The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway

I think this is a first novel. It definitely reads like a first novel. The author seems to have shoveled in every idea he's ever had giving it a rather chaotic feel. And the structure is a bit odd: half of the book forms what has got to be the longest flashback in the history of literature. Then there is the fact that text just needs a bit more deletion. I mean, I'm a fan of both Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, so I like humorous asides and explanatory footnotes as much as the next person, but “The Gone-Away World” contains several which are so long and convoluted that they get in the way of the story. Despite these criticisms, the book contains some great ingredients: truckers, Ninjas, mime artists and the end of the world. I think this book was like a cake I dropped on the floor but decided to eat anyway: a bit of a mess but still tasty.

Sometime in the near future the latest ultimate weapon is invented: the “Go Away” bomb which removes the information from matter, effectively causing enemies to disappear all together. A small, regional (Afghanistan-like) war quickly escalllates and results in much of the planet being reconfigured with “Go Away” weapons. At which point it is discovered that these perfect weapons come with their own kind of fall-out. Matter stripped of information (known as “stuff”, presumably as in “such stuff as dreams are made on”) is given new and horrific forms by people's thoughts and the survivors of the “Go Away” war have to battle centaurs, mermaids and dog-swllowing monsters. In this crazy, post-apocalyptic landscape the “Haulage and Hazmat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company of Exmoor County” eke out a living until called on to put out a huge fire with the added hazzard of “stuff”. That's about all I can tell you without spoiling the plot.

In the way of themes we have, War, friendship, the dehumanising aspects of large companies (pretty apt in the wake of the credit crunch) and, of course, Ninjas. Everyone loves Ninjas.

My favourite character has got to be Ronnie Cheung, a foul-mouthed army martial arts instructor who offers the hero the following advice:

“You are fucked. You are desirous of getting unfucked.[...] The second law of thermodynamics [...] does not smile upon unfucking.”

In the big set-piece battle with the Ninjas at the end of the book, Ronnie drops hs kecks to show them his wrinked martial arse. He's a class act.

I really hope Nick writes some more books. This one is kind of a trainwreck, but a trainwreck that's pleasantly exciting to be in, rather than deadly. Once he's found the delete key, I think his work will be an absolute joy. Write more Nick! And then get rid of most of it to leave only the best bits!

Larklight by Phillip Reeve

This was an enormously enjoyable children's book set in a kind of space-faring version of the Victorian era. This is what we SF fans would call "Steam punk". It works pretty well as the book has the positive aspects of the "Thrilling Stories For Boys" kind of books (space pirates fighting giant spiders, for example), while satirising the jingoism of the originals. There is also Victorian-era science: space is full of "Aether" rather than vacuum.

My edition has been illustrated by David Wyatt and inside the covers of the book are lots of mock-Victorian adverts which are full of little jokes for the SF fan-boy. For example, an ad for the "Crighton" model of auto-butler and the "Lensman" series of telescopes.

Art and Mytrle Mumby live in Larklight, a rambling mansion floating somewhere between the Earth and the moon. Art reads thrilling tales of adventure in the farthest reaches of the Empire while Myrtle attempts to master the accomplishments of a gentlewoman (these appear to be fainting and playing the piano-forte). The house is attacked by giant spiders and their scientist father is carried off wrapped in web, leaving Art charged with protecting his sister. Art tells Mrytle that they must get to the lifeboats as, "something most disagreeable has happened!" and they are lunched on a series of adventures which include nearly being eaten by caterpillars, rescued by pirates, being repeatedly attacked by the giant spiders and saving the British Empire - hurrah!

Back to the Golden Age...

What, in these difficult times, could be more cost-effective than reading second hand books?* This month I have been using second hand books to return to the “Golden Age” of science fiction, the 40s and 50s, when stories were relentlessly optimistic and everyone was looking forward to a shiny new world of spaceships, robot slaves and scantily-clad alien princesses. Unfortunately, I’ve been reading Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury, who rather bucked the trend for mindless optimism.

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

I bought my copy of The Sirens of Titan from a shelf of second hand books in Lillypool cafe in the Mendips for 10p. What a bargain! You don’t half get a lot of satire for your money.

