Science Fiction Book Haul #9

My book haul brings all the boys to the yard, so it's time we had another. These have been picked up in dribs and drabs from a variety of exotic locations. I.e. Nottingham and Derby.

Digging into the B formats first, it's the doyen of British hard SF, Stephen Baxter. His officially endorsed sequel to HG Wells's The Time Machine might just be his best book in my opinion. So what can he do with the Martians? As you might have gathered from the title, The Massacre of Mankind, it's not likely to be positive for humanity. Britain has enjoyed a technological bonanza from picking over the fighting machines left in the wake of the Martians' defeat. With a souped-up military and a planet full of microbes sure to smite the Martians if they come back, the world is reasonably content. That is until the famous green flashes light up the surface of Mars, signalling a new fleet of cylinders are on their way. Yes, this time the Martians have had their jabs. Massacre has earned less praise and comment in the 10 years since publication than The Time Ships enjoyed. Over long and repetitious is the wisdom of the Goodreads crowd, but as The War of the Worlds is my favourite novel I'm sure there's something in here worth persevering with.

The second on the list is easily the most famous of this clutch, Octavia E Butler's Kindred. To my shame, I've not read any Butler yet. The premise here is that Dana is enjoying her birthday celebrations when she passes through a time slip into antebellum Maryland. She rescues a slave owner's drowning son, and here is set up a cycle where she bounces between the present and the past. Each time, she has to save this privileged white boy from scrapes, even though he becomes increasingly monstrous as he ages. Regarded as something of a classic, I've perhaps laid off because novels dealing with American slavery are grim, and packed with trauma and pain. But it has been some years since reading the last one, Colson Whitehead's SF-adjacent The Underground Railroad. It's time, and it'll definitely be read very soon - I've persuaded my book group to read it for September.

Much lighter fare comes from Richard Morgan with the first of his fantasy series, The Steel Remains. Best known for Altered Carbon and its sequels, Remains pitches itself as a "grimdark" fantasy with a gay lead. Fair enough, but having read it I didn't think it was particularly grim. In fact, it's more chilled than Morgan's more famous titles. People who like plenty of choppy, choppy sword play will be satisfied, and some unpleasant experiences befall poor peasant unfortunates, but it runs along at a decent canter with more than a dollop of Dying Earth/Viriconium influences. To be honest, I liked this more than Altered Carbon.

Aliya Whiteley's Skyward Inn was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award, so what's it about? There has been a war which, apparently, humanity won against the alien Qita. And now a bunch of veterans from both sides have clubbed together to run the titular inn. A visitor shows up asking for assistance, and with them opens a Pandora's Box worth of questions. Some things, it seems, are better left unsaid and unquestioned. Whiteley has steadily been accruing cred over the years, and walked off with the BSFA's novel award last year. I have read her The Loosening Skin, which is an alternate history thinking through the cultural implications of humans shedding their skin, snake style, instead of it flaking off as it does. That, I thought, had a strong opening before tapering off. But seeing as Skyward Inn scooped a nomination, I am hoping this is better.

The next should need little introduction - an omnibus of Ursula K Le Guin's first four Earthsea novels. Really, I bought this for my niece but seeing as I haven't read it yet ... There's a fairly standard fantasy set up. Ged has a gift for magic and gets sent to wizarding school where he becomes a mighty spellcaster, but over the years evil slowly reveals its predictable head. I wonder who got inspired by such a set up? Another series of books that caused Le Guin to expand her trophy cabinet, and one I'll be tackling very soon.

Then down at the base is The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajabiemi. This does come with a super hard SF warning, the sort that melts the unwary reader's brain with their exploration of quantum effects and the weirdness associated with that layer of reality. As far as I know, this revolves around a protagonist locked in a virtual prison where he undergoes endless cycles of the prisoner's dilemma. He gets busted out, and it gets stranger from there. This book is known for refusing to explain much, and the reader is just expected to get with the vibe, including all the discomfiting future post-human solar system. Not sure what I'll make of this.

Bottom up on the second stack there we find The Race by Nina Allan. Her debut and BSFA-shortlisted novel features an environmentally-ruined Britain and a character study of four equally-damaged people. In other words, this is as slipstreamy as they come. Nevertheless, my expectations are elevated as I enjoyed The Rift very much, which also played fast and loose with its genre status while telling a great story.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is a well-received variation on the Groundhog Day theme. Wee Harry lives his life, dies, and comes back to live it all over again. And at the outset he's done so 15 times, presumably making different decisions along the way to try out those paths not taken. On the last occasion, he's visited on his death bed by someone who knows, and she needs his help in the next incarnation. Harry August was nominated for the Clarke and the BSFA, and North has won a significant following as an SF writer with her recent space opera, Slow Gods, winning critical praise. This one sounds like the sort of science fiction novel you might get away slipping it to your mainstream fiction reading friends.

Last among the Bs is JM Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K. It's also another borderline novels, a bit like his preceding release, Waiting for the Barbarians. Here our hero has to journey across an alternative civil war-torn South Africa to return his mum to her rural birthplace. Michael, however, has a cleft lip and learning difficulties, and his mother is a servant to a rich Cape Town family. The path is not a smooth one, and the authorities detain him for "reeducation". Apparently, it has more than a few references to Kafka's The Trial.

Diving into the best paperback format, KW Jeter's Noir presents itself. An underappreciated master of SF and Philip K Dick associate, the only Jeter I've read is his Infernal Devices. A steam punk novel from the guy who coined the term, this was incredibly silly with a preposterous plot, but thoroughly entertaining for all that. Noir is a hard-boiled detective novel set in the only industrialised area left in the world. It's polluted, grimy, and dangerous. To make it extra grim, this hypercapitalist dystopia can raise the dead to pay off debts acrude in life. Sounds charming. And for that reason, a book to look forward to.

Sitting atop that is Barry Malzberg's Galaxies. This slender thing is a deconstruction of space operas, dressed up as a schlocky sounding faster-than-light zombie astronaut romp. It's presented as notes towards a novel by a science fiction author, who allows the story to zip along with inserts on the state and status of the genre, and other asides besides. Malzberg's critical reputation as a fine, if unsung SF literary hero is based on misanthropic works such as this.

Michael Moorcock has written so many books that it's easy to come across one you've never heard of before. The Black Corridor is such a title. Civilisation is falling apart (when is it not?), and one man flees from the Earth with his family. They're in hibernation, and it's a five-year trek to their destination. How will he cope with the intense loneliness? And how will this solitary tale tie in with Moorcock's multiverse? Will the hibernators dream of Jerry Cornelius?

Our penultimate title is The Night of the Triffids. Can you guess what this is a sequel to? 25 years have passed on our survivors' Channel hideaways and all is well. The son of our original hero scours the world looking for the means to defeat the Triffid menace, and finds a glimmer of hope in a New York colony. While the original was the first cosy catastrophe novel and was of considerable literary merit and influence, I understand Simon Clark's authorised sequel has none of these virtues. It's - apparently, for I've nto read it yet - more action/horror-oriented with more blood and guts and little originality. Still, Night might be mindless fun.

And the last of this haul's heap is The Rose, a wee find tucked away hidden in a charity shop's book case. Harness is best known for The Paradox Men, a 1950s space opera that won m admirers, including the aforementioned Michael Moorcock. The Rose is a collection of short stories, featuring the award-winning novella of the same name. This, apparently, features mutants, quantum mechanics, and the relationship between science and art.

That's the haul done. Have you picked up anything interesting lately?

