped ‘The Ozymandias Site’ fully (understandable, I think, given the manner of telling!), but the journey was worthwhile regardless.
‘The Devourer of Dreams’ is another story whose voice is the star attraction. A successful writer looks back on his childhood in post-war Suffolk. His father, an innkeeper, suddenly developed a talent for writing, and produced several best-selling books. One day, the boy discovered the macabre secret behind this turn of events — a secret he went on to exploit himself. The plot of this tale is, to be honest, nothing particularly special; but the narrattion certainly is. The author pulls off a difficult balancing-act, creating a voice which convinces as that of someone (albeit elderly) living in the present day, yet has enough of a Lovecraftian touch to give ‘The Devourer of Dreams’ the menacing atmosphere of an old weird-fiction tale.
Last year, I reviewed the previous Nemonymous anthology, Cone Zero (you can read that review here), and thought it excellent. Good as some of the stories are in the present volume, I would say that the overall quality of Cern Zoo is not quite as high — not because there are fewer good stories in the present book, but because a greater proportion (there are 24 pieces in Cern Zoo, as opposed to Cone Zero‘s 14) don’t quite have that extra something (that’s my impression, anyway). So, for example, ‘Dead Speak, with its tale of an investigation into the mysteries of CERN, starts off interestingly, but seems to me to stop before it really gets anywhere. ‘Dear Doctor’ is amusing, but essentially nothing more than a shaggy-dog story. ‘Turn the Crank’, which tells of a mysterious organ-grinder, brings a variation of the ‘malign carnival’ trope into the present day; it works, but does seem a little over-familiar.
It’s worth noting that I am being only half-critical with those exampless; that’s because I’m not talking about bad stories as such, but stories that don’t reach their full potential. For all of these, there are other tales in Cern Zoo that succeed more fully: ‘Parker’ is an intense study of someone getting rather too excited about a pen. ‘Sloth & Forgiveness’ starts with a man climing a tree naked and encountering a talking sloth; it gets away with being ridiculous simply because it never loses its conviction. ‘The Last Mermaid’ is about Carlos II of Spain, and has a heady atmosphere; it hovers on the borderline of being nothing but atmosphere, yet it has a unique ‘flavour’, as it were. On the surface, ‘Pebbles’ appears a slight story, of a girl collecting pebbles from a beach and carrying them away in her jumper; but there are subtle clues which, if I interpret them correctly, hint brilliantly at what’s going on behind the words.
I’ll finish with my personal favourite story in Cern Zoo, which is ‘Artis Eterne’. This revolves around an old pub (‘The Cerne Abbass’) and one of its fixtures, a strange man called Albert; ‘fixture’ is the right word, because he never moves from his seat. He’s there throughout our narrator’s childhood, and still there when he returns for a work conference many years later. Apparently Albert decided literally to ‘live in the moment’, and to see how long he could make that moment last — and it would seem to be working.
‘Artis Eterne’ is a joy to read because so many of its elements work beautifully together. The prose is wonderful; for example:
I was born in the kind of parochial town whose aspirations held it closer to the nearest big city than mere geography. This same giant metropolis held our status as a smaller cousin in careful equilibrium, maintaining and coveting our local charms while at the same time sending out regular raiding parties of young adults who would drink too much and too loudly, making us feel like aliens on our own streets on summer weekends.
This strikes me as a very sharp observation of life in a satellite town in contemporary Britain. And there’s more to enjoy here than just the writing: Albert’s idea captures the imagination, but best of all is how it acts as a counterpoint to the protagonist’s life, and the gravity exerted by his (or her) home town.
I wish I knew who wrote this story, so I could track down more of the author’s work. But I’ll have to wait a while before I can do that. For now, I can — and do — heartily recommend Cern Zoo to you.
For more on Cern Zoo and Nemonymous, including purchase information, visit www.nemonymous.com.
Books from FantasyCon
Three points:
1. I’ve decided to get more into photography — not in any major way, just to practise a bit and see how well I can do.
2. Yesterday, I returned from FantasyCon with… er… ‘a few’ books in tow.
3. I’ve seen other bloggers do ‘books received’ posts, but never done any like that myself.
Combining all these three, I present to you some gratuitous shots of the books I got from FantasyCon. (I know they’re not the best possible photos, but I’m uploading them as they are to record what level I start from with the photography.)