Winston Niles Rumfoord is an aristocratic space adventurer who, together with his dog, Kazak, was sucked into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum in between earth and Mars. This means that he now exists as a waveform, rather than a person (appearing in human form only where the orbit of a planet intersects an antinode of his wave) and has knowledge of past and future. At first it appears that he has used this knowledge to toy with the lives of other people, including his wife and the rather reprehensible millionaire playboy Malachi Constant. Rumfoord engineers a war between Mars (whose population he builds from kidnapped Earthlings) and uses the resulting soul-searching to found The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent with the strap line “Take care of each other and the Almighty will take care of himself”.

When the action moves to Titan, we learn that the master manipulator is himself a puppet of aliens from the planet Tralfamadore: A Tralfamadorean robot called Salo has crashed there while taking a message from one side of the universe to another and his spacecraft requires a spare part. The whole evolution of life and intelligence on Earth was engineered by his home world just in order to provide him with a specially-shaped piece of metal to continue his journey. After being goaded by Rumfoord, Salo peeks at the message he’s being carrying to find that it is... a single dot.

Although funny and wittily told, this has to be one of the blackest comedies I’ve ever read: no one has any free will, millions die for a faked-up religion and the ultimate reason for human existence turns out to be completely feeble! A fine book, but if you only read one Vonnegut book in your life, make it "Slaughterhouse Five".

The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

The Illustrated Man is a collection of short stories. Bradbury seems to me to write at the intersection of SF, fantasy and horror, but these stories are pretty much traditional science fiction. What makes Ray different from many of his contemporaries (and therefore more readable to the Bookclub of One) is that he has a realistically low opinion of human nature. This means he is unable to subscribe to a gleaming, hi-tec utopia; he knows what we'd really do with technology.

Two of my favourite stories were "The Velt" and "Zero Hour". In "The Velt" a couple use a sort of virtual reality theatre to educate and entertain their children and are subsequently murdered by the selfish, empathy-free brats they have spawned. In "Zero Hour" all the children in a small town become obsessed with a make-believe game called "invasion", which turns out not to be make-believe at all. The kids are being used as a fifth column for aliens and they've sold out humanity in return for being allowed to stay up an extra hour. I think I like these stories because I find children spooky and unfinished. You might think yours are cute, but when I look at them, I see those twins from The Shining or the little girl from F.E.A.R.

The absolute stand-out story for me, though, was The Concrete Mixer. A Martian invasion fleet arrives on Earth to a rapturous welcome. While the Martians thought they were conquerors, the Earth men see new consumers and new markets. The invaders are soon addicted to a life of booze, cars, pointless sex, indolence and useless spending. Their culture is plundered to make crappy Hollywood films which Earth sells back to them, their bodies are poisoned and their spirits are crushed. O God, I'm living in that particuar distopia right now!

*Other than going to the library. Or stealing books. Or reading over other people’s shoulders on public transport. Or downloading free ebooks and giving yourself a headache trying to read them. Or just shamelessly standing there in Waterstones, reading the whole thing in spite of the tutting (particularly effective for graphic novels, that method, as they are both pricey and quick to read). Now that I think about it, there are quite a few better sources of cheap books than the second hand market, but let’s celebrate it anyway. We’ll cover stealing another time.

The Complete DR and Quinch by Alan Moore and Alan Davis

D.R. and Quinch are a pair of alien delinquents from the future whose anarchic exploits featured in 2000AD. In the course of this compilation they destroy the Earth, start a war, send DR's new girlfriend bonkers and make a blockbuster movie. A very great number of things are blown up along the way. I think my favourite part was when they are locked in a miitary stockade with a deranged war veteran and come up with an intricate escape plan involving a bar of soap carved into a gun shape and a lump of plastic explosive made to look like soap.

The book was borrowed from my friend G.P. who gave the impression of being a bit disappointed with it because it wasn't as clever as the other Alan Moore comics in his collection. I feel much more forgiving towards it. Firstly it is early work, and secondly you have to bear in mind the readership of 2000AD: boys between 10 and 14. Also, I think I just like seeing two dumb kids stick it to authority. This is definitely a book to watch out for if you have children - you don't want the little buggers reading this, they'll be beyond taming!