Ascendancies by DG Compton

Imagine an alternative 1980s. The economy is going gang busters as Britain booms with unheard-of levels of prosperity. On top of this, the majority of workers enjoy a three-day working week enforced by strong trade unions. Sounds much better than the 80s we actually got. But there is a catch. In 1983, a dust commonly known as moondrift began falling out of the sky at random intervals. This was found to be a safe, fissile material ideal for generating power. It was also a fantastic fertiliser, ending global hunger in addition to cancelling the dependency on fossil fuels. A few years later, however, came the downside. People began disappearing. Their displacement to who-knows-where is preceded by the blanketing of a locality with disembodied singing and a strong reek of synthetic roses. Typically, upwards of 700 unfortunates wink out of existence. Why it happens is beyond anyone's ken, but it takes place shortly following falls of moondrift. That surely puts a link beyond the circumstantial.

Society has adapted, of course. And the economy is booming. The disappearances, however, have thrown the legalities of declaring a death into a minefield. With no one knowing if the evaporated will return, the old rule that death is officially declared after seven years comes into play. Insurers can avoid paying out in the absence of a body, and spouses, families are left in limbo over payouts and inheritance. With insurance companies wanting to see the body prior to paying out, a black market grows up around the procurement and renting of the recently deceased to expedite insurance claims.

This is where DG Compton's Ascendancies begins. Richard Wallingford is employed by Accident and General as a claims assessor, and is called to the house of Caroline Trenchard. Her husband, Havelock, apparently collapsed at the top of the stairs and fell down breaking his neck. Examining the corpse, Wallingford goes through the routine questions and fills out the declaration paperwork. With everything signed, as he's about to leave, he asks the grieving widow what colour Havelock's eyes were. "Brown", she says. He goes back and checks - the body's eyes are blue. Instantly realising this is a scam and the body was acquired after Havelock's disappearance, Wallingford blackmails her. He demands a sizeable chunk of the life insurance payout, or he'll shop her for fraud. There follows the development of a stilted relationship as they're mutually drawn to and repelled from each other. For Wallingford, she's a "bloody woman" and a cash cow, someone subject to his misogynistic internal monologue. For Trenchard, he's inappropriate, almost a bit of rough. Someone not quite suitable, a feeling reinforced when he's introduced to her set.

Ascendancies is a slow book and not a great deal happens. The couple riddle out the body scam and face down a blackmailer. A small detail, some of the best drawn scenes are the inconsequential Wallingford has with his boss, Bernie Caldwell. Compton's characterisation here is exquisite - a man who pretends to friendship with his overfamiliarity, a put-on hatred against the suits upstairs, and a subtle sense of menace that tacitly suggests he knows exactly what's happened and is waiting for Wallingford to throw himself on his mercy. Behind the bonhomie lies the hint of threat. There are a couple of moments where the book unnecessarily crosses into prurience, but this is a science fiction novel written by a bloke of a certain generation and at a certain time. But if accurate forecasts of the near future are worth noting, Compton was right to conceive of charging points for cars as not uncommon sights on British streets.

Compton is better known for the much-praised, and increasingly hard-to-find Farewell Earth's Bliss about a Martian penal colony, and The Continous Katherine Mortonhoe, a novel about reality television and a critique the obsession with novelty approximately 25 years before programming of that type was wall-to-wall. Ascendancies is never spoken in the same breath as these books, and that is a shame. While not a lost classic it is a slice of literary SF that works well for those bored with flash bang and the usual genre tropes. A character study of two people thrust together by coincidence and opportunism, and how a common, dramatic experience doesn't bridge their mutual solitude probably explains why it's rated so poorly on Goodreads - a case where the wisdom of crowds have turned into their opposite. A worthwhile read for sedate palettes, and one that would benefit from a reissue.

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Science Fiction Book Haul #8

Thanks to not feeling it writing-wise lately, I've accumulated loads of (mostly vintage) science fiction paperbacks since the last post outlining my acquisitions. Instead of trying to wade through them all in some sort of order, I'm going instead for the most recent clutch: those I picked up from visiting Stoke-on-Trent today.

Without any further ceremony, starting from the bottom we have Paul McAuley's Gardens in the Sun. This is second in his Quiet War quartet and deals with the aftermath of the events in the first novel, The Quiet War. No spoilers here in case you haven't read that, but it made my top ten of last year's best SF reads. Imagine a near-future solar system that has become something of a powder keg, and there's real tension between the earthly powers and the outer colonies. If this sounds a little bit like The Expanse, that's because - I'm convinced - this series "inspired" the later mega hit. Except this is much more intelligently and better written, with great characters, and no silly, pulpy elements. The Quiet War is on my best science fiction of the 21st century list, and I've got no reason to believe that this sequel won't live up to its predecessor.

Next up is Mack Reynolds's Earth Unaware. In case you didn't know, Reynolds was for many years a leading cadre of the US Socialist Labor Party and was expelled for fostering illusions in capitalism or some such. Therefore, much of Reynolds's work has a sort-of Marxist/utopian bent to it. Of his books, the first I'd heard of this one was when it presented itself on the shelf in front of me. According to the blurb, a self-proclaimed prophet and, its words, "his sexy young daughter" use telepathy to wean the human race off the mass media. Does no television mean instant revolution? The answers to this question lie within this slim volume.

My bad with the Heinlein. I originally picked this up as a Baen omnibus with The Menace from Earth a few weeks ago. Ooops. The Green Hills of Earth is a short story collection from early on in Heinlein's career. They centre on a blind engineer who's a poet and a musician, and goes about the solar system singing, performing, and fixing things. I've had tricky times with Heinlein in the past, and only one of his books so far - Citizen of the Galaxy - have ticked the okay box for me. Perhaps I'll find this collection more agreeable.

John Brunner's The Long Result has some good news and some bad news. The good? Racism is dead. The bad? It's now applied to species other than humans. Earth had colonised two extra-solar worlds when we're approached by intelligent folks from Tau Ceti. They want to set up a meeting, but the extremist The Stars Are For Man League want to sabotage the occasion to demonstrate humans are the galactic top dogs. Obviously, a very clever move destined to go entirely to plan, and with the desired outcomes. Not normally considered a major Brunner by those conversant with such things, but even that would rank this book above the usual fare.

The Fog! A horror book! Or, to be more exact, an SF-based horror book. This James Herbert classic has some meaning for me. When I was a nipper, my Dad had a book case full of horror paperbacks at the top of the stairs. Herbert was his favourite author, and this was among the collection. I never read it, but do remember someone bringing their dad's copy into junior school and reading aloud the grim gym scene. Over the years, I've got through a handful of his books - the last one being '48, an alternate history after which Hitler has unleashed a deadly plague. That was great fun, as have been all the other Herberts I've read. This version - the 1979 printing - is, I think, the same one Dad had. Maybe he's still got his library in the loft?

A Talent for War by Jack McDevitt is also another book with some meaning attached. I remember my mum buying a random collection of paperbacks from the local primary school's annual May Fayre. Among them were Larry Niven's Ringworld, the 70s film tie-in of Dracula, James Herbert's Sepulchre, Nikolai Tolstoy's The Coming of the King, and this. I read it and found it more interesting than the, to my 14-year-old mind, frankly weird Ringworld. Christopher Sim is a legend who fought off the alien Ashiyyur while Earth and the main colony planets were twiddling their thumbs. But what if this is a load of nonsense? It's undemanding stuff, and made me a bit of a fan of McDevitt's work. Unfortunately, my original copy was let go during a huge book clear out we had. So there is a vague, vague chance that the copy I picked up today could be the same one from back then.

Our next one is Edmund Cooper with Seed of Light. I still haven't read any Cooper, despite owning several of his books. Somewhat noted for being a grump and not a fan of feminism, the SF Encyclopedia says that this title, from the late 1950s, is a touch optimistic. The Earth has been wrecked through environmental catastrophe and war, but the launching of a generation ship marks the possibility of a hopeful new beginning. We could all do with that.