As to when I’ll get around to reading any of these books: your guess is as good as mine…
The Year of the Flood (2009) by Margaret Atwood
The latest novel by Margaret Atwood takes us back to the world of 2003’s Oryx and Crake; though The Year of the Flood is not so much a sequel to it as a companion novel, taking place as it does in more or less the same timeframe. It’s not essential to have read the older book to comprehend the newer (though of course certain events carry more resonance if you have); and I’d say that, overall, The Year of the Flood is a better ‘way in’ to this world of Atwood’s. I would also say it is the better book of the two.
In the near-ish future, most of humanity has been wiped out by a plague. We focus on two survivors: Toby, who has sequestered herself away in a spa; and Ren, who was in quarantine when the plague hit, waiting on test results after being bitten by a client of the sex club where she worked. What the two women have in common is that both were members of God’s Gardeners, a nature-based cult whose philosophy fused science and theology (the book’s title refers to the ‘Waterless Flood’ which the cult believed would spell the end for humanity). The novel follows the lives of Toby and Ren through their time in God’s Gardeners and after, up to the fictional present, where they discover that they’re not alone.
The earliest time depicted in The Year of the Flood is still in the future from our vantage point, and it’s a future of powerful corporations, corrupt law-enforcement environmental pressures, and hybrid species created by genetic manipulation. Atwood brings to life the horror of living in this bleak world, perhaps most vividly early on, when she describes Toby’s attempts to survive after losing her parents: renting a room above a shop that trades illegally in endangered species, she first gets a job dressing up in animal-suits to advertise things; then she sells her hair; then her eggs (which leaves her sterile); before finally landing a job at SecretBurgers (where the secret is what kind of meat you’re eating.
It’s after an altercation in this job that Toby is taken under the wing of God’s Gardeners, and she becomes one of the cult’s teachers; Ren joins along with Lucerne, her mother, when Lucerne leaves her husband for her new lover, Zeb. The Year of the Flood is, for the most part, a portrait of the cult and the effect it has on the protagonists. The cult means well, but life within is not entirely rosy: some members are unable to adhere to the rules (for example, we see Zeb smuggling in meat, when God’s Gardeners are all supposed to stick to a vegetarian diet); and even the cult’s philosophy can be fluid if needs be (at one point, the leader, Adam One, talks of the need to present the cult’s theology in a way that will ‘push popular sentiment in a biosphere-friendly direction’; ‘God needs to be filtered’, as he puts it later). Furthermore, being in the cult affects the way its members deal with the world when they leave; for instance, after Lucerne quits and takes her daughter with her, Ren has to adjust to being in a ‘normal’ school, and the cult’s insistence on memorising everything leads her to mistrust the school’s methods: ‘it seemed so dangerous, all that permanent writing that your enemies could find’ – even touching the tools and products of writing leaves Ren feeling literally unclean.
This portrait of the cult and its world is, I would say, the main point of the novel: the characterisation is rather too patchy for the book truly to work as a character study (none of the characters really leaps off the page as a rounded individual); and the plot seems more or less to be just ‘life going on’ (even accounting for the Waterless Flood, which is not depicted in overly dramatic terms). This leaves us with the issues to be the primary focus of The Year of the Flood; and I find the book to be ambivalent about them.
On the one hand, the heart of the society Atwood depicts is clearly rotten; on the other, as noted, the cult is not presented in a highly positive light (and the sermons delivered by Adam One throughout the novel smack of increasing desperation as time goes on). Yet I don’t gain a clear sense that this ambivalence is really intentional. Be that as it may, these are the moments that represent for me The Year of the Flood’s key point: Toby listening to birdsong, imagining her knowledge of language being supplanted by this ‘ceaseless repetition, the song with no beginning and no end.’ And Ren telling us her motto: ‘We are what we wish. Because if you can’t wish, why bother?’ What matters, this seems to say, is the ability to imagine a changed life, and to work towards that vision. Perhaps the failing of God’s Gardeners is that they were ultimately not up to that task. Perhaps the Waterless Flood took away all chance of anyone doing that; then again, given the book’s ending, perhaps it didn’t.