By the end, I could, like, totally hear DR's distinctive speech patterns in my head, man. It was, like, totally amazing.

Favourite line: "A kiss on the hand may be quite continental, but tactical thermonuclear weaponry is a guy's best friend."

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.

On Finishing the Takeshi Kovacs Trilogy...

Altered Carbon won the Philip K Dick Award in 2003, and it was a well-deserved win indeed!

It's a science fiction detective story (love a bit of crossover, me!) and also a kind of noir pastiche - it always seems to be night in the city and raining. One of the central ideas of the series is that a throughout their life a person's consciousness is continually backed up to a small storage device at the base of the skull, the “cortical stack”. The first consequence of this is that death is not necessarily permanent. For example, after being gunned down following some kind of botched criminal activity, Takeshi Kovacs wakes up in the rather used body of a Policeman, to find that a millionaire has paid to have him downloaded from the giant prison hard disk on which his data had been residing. The millionaire took his own head off with a plasma weapon a couple of days ago and had to have his last off-site backup downloaded into one of his spare bodies. Although it appears that no-one else could possibly have committed the crime he refuses to believe that he would ever kill himself (even temporarily) and has hired Kovacs as detective and enforcer, to find his murderer.

Takeshi Kovacs is a man with a past, or more accurately a whole heap of them. Until recently, he served in the Envoy Corps, the most feared soldiers anywhere in the “Protectorate” of human worlds. In this version of the future faster than light travel is not a possibility, but FTL communications are. This means that if you don't want to end up in a “Forever War” situation, you can send digitised humans to wherever you want to deploy your forces, download them into specially-built combat bodies. The Envoys are trained to deal with finding yourself on a new planet, wearing a new body with people shooting at you. As well as being trained in practical things like shooting and killing, they are also trained to observe, recall, learn to fit in and infiltrate. As a result they are so mistrusted that ex-Envoys are barred from nearly all positions of any power or responsibility in civilian life.

I think the reader can appreciate that when Kovacs works out who has been pulling his strings on Earth and why, he's going to embark on an ass-kicking spree of epic proportions.

How good was this book? It was so good that by the time I was half-way through, I was having nightmares about my time in the Envoy Corps. It was so good that I slightly resented the other two books in the trilogy for not being Altered Carbon (a bit of an own goal for Mr Morgan, that).

Broken Angels

I was rather sad to see that after playing detective Takeshi Kovacs is now back to killing people for money, serving with “The Wedge” (feared, but nothing like so much as the Envoys) in the civil war on Sanction IV.

By the time the book begins he's desperate to extricate himself from the war by any means possible. He is approached by a pilot and a younng archeologist who claim to have discovered some sort of portal leading directly to a fleet of abandonned Martian spaceships. Never mind the intellectual excitement of alien technology, the salvage on that lot has to be worth enough get the hell out Sanction IV! So a crack team is assembled by sorting through a bucket load of cortical stacks found on the battlefield, looking for special ops personnel with the right qualities for a spot of extra curricular speed-archeology. Getting to the Martian fleet before anyone else isn't going to be easy, especially since the area containing the portal is now full of illegal, experimental nano-tech wepons...

I felt that Broken Angels lacked a lot of the style of Altered Carbon, but it was enjoyable enough. The bad-ass spacemarine Wedge Commander aggrieved at the defection of his pet Envoy makes a fitting end-of-level baddie for the big fight at the end. And we get to find out more about the mysterious Martian artifacts left hanging about which humanity as used to jump-start their colonization of other planets, 2001-style.

At the start of Woken Furies, Kovacs is now killing for fun rather than profit, attempting to slowly wipe out the entire priest caste of the religion that killed his ex-girlfriend, Sarah. While running from the law in a damaged synthetic body he falls in with deComs, teams of mercenaries hired to decommission the 300 year-old weaponry which has been cluttering up his home planet since the Quellist uprising known as the Unsettlement. One of his new deCom friends has an unfortunate mental problem in that she appears to be sharing her head with someone who claims to be the long-dead revolutionary leader, Quellcrest Falconer. (Like Communism, Quellism has some excellent slogans and quotations, one of my favourites being, “When they ask how I died, tell them: Still angry.”).

