Terminal Beach by J. G. Ballard

In the midst of life, we are in death. Especially if we’re reading Ballard. His abiding interests seem to be sex and death and, to be honest, I think he likes death better. His work often seems to deal with our destructiveness and self destructiveness and his view of humanity is pretty bleak, but perhaps that’s unsurprising for someone who spent their teenage years in a Japanese POW camp.

My favourite story was one about a dead giant which washed up on the beach. Crowds turn up to see him, but soon their wonder turns into thoughts of how to turn a profit from this new resource and a little industry sets up around the giant, cutting manageable chunks off him and carting them off to rendering plants until nothing is left. The most disturbing story in the book is probably “The Giaconda of the Twilight Noon” in which a man recovering from temporary blindness chooses to gouge out his eyes, Oedipus style, in order to better enjoy vivid sexual fantasies about his mother. This kind of thing is pretty much par for the course when one reads Ballard.

Many of the stories feel rather dated now; especially those ones which seem to fit the pattern of Heart of Darkness. There are several of these which feature an upper class white Englishman choosing disease and death amongst the natives in some corner of the Empire, rather than going home to safe and insipid civilised life which would involve having to pull himself together and stop behaving like a nutter. The colonial attitudes of the characters are jarring for the modern reader but I think they might have been pretty standard when the book was written in 1964.

I enjoyed this collection, but not as much as my favourite Ballard book, "Crash". I heartily recommend that one. It is grotesque and disturbing, but still tempts you to corner far too fast while listening to The Pixies.

Ballard himself has been in the news of late as by virtue of publishing an autobiography which reveals he’s dying of prostate cancer. Looks like JGB is occupying one of the best sun loungers on the Terminal Beach.

Mappa Mundi by Justina Robson

As you can see, I have been on a bit of an SF binge. I blame Mary Barton, I really do.

Mappa Mundi was 600 plus pages of technothriller that saw me through my holiday this year. A huge scientific project to map the human mind is entering its final phases and it becomes clear that the US military means to use the technology for mind control. In the meantime, a Yorkshire academic working on the project accidentally becomes infected with her own mind expanding nano-hardware. Will she be able to use her enhanced intelligence to thwart the US military industrial complex and prevent humanity from becoming mindless slaves? (Clue: If you think the answer is “yes”, you are right.)

It’s an odd book which seems to lurch between the very clever (thought-provoking ideas on the nature of identity and the importance of free will) and the very daft (a handsome FBI agent on the trail of a mad scientist). I only found one actual crime against physics in it (a definition of fermions and bosons which was inaccurate to the point of being a lie) which isn’t bad going for an author whose background is linguistics. I give it a sci-fi rating of 3 spaceships out of a possible 5.

The best thing about this book though, is that it written by a lady SF writer who actually writes science fiction, rather than crapping on about bloody Elves.

Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds

It’s been a while since I read any space opera and “Pushing Ice” was an enjoyable read which ticked all the boxes: spaceships, aliens (some nice; some nasty) and technology so advanced it might as well be magic.

The book is set in the near future when the asteroid belt has been opened up as a source of raw materials. Bella Lind and the crew of her ship the Rockhopper capture these lumps of rock and ice and push them back to earth, hence the title. When the moon Janus turns out not to be a moon at all but an alien artifact accelerating out of the solar system, the Rockhopper is the only ship close enough to study it before it passes beyond the reach of us humans forever.

I rather enjoyed the depiction of the macho culture of the asteroid miners. I lost track of the number of times in the opening chapters that one of the crew laconically remarks, “We push ice. It’s what we do.”. I tried introducing, “We push bits. It’s what we do.” at work, but nobody wanted to join in...

I like the fact that much of the book is character driven. The older I get, the more it bothers me that much “hard SF” reads as if it has been written by an adolescent boy with Asperger’s. The only problem is that I did stop reading it briefly because the interaction of the characters was just too real. As the stresses and strains of the mission cause the team to fracture and begin stabbing one another in the back, it started to remind me rather too much of being at work. At least we haven’t had any actual murders here...

There is a slightly odd structure to “Pushing Ice”. It is (as Dr M who lent it to me observed) a book of three halves. That is, rather than one overall plot, we appear to have three largely separate stories arranged sequentially. The very best science fiction books like “Salt” or “The Handmaid’s Tale” are not only cracking reads, but carry a political message, or tell us something fundamental about the nature of humanity. What do we learn from “Pushing Ice”? That you can’t trust corporate bosses? That when women fall out they are meaner than men? That just because you feel like you’re in an inertial reference frame, it aint necessarily so? The lack of a big concept or philosophical theme means that the book remains a well-executed piece of genre writing, but there's nothing wrong with that!