Thoughts on Oryx and Crake (2003) by Margaret Atwood
Something has been niggling me about Oryx and Crake ever since I finished reading it. I’ve been trying to put my thoughts into a review; but, for whatever reason, can’t get them into a continuous piece of prose. Rather than continue to sit here, stumped, I have decided to write down my thoughts as they occur to me, and we’ll see how that goes.
First of all, here’s the plot summary I wrote:
Some time after the apocalypse, Snowman is the only human left alive — the only human of a kind we would recognise, anyway. The other inhabitants of this world are the Children of Crake, genetically-engineered humans who might as well be a different species, so alien are they physically and mentally. Crake — and Oryx — are god-like figures to these humans; Snowman says he was sent by Oryx and Crake, and now acts as a kind of messenger.
Of course, it’s all a pretence — Snowman’s way of surviving (or justifying his existence) in the transformed world. In the past (which is still in the future), ‘Snowman’ was named Jimmy; Crake was his friend Glenn, who grew up to be the geneticist who wanted to create a better kind of human. Oryx was a child prostitute who would become the teacher of the ‘Crakers’, as she called them. Oryx and Crake the novel chronicles how one world became another.
And here are my scattered thoughts:
- There’s something over-familiar about the worlds of both strands of the novel. In the further-future, post-apocalyptic strand, there are real marks of strangeness (like a bioluminescent rabbit, and the Crakers themselves); but I don’t feel the true frisson of alienness that I would expect from this kind of setting. Perhaps it’s a consequence of seeing this world through the eyes of Snowman (which I appreciate is vital to the story Atwood is telling), who’s the closest the book has to ‘one of us’, and therefore a way in to the world that we wouldn’t otherwise have.
- The nearer future — dominated by corporations, with living-spaces divided between the Compunds (where young JImmy lives) for the well-off, and the ‘pleeblands’ for everyone else — is better realised (just as well, as it’s where we spend most of the novel), but still has its shortcomings. An example of both sides: there’s a passage where Atwood describes how executions and suchlike have become a form of mass entertainment, and it comes across as pretty hackneyed to me. But then, immediately afterwards, the author puts in different terms: the culture of the body has taken over from that of the mind and soul. This, I think, is much more evocative and striking.
- Making the ‘last man’ such an ordinary person as Jimmy/Snowman is interesting, and perhaps closer to how such a situation might play out in reality than making him an ‘expert’ (then again, who really knows?). I appreciate Atwood’s observation that the world has become static for Snowman — he can’t move on, because there’s nothing to move on to. Even at the end, the last chapter begins in the same way as the first, as though to suggest that nothing has really changed (though perhaps it has…). But I’m not sure that this feeling is really evoked through the prose.
- When Oryx tells Jimmy about her past, he can’t understand why she’s so at ease with what happened to her (it’s because she feels it could have been much worse); this is mirrored by a rosy glow to the writing that contrasts most effectively with the grim nature of the events themselves. But I don’t think Atwood matches prose to effect quite as well as this in the rest of the book.
- We don’t learn the nature of the catastrophe that befell the world until over halfway through Oryx and Crake — and it doesn’t matter so much even then, because it’s the ethics in which Atwood is most interested. And there are real dilemmas to think through here, most clearly embodied in the differing views of Crake and Jimmy/Snowman. For example (I may be skating over some philosophical questions here, but please indulge me): if you could remake humans so that they lost some of their negative attributes and became better adapted for survival, but in the process they lost some of their capacity for free thought — if they became less recognisable to us as ‘human’ — would that be the right thing to do? Atwood offers no firm answers.
I chose to read Oryx and Crake now as a prelude to reading The Year of the Flood (which I should be getting to next). I’m curious to see how the two will compare.
SHORT FICTION REVIEW: Jupiter XXIV, Iocaste (April 2009)
I have a review up at The Fix of the April 2009 issue of the science fiction magazine Jupiter. I won’t say much here, as it’s all in the review; but this particular issue has stories by David Conyers; Gustavo Bondoni; Andrew Knighton; A.J. Kirby; James McCormick; and Gareth D. Jones.