I took a risk with Fritz Leiber's Gather, Darkness! considering how much I disliked The Big Time. Originally serialised in 1943, the blurb supposes a fantastical society in which science is suppressed and everyone is at war. Magic is in frequent use, and devils and angels are in the mix too. Yet not even a theocratic dictatorship can defy the laws of social dynamics forever, and a revolution breaks out that brings the edifice crashing down.

The last book is also holds some meaning. Before computers grabbed me, I was dipping my toe into role-playing games. But without enough interested friends, solo adventures were the way to go. As a fan of the Choose Your Own Adventure line, my mate Jay lent me a Fighting Fantasy game book and from that point I was hooked. I assembled a collection of the first 39 books, plus the Sorcery! quartet, the original rule book, and the two source books about FF monsters and Titan, the fantasy setting for most of the series. I still have them all and most are in very good nick. Anyway, I remember there being a trilogy of straightforward novels written by different authors from the FF stable. They followed the adventures of the strangely-named Chadda Darkmane and began with Steve Jackson's The Trolltooth Wars. Itself a rare book, I was able to happen upon it several months back. It turned out to be terrible, even for a kids' book, and has one of the worst endings I've ever read. But of the two sequels, I knew nothing. Until I chanced upon Marc Gascoigne's Shadowmaster today. The concluding book of the trilogy, Chadda teams up with FF recurring character Yaztromo the wizard to see off the forces of chaos. As the middle book typically goes for about £120, I don't fancy my chances of randomly picking it up cheap like I did with this. But still, it's nice to add something to my own FF range.

Those are my latest pickups. Have you bought anything new and interesting lately?

Science Fiction Book Haul #7

Let's haul some books!. What we have here are a collection of gatherings from my out and abouts, and arranged by format. In the first pile are some ropey-looking As, and the other features better weathered Bs.

Beginning on the left, sitting at the bottom is John Brunner's The Crucible of Time. This involves a bunch of aquatic aliens trying to flee their world as it passes through a (potentially) civilisation-ending debris field. This is SF at its most ambitious as Brunner tries putting together a convincing history of a species. Having recently finished George Zebrowski's excellent - and under appreciated - Macrolife, I'm not averse to epic scale thought experiments. I still haven't read any Brunner, despite acquiring his celebrated Stand on Zanzibar in haul #6, but aware of his reputation. If there's anyone who can pull it off, it's sure to be him.

Next is Brian Aldiss's Barefoot in the Head. Known (to me at least) as an early chill out track, Barefoot is set after a global war in which the primary weapons were payloads of psychedelic drugs. Far out. The survivors are on a permanent trip, seemingly unable to tell the difference between the real and the hallucinatory. The story follows a sober protagonist in a drive across Europe as he slowly succumbs to pharmacological intrusion and psychosis. Published at the close of the 1960s, it's one that could be described as being of its time. But the fact it found its way into the SF masterworks range means there must be something to commend it.

Robert Silverberg's Stepsons of Terra is an isolated colony story. Corwin hasn't had anything to do with mother Earth for 500 years, but desperately want to now as a rising military power has sent an armada in their direction. It's almost as if Silverberg had Dubai ex-pats in mind when he wrote this nearly 70 years ago. An ambassador is promptly appointed and dispatched to Earth to beg for help but, horror of horrors, the home world has slipped into indolence and decadence. As a relatively early novel, I'm not expecting much - but did find his Invaders from Earth from the same period jolly enough.

And then we have a famous/infamous book, depending on where you're sitting. Terry Brooks's The Sword of Shannara, the novel that sparked a trilogy and the huge boom in fantasy publishing that continues to this day. Often decried as a direct rip off of The Lord of the Rings, I've come round to occasionally collecting interesting spells-and-swordplay silliness. Given its importance, I couldn't pass it up after spotting it for a couple of quid.

Continuing the theme, going for a song in a local second hand bookshop was Raymond E Feist's Rift War trilogy, which is the first in a seemingly endless sequence of 30 novels. A portal is opened between a Middle Earth-type world and all sorts of perils come spilling out. Inspired by playing Dungeons and Dragons with his mates, apparently - just like Shannara - there are some unacknowledged and "accidental" homages. In this case to the setting of another early role playing game that subsequently influenced D&D. Nevertheless, The Magician is well thought of and now I have it, I'm duty bound to read it.

Sitting atop the pile is an Arthur C Clarke double bill, The Lion of Comarre and Against the Fall of Night. These two short works share a similar theme: that utopias are boring. Lion sounds like a centrist fantasy. The world is governed by wise politicians and technology can pinpoint and take care of citizens' needs. With everything taken care of, the best and the brightest choose to enter politics. Richard Peyton rebels because he wants to become an engineer, and he gets mixed up with some robots' rights stuff along the way. Sounds delightfully naive. Against is one of Clarke's more famous works, and follows Alvin, the last child to be born in 7,000 years. This is immortals-at-the-end-of-time stuff, and everyone is bored rigid. No one can leave the last city of humanity, but Alvin wants to. Cue the story. I don't mind Clarke and, to reiterate, found what I've read so far fairly decent - including more recently A Fall of Moondust. Not expecting literary fireworks, but then that's not what Clarke was ever about.

On to the B pile, at the base is our chum Christopher Priest and his The Dream Archipelago. A collection of linked short stories, here Priest subtly unsettles by offering a series of worlds that are immediately recognisable and familiar, but are off in some way. Something that is done in different ways in each of his books I've so far read - Fugue for a Darkening Island, Inverted World, The Prestige, and The Adjacent. Priest is a bucket list author and one whose oeuvre I plan on reading in full.

We're back in fantasy now with Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword. His sword and sorcery is often lauded in ways that his science fiction isn't, this is historical fantasy set in the time of the Vikings. There's Norse mythology, elves, fights with trolls, and has plenty of limb chopping and blood fountains. Not something you'd expect from the middle of the 1950s.

Then we have David Gemmell's Legend. By the mid-80s the fantasy boom was underway, and Legend offers a bloody vista of medieval warfare. The undermanned fortress is threatened by a half-million strong horde from the north. Hmmm, where has a very similar plot detail turned up in another popular fantasy series? Druss the Legend is the hero of the Drenai Empire, but as the enemy approaches he's retired and contemplates his death. Can he be called back into the fight? There is, as you might expect, plenty of action and siege scenes. Should be fun.

The Peripheral is the first in William Gibson's latest trilogy. Two viewpoints, one in near future rural US and the other in London 70 years after, and is a return to the noirish sensibilities of The Sprawl books. Flynne is a working class woman working on a 3D printer, and Wilf lives in her future where inequality has run so amok that there aren't many people left apart from the 1%. But is it really her future? Is it real at all? I enjoyed Neuromancer after last year's re-read, which I followed with Count Zero. Gibson is also another bucket list author, so will get round to this eventually!

Fantasy again. I read all four books in Jack Vance's Dying Earth science fantasy sequence a couple of years back, and especially enjoyed the middle two Cugel books. But the thing you take from them is the soupy, languid texture of an Earth sluggishly dragging itself through the end of its days. In Lyonesse, Vance's effort at a King Arthur-linked fantasy series, I'll be interested if this sensibility translates. It's high fantasy stuff with princesses and princes, star crossed lovers, and a load of intrigue and magic. I understand Merlin features, because of course he does. Lyonesse appears well thought of, so if I like this I'll pick up the other two.

Speaking of the dying Earth, NK Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy tap dances on Vance's toes. The Stone Sky is the third book in the sequence, and I can't say much because I don't own the second and haven't read the first. All I know is it's the far future, technology and magic are indistinguishable, and the Earth is shaking itself to bits through a plague of devastating earthquakes. What gives? Each book in Jemisin's sequence is highly rated and collected an embarrassment of awards, so this series won't stay at the bottom of the tbr pile forever.