Once again, it was nothing like as good as Altered Carbon, but “Woken Furies” still inspired me to vote Quellist at the local elections on May 1st.

While reading this trilogy, I had some logical problems with the cortical stack - why would the state pay for everyone to get one? Especially when the Protectorate is Uber-capitalist in all other ways. When do you fit one? Can the very young be killed off completely? Humans being what they are (and they do not seem to have become any less violent in Morgan's future) I suspect that the invention of the cortical stack would be followed pretty swiftly by the invention of some stack-frying EMP weapons.

On the whole, I was rather surprised to find that I like Takeshi Kovacs much more when he's being nice. Maybe I'm getting soft in my old age... I understand the concept of the flawed hero, and I totally get the premise that we can have a lot more tension in the story with a rather amoral lead charater, 'cos we never really know which way he'll go. Unfortunately, the downside of this is that if I don't really like the hero, I don't really care if he's properly killed, "stack irretrievable" or not. Sorry Tak!

Richard Morgan won this year's Arthur C Clarke Award (http://www.clarkeaward.com/) with “Black Man”. Llet's hope this means a return to Altered Carbon standards!

Open the door, get on the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur!

Boom! Boom! Akkalakka-boom-boom!

Hands up who wants to see cave men fighting dinosaurs? Yep, that's pretty much everyone. The only problem is that millions of years separate cave men and dinosaurs making feasible combat unlikely. So how about, right, an alternative world in which the meteor that caused the K/T extinction never hit? In such a world cavemen could fight highly evolved, super-intelligent dinosaurs! And that would be even better! Harry Harrison's “West of Eden” is set in just such a world and delivers fantastic, enjoyable SF hokum together with top-notch caveman/dinosaur* action.

The book features 2 made up languages (one dinosaur, one human), which results in the kind of cheerful gibberish you really only get in SF books:

“It stood, it walked like it was human, Tanu. A murgu, father but it has hands like ours.”

“Commander, you will take 10 of your strongest crewmembers ashore at once. Armed with hesotsan. You will have the uruketo stand by here.” Great stuff.

The plot, well... the plot doesn't really matter, but it goes a bit like this: Humans and dinosaurs meet and it doesn't go well. The more advanced dinosaurs track down and eliminate a whole tribe of humans, except for one boy who the take as a research subject. This boy Kerrick, learns to speak dinosaur and eventually comes to be highly prized by their leader for his ability to say one thing and think another (the dinosaur language is based on their body language making it extremely difficult for them to lie to each other). Kerrick eventually escapes an uses his knowledge of dinosaur society to help the humans destroy the dinosaur city.

A word on dinosaur technology: dinosaurs are heavily into wet-ware having become masters of DNA manipulation to create life forms to use as tools (like Justina Robson's Forged but less cool). Trouble is, they don't use fire, or work metals, so I'm not sure how they got this technology in the first place. For example, they have created an artificial life form which is all googley eyes and lenses to use as a microscope, but before this was invented, how would they be able to see the structure of DNA and meddle with it in order to create the googley-eye-beast-microscope in the first place? There are chicken-and-egg problems there.

Another point which annoyed me repeatedly is that the author has used the word “sentience” when he means intelligence. As I understand it intelligence enables me to solve problems and perform complex tasks, while sentience is self awareness; sentience is the little voice in your head that's doing the director's commentary on your life. For example, he talks about light emitting plants which the dinosaurs use to guard the perimeter of their camps. Apparently these have been bred “sentient” to enable them to detect motion and light up attackers. They don't want sentience for that, intelligence will do! No-one wants a sentient weapon. Well, no one who's ever seen Dark Star...

West of Eden comes with the book equivalent of a DVD of extra material: dictionaries of human and dinosaur languages at the back of the book, a history of the world according to dinosaurs and notes on each of the different culture. I paid the exactly as much attention as I do DVD extras.

The review of a book which is such good fun should end on a upbeat note, so here goes: Cavemen! Dinosaurs! You have to imagine the furry thongs and bikinis yourself but any regular reader of SF will be able to do that without any trouble.

* I should point out that I do not mean “caveman slash dinosaur” in the sense of “slash fiction”. Well, except for one very wrong and mercifully brief scene...