‘The Best Monkey’ (2009) by Daniel Abraham
Niall Harrison of Torque Control has announced that, starting this weekend, he’ll be hosting weekly discussions of short fiction. In an attempt to increase the amount of commentary out there (and because I’m unsure of how much internet access I’ll have over the next couple of weeks), I’m going to blog about two of the stories in advance.
We begin, then with ‘The Best Monkey’ by Daniel Abraham, originally published in the third Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, and now reprinted online at Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist (click on the story title above for the link). Our narrator is Jimmy, who works for a news aggregator, but is tasked by his latest boss with doing a little investigation. Elaine Salvaret, a bigwig at a leading technology conglomerate named Fifth Layer, has been overheard saying something that might be a clue to the secret of the company’s strange technology – a secret that might not be ethically sound. This could be a scoop, and it’s Jimmy’s job to bring back the goods. Why him? Because he and Elaine were lovers thirty years ago.
I’m ambivalent about this story. At heart, it’s a story of ideas (perhaps the central theme is the nature of beauty and attraction, and how they relate to biological imperatives), which I found intellectually interesting; but I think the idea that acts as the engine of the plot is a little too abstract to be intellectually gripping – so the story doesn’t quite have that extra zing to turn it from good into great.
Viewing the piece from another angle: Abraham’s depiction of his future is pretty good, with some nice details like the constantly changing fashionable argot of Jimmy’s bosses (and, indeed, Jimmy’s constantly changing bosses). One gripe, though: we’re told that in the thirty years between the present of the story and Jimmy’s younger days (which may not be far off our present), there has been major environmental catastrophe; yet I don’t gain any sense of the effect of this in the story itself.
Quite a mixed reaction to ‘The Best Monkey’ from me, then (though I do feel more positive than negative about the tale); I’ll be interested to see what others think.
Moon
It’s a fine day to see a film called Moon, what with it being the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11. This is the début movie of dirctor Duncan Jones; was made on a relatively low budget ($2,500,000); is more intelligent than many a film of its type; and, in the end, falls frustratingly short of being great.
In the future, clean energy is abundant, thanks to the mining of lunar rocks. Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell) is the sole human crew member of an automated mining base. He’s on a three-year contract, but his live satellite link to Earth is down so the only company he has is the ship’s computer Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey), and a few plants. One could forgive him for having a little cabin fever, and it’s perhaps no surprise that Sam starts to have hallucinations, even if he doesn’t like to admit it.
There are just two weeks of Sam’s tenure to go when disaster strikes. He’s out investigating a fault with one of the mining machines when he experiences another hallucination, causing him to crash his lunar rover. He wakes up in the base infirmary, a little worse for wear, but tests reveal that he’ll be back on his feet in a few days; till then, he has to stay indoors. But Sam is impatient to get back to work, especially with that same mining robot continuing to malfunction. He contrives a way to get Gerty to allow him outside, and goes back to the site of his accident — to find another buggy crashed there, with someone who looks very like him inside. Sam takes the man back to the base, and asks Gerty who he is…
We then cut to the infirmary, where a pasty-faced, injured Sam wakes up in bed while a healthy-looking Sam stands over him. From hereon in, there’s wonderful ambiguity as to who’s who: pasty Sam is the mysterious stranger rescued from the second LRV (isn’t he?), yet he says he’s been at the base for three years. What’s indisputable is that there are two Sams, but neither behaves in a way that makes immediate sense, given what has gone before; and Gerty seems remarkably unconcerned about this strange situation.
In fact, the computer appears to spill the beans willingly about halfway through the film; the rest of the movie fills in the gaps, in a roundabout way. This is where things get frustrating: it’s interesting to work out what’s going on; but, once you have, there’s not much that stays behind. Solving the puzzle closes off imaginative possibilities (compare with, say, Franklyn, which opens them up). And there are ethical issues which are touched on briefly, but never really dealt with.
On a more aesthetic level, it’s good enough. The budget shows, but not embarassingly so. Rockwell does well with his part(s), and one can sense Spacey recording his HAL-esque lines with relish. There are some nice touches, such as Sam sitting in an old wingback chair wearing his slippers while Gerty cuts his hair; and some that don’t work so well, such as there being nothing to watch on TV but stuff like Bewitched and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Sam having Chesney Hawkes as his alarm call (amusing, yes, but not very likely, I’d suggest).