And lastly, there's Hugh Howey's Wool. Now a TV series, the remnants of humanity are ekeing out a bleak existence living inside a missile silo. This protects them from the dangerous radiation outside. Life isn't great, and there's little sense of what it was like before the apocalypse came. Anyone who expresses curiosity or a desire to go outside are duly obliged. They're expected to clean the external sensors, even though it means certain death. It's very much a YA piece, and I read the graphic novel adaptation ages ago and don't remember being that impressed. But this was practically being given away and so it's here.

Since getting these, I've also grabbed several more piles of books. We'll look at them when the mood takes me.

Have you picked up anything interesting lately?

What I've Been Reading Recently

It's been some time since we last had one of these, so rather than a mega list here's a more manageable chunk: the books I got through in January.

Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds
Leonard and Hungry Paul by Ronan Hession
The Transparency of Evil by Jean Baudrillard
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place by Jean Baudrillard
The Illusion of the End by Jean Baudrillard
Cold Allies by Patricia Anthony
The Food of the Gods by HG Wells
Baudrillard Live edited by Mike Gane
Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart
Clash by Night by Henry Kuttner and CL Moore
The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis
Baudrillard's Challenge by Victoria Grace
The Forge of God by Greg Bear

Once again, Baudrillard is gently simmering on the back burner, so no commentary about these works here. But I will say the book by Victoria Grace is by far the best one-volume treatment our hyperreal hero has received. At least among the not inconsiderable secondary literature I've read. Her target are the feminist debates around subjectivity that dominated proceedings in the 1990s, and makes a cogent and compelling case that Baudrillard offers a way out of the impasse it butted up against. Yes, really. Baudrillard, by way of Haraway, opened a path to a materialist feminism of the 21st century - one that could grasp the specificities and new patterns of power in the postmodern era. Published in the futuristic year of 2000, it's now a very old book, but its relevance lies not only in the feminist case for Baudrillard, and the fact much contemporary feminism did take the Harawayan road. The possibility of a fruitful engagement remains.

As mainstream novels went in January, it's a real case of chalk and cheese. Leonard and Hungry Paul was the sort of book that made me want to hulk out and rip in half. A twee story of friendship between two socially awkward, and implicitly autistic men, it inspired nothing but hostility in me. It would have been a DNF were it not a book group read so I endured ... and then couldn't go because of illness anyway. I don't mind plodding and inconsequential as long as it's done well, but this was an irritant. The very opposite of calming. And now it's been filmed as a TV series. I won't be watching. What a welcome difference Young Mungo made. About the titular Mungo, this is a coming-of-age story about a young, gay working-class Glaswegian. The ever present backdrop is alcoholism, child neglect, violence, abuse, and sectarianism. Life is brutal, and it's as far from a cosy read you can get. Yet it's a novel full of love as well. A shocker it never made the Booker short list.

Up there this month with Young Mungo is The Man Who Fell to Earth, a stunning work of loneliness and despair. What a cheery read! Thomas Newton is on a mission from Mars, and that's to save his people! He uses their advanced technology to make millions so he can build a fleet of ships and ferry what's left of his civilisation to Earth. But nothing is ever straightforward. The preceding sentence does not do this book justice. It's one of the greatest SF novels I've read, and sure to be on the year-end list. A good way for the mainstream literary reader to sample science fiction without the tropy stuff getting in the way. Also very good, but this time super-tropy was Chasm City, a slab of a book typical of British new space opera, but one that is extremely polished and compelling. Chasm City is an exciting mix of generation ship, spy, and hard-boiled SF noir. A recommend if you like that sort of thing.

And the rest, sadly, was quite average. Bear's The Forge of God was over long, and half-way through I couldn't wait to see the Earth destroyed. Clash by Night by golden age power couple, Kuttner and Moore was high seas hi-jinks on Venus. It had a certain sharpness and quality, but by the same token it didn't grab me. Mercifully, it was short. I was expecting good things from The Food of the Gods, Wells's tale of oversized plants, animals, and (eventually) humans, and how Edwardian society dealt with them. Not a patch on his better known stuff. And lastly was Patricia Anthony's future war novel, Cold Allies. Europe is fending of invading Arab armies, driven north by run away climate change. And as the former teeters on the brink of defeat, a set of mysterious aliens show up. Friend? Foe? Sadly, you'll be indifferent to the answer by about a third of the way through.

What have you been reading recently?

10 Best Science Fiction Books Read in 2025

We've had the bad stuff, so what makes the opposite - a great science fiction book? Despite the best efforts of literary establishments and genre gatekeepers there is no determinate criteria. Character, writing, plotting, what matters collectively shifts with the fashions, and for the individual it is as much about peccadilloes and mood as the wider field. And so sitting at the end of this year, the cuts below have been selected because of the favourable impression they made at the time and how they've (pleasantly, productively) played on my mind since. That means that while I read oft-acknowledged classics like Ursula K Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven, Christopher Priest's Inverted World and the first volume of the Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer, these didn't stay with me in the same way - despite my expectations going in. There were a few near misses that did get their hooks into me. I enjoyed JG Ballard's The Wind from Nowhere, Nina Allan's The Rift, Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky (yes, really), M John Harrison's Light, and Ken MacLeod's Intrusion. So what edged out these great novels and made the mark in 2025? Expect something a little different to the usual best-of lists.

Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica. A contender for the best novel I read this year, as I said at the time. A mash up of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Neil Barrett Jr's barely-remembered Through Darkest America, Bazterrica has confected a sparingly written and brutal meditation on the ultimate society of excess. When the animals are dead, why not put specially-bred human beings on the menu? Hugely hyped at the time of its translation, this is a rare work that justified all of it. The subtlety with which Bazterrica paints her horrific dystopia is a lesson more science fiction authors would do well to learn. And the story itself, with its utterly unsparing ending, is among the most impactful I've read in years. This comes with the strongest of recommends.

Dark Eden by Chris Beckett. This is Tender's immediate competition. It's some point in the future, and a couple of hundred humans are stranded on a sunless, wandering planet. Life is possible thanks to copious internal heating, a digestible biome, and a world lit up with bioluminescence. And our nascent society? All of them are descended from one pair of astronauts. Yuck. Yet Beckett handles the ick factor of in-breeding extremely well, and builds a believable setting of matriarchal social structures and fixed cultural symbolism coming under pressure from innovation, rebellion, and conflict. Dark can also be read as a meditation on the emergence of patriarchy and its reliance on physical violence, as well as the limited powers of tradition in dealing with disruption and social stagnation. This wouldn't be worth a hill of beans of the story wasn't any good, but Beckett provides his characters believable dilemmas and relatable motivations for doing what they do. Simply one of the best British science fiction novels of this century.

Bridge by Lauren Beukes. Another great book that got the review treatment. This is a drama of parallel worlds, a cross-reality hunt for the truth - and for new victims by a pitiless killer. The titular Bridge finds a weird stringy mass in her late mother's fridge. This is a dream worm, and eating its threads lets anyone drop into the lives of their alternate selves in other timelines. This might not sound especially original, but the doings Beukes embroils her characters in is a cut above. At the heart of Bridge is the tight rope Bridge has to walk between escaping her dissolute existence at the risk of greater disassociation and mental collapse, all the while riding a plot full of moral ambiguity and the uncertain stakes of potential catastrophe. Probably the cleverest of this year's reads.

China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F McHugh. Never met anyone who doesn't like this novel, China stands out on this list - and among SF generally - because nothing really happens. It's the near future and US power has been smashed by socialist revolution. China is the dominant world power, but we're still far from the society of associated producers Marx forecast. Zhang is a half-Han labourer in New York, and he knows his ethnicity can open doors for him. But he's also gay, which is strictly illegal. How he makes his way in this world, participating in the manned kite-racing scene, dealing with an unwanted betrothal, and surviving police raids, over the span of the novel Zhang is able to modestly advance up the pecking order. We also follow San-xiang, another American-born Chinese woman who undergoes cosmetic surgery, and Martine, a goat herder on a colonised Mars. Everything seems low stakes compared to others on this list, but what McHugh brilliantly realises is a sample of the everyday life that is hardly ever treated by a genre dominated by space opera and goodies vs baddies heroics. Believe me, this is not as dull as it sounds!

The Quiet War by Paul McAuley. Speaking of space opera, The Quiet War is spectacular. It's the near future and our colonisation efforts find most planets and moons garlanded with habitats, installations, and orbitals. This is a solar system recovering from a devastating Earth/Mars war, in which the home world emerged victorious but badly beaten. The three oligarchical big powers, Greater Brazil, the EU, and the Pacific Community variously compete for dominion and are looking for toeholds around Jupiter and Saturn. Meanwhile, the survivors of Mars migrated to these outer planets where they set up shop as Outers. Cue espionage, chases, exploding spaceships, speculative genetics, and clever plotting. Written before The Expanse, one might say some of its elements inspired what we saw later in that mammoth series. Except The Quiet War is its superior in every way - composition, character, political complexity, McAuley delivered a slice of space going SF that shows how it should be done.

Run, Come See Jerusalem! by Richard C Meredith. The oldest book on this list and we have a time travel story. Eugene Spillman works with time, and he's just been drawn into a conspiracy - to escape into the past and change history! Oh, we do love our paradoxes. Unfortunately, the plot has been rumbled by the tyrannical regime and agents are dispatched to stop the scheme. The action moves back to prehistoric North America, and then forward again to 19th century Chicago. Stumbling into the street injured, Spillman is taken in by wealthy good samaritans and nursed back to health. He then gets caught in the Great Fire of Chicago, and perhaps - if everything has gone to plan - an uncertain future. Time travel is hard to pull off well, and Meredith does not get too bogged down with silly paradoxes. This will not (nor did it) win any literary prizes, but the characters stand up on their own, and Meredith moves and down tempo as the plot requires. What results is an unshowy but satisfying timeline tapping bop.

The Kings of Eternity by Eric Brown. This just edged out his pub-based SF first contact tale, Kethani, Brown's Kings deserves a much wider audience. One leg of the book is in 1999 where reclusive author Daniel Langham is enjoying the fruits of literary success. But his voluntary exile on a Greek island has attracted the attention of a journalist looking for a scoop, and isn't afraid to use blackmail to get his story. 60-odd years earlier, his grandfather Jonathan Langham - a struggling novelist - is invited with successful SF writer Edward Vaughan to an old school friend's country pile. Their friend has discovered a zone in his grounds that is periodically visited by mysterious lights. One night, after a few swigs of scotch, they go to see what's happening. In Kings, Brown managed the tricky job of pulling off a cosy work without the cringe. His skilful rendering of character and dialogue suffuses it with genuine warmth and good vibes. You really care about the characters, and it's a mark of real craft that the pulpy elements are deftly woven in and don't come across as awkward grafts. An unsung hero of British SF.

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. A huge chonker of a novel, the first in Willis's Oxford time travel sequence also comes in two halves: the "present", which is our near future, and the 14th century. Instead of getting into the business of excavating a series of small walls, the Dons are using time travel to aid their scholarly activity. Kivrin Engle is whisked back to the Oxford of 1320 just as everything goes to pot in the present. A wave of nasty flu rips through the country, hospitalising the time travel technician while Kivrin isn't entirely sure she's at the date she should be. Sadly, the two halves vary in quality. The present is, to be honest, quite boring, forced, and unnecessary. The technician, for instance, bursts into the pub unwell and tells the project team that something has gone wrong. But decides to run off before giving them specifics. He's then in and out of consciousness before finally letting them know what's happened. It's a;; a bit forced. But where Doomsday shoots into the stratosphere is in the medieval narrative. The detail, the relationships, the bleakness and despair, it's impeccable. This works despite the so-so time travel stuff, and this half of the book alone is way above most of the things I've read this year.

Grass by Sheri S Tepper. The galaxy is in the grip of a plague. There's no known cure, but there's one curious fact. The people living on the world of Grass have not contracted it. The Sanctity, the church militant that rules human space send a husband-and-wife team to Grass to get to the bottom of it. They get a frosty reception and it takes a lot of coaxing to get the posh locals to admit them to society. The clans of the aristocratic ruling class organise their lives around the hunt. They ride the native alien hippae and use native "hounds" to hunt down the cunning and mysterious foxen. But it quickly becomes apparent that something isn't quite right. Young women disappear, and the needs of the aristos to go hunting borders on the pathological. What the hell is going on? Grass surprised me with its cleverness, tight plotting, and a sense of creeping dread as the mysteries of Grass are unravelled. There is plenty about the stupidity of patriarchal gender relations and the cynical use of ideology for personal gain. Rightly celebrated.

Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky. He made the list last year with the preceding volume, so I'm here to redress an injustice. Children of Time gets loads of praise, but I would suggest Children of Ruin is its equal. The humans and the spiders have made for a good symbiotic civilisation, so why not head off into the galaxy to see if the old, wrecked empire has left offspring of Earth around other stars? The answer is yes. This book is about sapient cephalopods and the messy, chaotic society they build. But making things complicated is that, on the next planet over, an alien intelligence is stirring. All of Tchaikovsky's strengths are on show here. Speculative sociology, his ability to construct convincing non-human characters, and a pacey story with high stakes and thrills and spills aplenty. This demonstrates, against, why he's front rank.

Those were the 10 best science fiction novels read this year. But a shout out to a few other books. 2025 has been the first year I've read as many fantasy novels since I was a keen teenaged fan of the Fighting Fantasy game book series. The clear winner in the seven or so I read was Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone. The first in the rhizomatic Elric sequence, it had everything for someone coming back to genre fantasy after giving it a wide berth for many a year. Intelligent dialogue, complex relationships, cliche avoidance, just great stuff. From mainstream fiction, two novels vie with Bazterrica and Beckett for the best read of the year. There's Han Kang's 2021 novel, We Do Not Part, which was published in English this year. Haunting and beautifully written, its depiction of a snow storm is likely to leave you with frostbite. Believe the hype. And the second is much older, and that's Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion. I've always been a Bret Easton Ellis aficionado, and Play is the degree zero for Less Than Zero. A dead-inside young woman bounces through star-crossed marriages, bereavement, success, and mental collapse in a nihilistic masterpiece. Brilliant.

What have been your best reads of the year, science fiction or otherwise?

The Five Worst SF Books Read in 2025

My second year of binging on science fiction is nearly over, and it's pleasing to report that out of 107 SF novels and collections, I found only a handful of books that were properly annoying. Continuing the anti-festive spirit from last December, here's 2025's clutch of do-not-recommends arranged by the order I read them.

The Passage by Justin Cronin. I see this get praised a lot, and none of it is warranted. A clandestine subsection of the US government are experimenting on death row murderers and serial killers and turning them into super strength zombie/vampire monsters. Sounds like a good idea. And because of the mysterious mind powers they have, they are able to escape and more or less kill everyone. A post-apocalyptic story of survival with, of course, a special "chosen one", endless hundreds of pages are given over to cliches and characters prey to unnecessary/scarcely believable tensions that ends up imperilling them. Then there is the incredulous stupidity of the unleashed zombie/vampire virus killing everyone who lives outside of North America. A pretty dumb genuflection to US exceptionalism. If all this wasn't bad enough, the effort Cronin puts in to provide a science fictional conceit for this bloody-but-boring mess is undone by shoeing magic powers in toward the end. Terrible.