So, Moon is a good movie — even a good science fiction movie — though not a great one. Still, it’s a good start to Jones’s film career, and he’s a director worth keeping an eye on.
The Turing Test by Chris Beckett (2008)
Earlier this month, the winner was announced of the Edge Hill Prize for the Short Story. The shortlist included collections by a Booker Prize-winning author, and two former Booker nominees — and this Elastic Press book of science fiction stories by Chris Beckett. A classic case of tokenism, one might think — except that Beckett won.
‘It was…a bit of surprise to the judges, none of whom knew they were science fiction fans beforehand,’ commented one of the judging panel. Well, the obvious thing to say to that is that you don’t need to consider yourself a ‘science fiction fan’ to appreciate science fiction, any more than you have to be a ‘literary fiction fan’ to enjoy literary fiction (not, of course, that the two need be mutually exclusive). Readers interested in good fiction shouldn’t be surprised to find stories of interest in any given quarter — but apparently some still are.
Anyway, I don’t know the other books, but it’s not hard to see why the judges thought The Turing Test a winning book, because Beckett’s stories are superb. He’s especially good at examining human concerns against the background of a science-fictional future. The title story sums this up nicely. The ‘Turing test’ refers to a means of assessing whether an artificial intelligence is convincing enough in conversation to be indistinguishable from a human being. Our protagonist is a gallery owner named Jessica, who finds herself the recipient of a highly sophisticated ‘virtual PA’. Jessica is feeling rather insecure with life (one of her first acts is to ask the PA to change its avatar to something less attractive, and hence less threatening to her self-esteem), and the real question Beckett asks is not whether a computer could pass the Turing test, but whether a person could — perhaps Jessica’s greatest fear is that she could not.
The theme of artificial intelligence returns in ‘La Macchina’, where a man finds his ideas about robots challenged when he vists his brother in Italy. Robots are now commonplace, but they’re not supposed to talk to humans, except in superficial, rote ways — so when one tries to strike up a friendly conversation with our man, does that alone make it a ‘Rogue’ that could cause havoc, and hence needs to be destroyed? Then there’s the ‘Safe Brothel’ staffed by sinteticas made to look indistinguishable from human women — but sinteticas are more popular, so some human women pretend to be robots. What’s the protagonist to make of that? All adds up to a very different kind of robot story; the experience of reading it is distinctive.
The same could be said of many stories here; Beckett transforms SF staples with the ‘ordinary’ grounding he gives them. ‘Dark Eden’, for example, is a space opera where a small group of people travel to an exotic world — but the ups-and-downs of their relationships are not so different from ours. And ‘The Marriage of Sky and Sea’ puts yet another spin on the form with its tale of a spacefaring writer who makes a living from books about the cultures of more ‘primitive’ human colonies than his own — but his latest trip, to a Viking-style society, makes him question his attitude…
My favourite story in the book (which forms the first half of a pair) is about virtual reality, though with Beckett’s characteristic twist. ‘The Perimeter’ is set in a London where the vast majority of people are ‘consensuals’, living in a virtual world; and the more they can afford to pay, the higher their resolution. Only a few, very rich, individuals remain flesh and blood, inhabiting the ruined ‘real’ world, and able to experience the virtual reality through an implant. This story tells of how young consensual Lemmy meets the physical Clarissa Fall, and has his very sense of self challenged. But the tables are turned in ‘Piccadilly Circus’, where we meet Clarissa again a few years later, and she has to face up to her increasing irrelevance as a ‘physical’. To my mind, these stories — and ‘The Perimeter’ especially — have the best fusion of ideas and human consequences; but many of the other tales are almost as strong.
In his introduction to The Turing Test, Alastair Reynolds makes what has turned out to be a very appropriate comment: that he hopes the book will bring more attention to Chris Beckett’s fiction. He ends by saying, ‘I’m confident that you’ll finish The Turing Test wanting to turn more people on to this singularly underrated writer.’ So I’ll end by saying: yes. Yes, I do.
Red Dwarf: Back to Earth
I was going to write a full post on this, but it is now a month after the event, and I have enough that I want to post about anyway. Suffice it to say: if you haven’t seen Back to Earth yet, and it comes to a screen near you, don’t bother. It’s that disappointing.
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