A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys. This has such an interesting premise. It is the near future and the world is transitioning away from capitalism to some sort of eco-communism. States remain, but they're largely vestigial and ceremonial hold overs. And capitalism, as in turbo-charged faceless corporation capitalism, is confined to a few (literal) islands of influence. The main bulk of the population ignore their nonsense and live in decentralised communes organised on a geographical basis around watersheds - which makes for a thought-provoking suggestion for post-scarcity social organisation. Sadly, this is the best aspect of the novel. The appearance of cartoonish eco-conscious aliens and their organic ship that constantly shits their effluent into the Atlantic is not the ideal first contact scenario, and it doesn't get much better from there. Also, the characters always seem to be lecturing each other on pronouns, and thrown in are as many non-binary modes of address Emrys could think of. I don't want to dump too much on this book, as Emrys is attempting an empathetic SF here with genuinely different, if right-on aliens - but its earnestness does not make for a compelling story.

The Big Time by Fritz Leiber. Normally, it's his Hugo-winning The Wanderer that gets the brickbats. Alas, the absence of alien cat babes is this novel's only redeeming feature. Set around a temporal war where two factions battle over the course of history, Greta, a time-travel part-psychologist, part-comfort woman offers her ministrations to the troupe of soldiers that file through her end of a pocket universe. The Maintainer, a device that sustains this gap in reality, is stolen and someone threatens to set off an atomic bomb. All in a day's work for Greta! Sorry to say that if I could wind back time, I'd have spent the time reading this (mercifully) short work on another book. It's a complete mess and barely holds together. The problem is you get the sense Leiber is fizzing with ideas and wants to show off his distinction as an erudite writer, but here he lacks focus and falls short of a coherent and compelling novel. The definite tie for the worst novel to have crossed my eyeballs in 2025.

The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin. The Three-Body Problem juggernaut lands on this list. I wrote more about it earlier this month, and it gets worse the more I think about it. It's puzzling why Dark Forest makes so many best of lists. The writing is leaden, characters completely interchangeable, and human beings are by turns robotic, faddish, stupid, and hysterical. The aliens, the pulpy-sounding Trisolarians, are probably some of the worst realised in contemporary science fiction. But above all, the ideas if proffers - something which the series is often praised for - are hardly original, having been done many times before elsewhere. His "original" idea of Cosmic Sociology, a speculation about what alien societies might be like, is simply laughable and wouldn't be out of place in a collection of ravings by right-wing evolutionary psychologists. A book written to be thrown at the wall - more than once. Unfortunately, two-thirds in I'm likely to end up finishing the trilogy. So don't be surprised if Liu pops up here again this time next year.

Birthright: The Book of Man by Mike Resnick. Competing hard with Leiber for the worst-book-read-this-year award, Birthright was horribly out of date when it was published in 1982. Resnick's future history tells of the rise, fall, and eventual extinction of "Man". We are "treated" to a sprinkling of vignettes throughout that history to give a sense of how humanity conquered an empire, treated its subjects, underwent democratic revolution, and then slid into oblivion. Why we did so well was because humans were more special and imaginative than the thousands of other species we discover during our galactic rampage. All humans, like all aliens, are cut from the same essentialist cloth, and we're cast as aggressively expansionist and imperialist by nature. It's exactly the same sort of species-level dopiness Liu indulgences. But if anything, this is more badly written. Supposedly a critique of colonialism, it is not nuanced enough to even gesture in that direction. Instead it comes across as a clumsy and boring celebration of dominance, militaria, and the wily application of statecraft. Just a very, very poor book that was 40 years too late.

Rants are over. What were your worst reads of the year, be they science fiction and/non-sf or even non-fiction?

Science Fiction Book Haul #6

With Christmas around the corner, the discerning collector of vintage science fiction paperbacks can expect a few additions. Here are some careworn A-formats I've recently picked up.

Let's begin with something that isn't SF at all - the Sara Douglass Crucible trilogy. All three were going for a song, so it would have been rude not to. Douglass was the pen name of Sara Warneke, a medieval historian who also authored several series/trilogies of genre fantasy novels. She won a couple of awards but never gained the critical reputation and/or sales of a big hitter. The Nameless Day, which I read several months ago, was set in medieval Europe and sees Thomas Neville, an English monk, set out on a mission set by the Archangel Michael to battle the hordes of Satan. It was alright, but did so much violence to the historical record that Douglass must have winced as she wrote it. Also, the Devil portrayed here is very much the modern version dating from Goethe and not the pathetic jester/sufferer of chronic flatulence that was contemporaneous to the 14th century. But an unthreatening fool wouldn't do as an antagonist. How does Neville get on? I'm committed now so will find out eventually.

Providing a foundation for them is a sun-faded copy of John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar. A regular on SF critics 'best of' lists, it's set in the futuristic year of 2010 and is a sprawling narrative focusing on two upwardly-mobile executives. It promises a meditation on overpopulation, artificial intelligences, economic development, genetic engineering, and drugs. It's frequently praised for anticipating our future and for being a cracking good read- certainly up there with Brunner's other semi-canonical works.

Mack Reynolds is an interesting character. Openly left wing at a time in the United States when that would be a career killer, Reynolds's SF spent a lot of time thinking about and thinking through utopias. He was raised in the De Leonist Socialist Labor Party, and for a time he was a full-time cadre for the party. Later on in the 1950s and having established himself as a writer, the SLP sought to purge him for publishing How to Retire Without Money - the type of self-help slop that was as ten-a-penny then as now. For raising illusions in capitalism, Reynolds reluctantly resigned - but he remain dedicated to pushing utopian SF. In Commune 2000AD from 1974, Reynolds imagines a sexually liberated US where everyone has a guaranteed income and government is entirely rational. Yet there is discontent - how can there be serpents in the modern paradise? Not a major piece by any means, but a welcome addition to the growing vintage collection.

The next two come as a pair. When Gravity Fails and A Fire in the Sun are two-thirds of a trilogy. If you're familiar with Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon books, there are some superficial similarities between them. Here, Marid Audran is muscle-for-hire in a world where one can swap out personality cartridges. And it happens that his job is to track down a sadistic killer who can't stop slotting in the personalities of history's worst mass murderers. Undoubtedly, much cyberpunkish grittiness and violence ensues. By all accounts, George Alec Effinger wrote his trilogy while living with severe health problems and an ever-increasing pile of medical debts. Unfortunately, his difficulties meant this was the last substantial piece of work he produced. But as final works go, they have retained a decent reputation unlike most other cyberpunk-style cash-ins.

Project Barrier by Daniel F Galouye has a not-at-all questionable premise. Humanity has the technology to send people to the stars! But the rigours of superluminal travel means only a crew component weighing 120lbs can go. The ingenious solution? Strap in a 12 year old girl and imprint the personalities of three astronauts onto her brain. But what happens when they return from their trip? Does restoring her singular personality mean murder? Actually a collection of related short stories (my UK edition does not indicate this), for some reason Richard Dawkins is a fan. I'll try not to let that put me off. Galouye is probably best known for his Hugo-nominated Dark Universe, but was another writer plagued with ill-health - this time thanks to injuries sustained as a navy pilot during the war. That this was completed and published following his medical retirement is testament to his determination.

Speaking of dodgy-sounding conceits, next up is Fred Hoyle's Ossian's Ride. In the far future of 1970 (Ossian's was published in 1959), the Republic of Ireland sits under a dictatorship and, thanks to its mysterious free port-style "science zone", its monopoly on highly advanced technologies may constitute a threat to dear old Blighty. And so a scientist-cum-secret agent Thomas Sherwood, a man with an impeccably English name, is dispatched to infiltrate Ireland's secret powerhouse and bring home the bacon. I'm not suggesting this is suffused with post-colonial paranoia, but. Fred Hoyle was a distinguished astronomer who made several important contributions to physics and chemistry, as well as originating the theory of panspermia. I.e. Life did not begin on Earth, but migrated from elsewhere and came here via meteors. He was a pillar of the establishment despite being at odds with colleagues over this and his view that the universe did not originate from a big bang - a phrase he apparently coined. Does this mean his science fiction is any good? The Cloud often gets decent write ups, but I suspect that there might be reasons why this exercise in paddy peril is not so feted.

I'm not sure many people have heard of When the Earth Died by Karl Mannheim. I have checked, this is not the German sociologist of knowledge - though his most famous book, Ideology and Utopia, almost has an SF ring to it. This, published in 1950, comes from the pen of an unknown UK author who chose to remain anonymous. How intriguing! The world here is where two power blocs face off against each other and, apparently, everyone dies in nuclear fire. Not sure how science fictional that was in 1950, but my copy was going for a song and it's in very good condition so it was hard to say no to.

From the obscure to the famous, Arthur C Clarke is by light years the biggest name on this list. And here he's represented by an almost mint early 90s edition of 2061: Odyssey Three. I watched 2001 when I was a nipper and, like most other people, was puzzled by what was happening. The novel was much clearer. Later I was quite the fan of 2010: Odyssey Two, but haven't read and don't own the book. So this here occupies a place of abeyance until 2010 falls into the collection. This? It lifts off after Jupiter has ignited and it shines down on us as our second sun. And I know no more than that. The general chatter isn't that favourable regarding the Odyssey series, but I do have a soft spot for Clarke. Growing up in the 80s, I remember Arthur C Clarke's World of Strange Powers, which was full of Fortean silliness. One episode about past lives was trailed as "Here is a man looking for his own grave." Fantastic stuff. Much later I quite liked Rendezvous with Rama - much less its sequels with Gentry Lee, which were terrible. And last year I thought A Fall of Moondust was quite jolly provided you go into it knowing Clarke's weaknesses. I expect 2061 to be broadly similar.

I blow hot and cold with Ian Watson. I thought his Alien Embassy was very good, if not a touch questionable by today's standards. However more recent reads, Chekhov's Journey and God's World did not hit the spot. Watson is an erudite and sophisticated writer, but two out of my three forays into his oeuvre have not paid off. What of The Very Slow Time Machine? This is another short story collection, the titular tale is about an old boy landing from the future in 1985 and slowly ageing backwards. Apparently, this is one of the weakest in the book - but that's because the others are stronger. We'll see if Watson's idiosyncrasies hold up in the short form.

Last is another author I've yet to read: Harry Harrison, and he shows up here with his War with the Robots. Yet another short story collection, this gives us a range of whatever-you-can-do, machines-can-do-better adventures. On the shelves I've got a load of his Stainless Steel Rat and Death World novels. Popularly seen as an overly pulpy writer, this apparently is to do Harrison a disservice as his work is full of subtle satire and irreverent gestures to overweening SF tropes. And the cover for my edition is ridiculously OTT. It's sat there now demanding that I read it.

There endeth the latest book haul. Another one is due early in the new year. Have you picked up anything interesting lately?

The Darkness of The Dark Forest

Commenting on the first book in a trilogy is a perilous affair. Not all of the author's ideas or characters are fully developed. The impact is staggered across the subsequent volumes. The vision and the achievement of the work has to be taken in the round. These were the gist of many replies my review of Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem provoked around various the corners of the internet. Having now read the sequel, The Dark Forest, if anything the story takes a turn for the worse. This middle book is very middling.

To summarise where we left off, a Chinese radio scientist advertised the location of the Earth to a nearby predatory alien civilisation. Their world is threatened with destruction by their suns, and have launched an invasion/colonisation fleet in our direction. Owing to the distances involved they will turn up approximately 400 years after the close of the first book. The 'Trisolarians' are assisted by the sophons, microscopic supercomputers they sent to Earth at the speed of light to mess with physics experiments, preventing significant technological advancement, and to put the preparation of the planet's defence under total surveillance. Also assisting the aliens are groups of humans who, for a variety of reasons, would rather see our species destroyed or placed on reservations under the extra-terrestrial boot. Thanks to some plot-convenient violence to how quantum entanglement operates, both can instantaneously communicate with approaching fleet and the home world.

Spoilers follow.

The Dark Forest is about how Earth meets this threat. The narrative orbits around the efforts of the wallfacers, experts selected by the UN to come up with strategies for stopping the invasion. They are not to write their plans down, nor converse with others about them. They are granted unlimited resources and the authorities are expected to obey their orders. The sophons cannot read minds, and so they can only guess at what the facers are doing. However, several turncoat humans have appointed themselves "wallbreakers". They shadow their opponents, figure out their plans, and confront them when they have done so. And surely, one-by-one, the facers' schemes are rumbled. All except for Luo Ji, a washed up social scientist turned astronomer who for some reason the Trisolarians are trying to murder.

In the second half of the book, Luo wakes up after a couple of centuries in cold sleep. He comes to in a science fictional future: wireless power transmission, vast underground cities, colonies on other planets, and a hefty space fleet. While all this is amazing to Luo, it's the result of applying already-understood physics. There have been no qualitative breakthroughs since the aliens shut down all our particle accelerators. Nevertheless, the world is confident that they can take on the Trisolarians. And by way of a demonstration, a thousand-strong battle squadron of ships are set to rendezvous with a probe the aliens have sent ahead of their fleet. What could go wrong?

Unfortunately, instead of suspense all Liu's leaden prose conveys is tedium. Not that this necessarily matters for genre SF. It never did Arthur C Clarke's or Isaac Asimov's sales any harm. Like its predecessor, Dark Forest goes big on the big ideas, and I suppose for those not versed in the usual tropes they can appear spectacular. For example, this book has leant its name to the so-called dark forest hypothesis, one of the "solutions" to the Fermi Paradox. I.e. If there are aliens, why are they not here? Liu's answer is they're there alright, but they keep themselves to themselves lest they be espied and destroyed by another civilisation. Kill them before they can kill you is the pessimistic resolution of the great silence. Luo demonstrates the truth of this supposition. Sending out a signal that purports to come from a star 50 light years away, several decades later it goes nova. Astronomers spotted a fast moving object slam into the star. Someone out there wasn't taking any chances.

The real problem with Dark Forest is its misanthropy. Liu betrays a rather dim view of his fellow humans. We are cast as irredeemably credulous, stupid, cowardly, and cruel. In the present, the wallfacers are feted as rock stars who can do no wrong. Forget the cynicism that is the lot of contemporary culture, including Chinese culture, it's like we've all become participants in personality cults - but we mean it. This enthusiasm manifests itself in a hysteria against "escapism". The masses push for and successfully see laws implemented forbidding states and individuals from building their own ships to flee into the cosmos. We're all in it together as the herd insists we keep our eggs in one basket.

All of these collective flaws come to a head in the space battle. As the probe comes to a halt, the thousand warships line up in formation for the show down. What we get instead is a massacre. Thanks to the Trisolarians' hoodoo physics the probe becomes a wrecking ball that smashes through the engines of the lined up ships, causing them to explode one after the other. Evidently, our descendents had learned nothing from ocean-going navies, let alone three-dimensional space combat video games. Some ships at the margin of the massacre are able to escape and chance it on an escapist, interstellar run. A good job they remembered to pack the cryogenics. But before they do, they butcher each other so the victors have enough supplies and parts to keep them going for a centuries' long voyage. And because of the defeat, everyone on Earth, everyone panics and starts treating Luo as the second coming. They're soon disappointed as he concentrates working on a project seeding the solar system with dust, which will help determine the coordinates of the Trisolarians when they arrive. He's condemned as a fraud while civilisation falls into despondency.

The rendering of these dramatics are rather amateur. Clunky, mechanical, grating, none of this was worth the eventual pay off. It's not just that the writing is poor, the plotting obvious, the whole book - much more than the first - oozes condescension. The dim view of human nature and the patronising 'we are but children who know nothing' sentiment was a real drag, as was the implicit endorsement of putting trust in the abilities of our betters. Humanity here is not a civilisation trying to defend itself, it's the backdrop, a collection of bystanders that can only cheer or cry.

Obviously, this is not a recommend. But despite itself, two books into the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy I am masochistically invested enough to put myself through the final installment. Read this as a warning and save yourself some time.

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Conceiving the Alien

Caspar Geon (AKA Tom Toner)'s The Immeasurable Heaven set off ripples of interest with its promise of a 100% alien cast of characters. Something few other science fiction authors have attempted. The other thing going for this novel is the utterly luscious, life-suffused universe of Yokkun's Depth - the teeming galaxy of the setting. To convey not just the flavour of a galaxy, but of multiple realities sets a new bar for world building in SF, but is that all there is to it?

Set a couple of billion years ago in a galaxy far, far away, the inhabitants of Yokkun's Depth - humanoidish and otherwise - are long used to a more or less peaceful co-existence. In the heart of every star resides the immensely powerful post-machine intelligences, the Throlken. They have manipulated and shaped the galaxy's biological species for over 300m years, and have given it a common language, a light touch governance structure, and a unified economy. There is no war, nor any violence. For Yokkun's Depth is a hyper-Foucauldian space. With swarms of their microscopic servants inhabiting every litre of air and not a few volumes of vacuum, violent acts are stopped by liquefying the perpetrator's brain.

The galaxy has another feature. A well that leads to layers of reality beneath the surface. These can be accessed by falling into the well, or coating oneself in iliquin, a special mineral that punctures the membrance between realities. Messages can be sent up and down the realities, or phaslairs, and they have been variously colonised by what passes for the powers of Yokkun's Depth. The Throlken, for example, are omnipresent in many of them. But the physics of sliding between the layers is one-way. Someone can travel down, but they cannot come up again. Consternation verges on panic when there is a suggestion of someone, or something, has found their way around the laws of reality and are ascending through the phaslairs. How, and more importantly, why, is a complete unknown. Even the all-powerful Throlken are disturbed and none-the-wiser.

This is the set up. A world that heaps one novum on to another in quick succession. The plot revolves around three people. Yib'Wor, who begins the novel scratching an existence out of and trying to escape a dead world, Whirazomar (Whira), an agent sent to the well to investigate and, if needs be, stop the rising entity, and Draebol, a surveyor of phaslairs and the maker of a map of the realities - something that would be sought after, if it was ever to be put up for sale. They are three characters whose paths are sure to cross eventually.

The Immeasurable Heaven is certainly a flavoursome novel. Perhaps too flavoursome given the funky, gunky habits of many of the species we're introduced too. It's well written and has that good-humoured vibe common among contemporary British science fiction writers. The dialogue is spot on, and there are some memorable characters. Such as Gnumph, a "megaspore" who swallows its passengers and stows them in its stomach as it zips about the galaxy. I do think the plot, however, could have been better defined and it is sometimes lost among the verdant prose. Also in common with much current UK SF, multiplicity has a strong presence. But unlike Adrian Tchaikovsky and MR Carey, the plot does not hinge upon it. While the aforementioned draw dynamism from the struggle between, I suppose, territoriality and deterritorialisation, of trying to force everything into a mould versus live-and-let-live, Yokkun's Depth has none of this. The Throlken police violence and they have fenced off sections of the galaxy, but that's more or less the extent of their contemporary involvement. The rising entity certainly conducts its relations with others through a strictly instrumental lens, but its ultimate goal is not about imposing a straitjacket or a prison on the galaxy.

Geon/Toner is forced to impose some reterritorialisation of his own to make a novel out of his book. The aliens are varied and weird, but their cultures and psychologies much less so. Whether an eight-winged monstrosity, a be-slippered centipede analogue, or sentient parasites inhabiting the nostrils of their host, these characters are very human. Only the Throlken remain inscrutable. Compared, again, with Tchaikovsky whose work can be characterised as posthumanist SF thanks to the level of detail that goes into constructing psychologically-convincing non-human protagonists, there perhaps could have been room here for some similar exploration. Second, for all the wonderful weirdness, the socioeconomic system that unites Yokkun's Depth and other civilised phaslairs is ... capitalism. Characters want to be wealthy. Characters have to buy things. Characters have to rent out rooms (and, on one occasion, a floating junkberg on the edge of a solar system). It's easier to imagine alternative biologies than alternatives to capitalism, to put a spin on Fredric Jameson. As such the world building only goes so far, and not far enough into the truly alien. Lastly, for a seething novel bursting with life forms, the publisher - Solaris - could not have cranked out a more boring cover. Do they not believe in catching the buying public's eye?

These criticism aside, The Immeasurable Heaven will probably benefit from a reread. There is a lot going on here away from the plot line, and there are details that could be savoured on the second trip through. It is a recommend to SF readers, certainly, and it will be getting a nomination from me for the longlist of the British Science Fiction Association awards this year. And I hope there are more adventures and explorations of this setting to come.

Science Fiction Book Haul #5

There's some A-format goodness for the discerning genre fiction fan.

Starting at the bottom, it's another collaboration between Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. I did enjoy Lucifer's Hammer last year, which was a romp unnecessarily blighted by right wing and racist asides. Footfall apparently is of a similar cast, except our beautiful green Earth gets assailed by elephantine aliens. I'm sure there will be absurd moments, but nothing can top their Lucifer silliness of having a throwaway character surfing a mile-high tsunami.

Adam Roberts's Salt isn't only the newest book in this selection, it's his debut novel! To be honest, I don't know much about it. Except it's well thought of. A colony ship treks across space to a new Earth, and finds a stark, eerily beautiful world. Unfortunately, old rivalries are no respecters of new beginnings and the cracks in the mission soon show. Up next is Jody Scott's I, Vampire in the classic Women's Press line. The sequel to Passing for Human, which I also have, this features a vampire called O'Blivion who strikes up a relationship with Virginia Woolf. Who is really a dolphin-like alien, and adventures ensue. Sounds weird in a fantastically good way.

Next up is the don, Robert Silverberg. I've got loads of his books but, to date, have only read two of his novels. I'll keep collecting them though. The people of the 25th century are fed up with a crowded, hungry Earth, and have decided to chance on happiness by skipping back in time. More aposite now than the publication date (1967), seeing as too much politics plucks at the nostalgia strings. Clifford Simak's City is probably his best known, and is often considered his best book. The human race has either died out or fled the Earth for the stars, and we didn't take our best friends with us. Abandoned to fend for themselves among our ruins, a new civilisation starts its rise - a society of very good boys.

I recently had my first encounter with AE van Vogt, he of Voyage of the Space Beagle fame, and his Darkness on Diamondia didn't land with me. But his early work is generally considered first rate, among which is the second of his Weapons books, The Weapon Makers. The blurb promises a titanic galaxy-spanning scrap, and the hype suggests some of the best writing in genre sf. Something to look forward to. Richard Cowper (pronounced Cooper)'s Time Out of Mind is a story of future drugs cops, illicit substances that give users the power to teleport objects, and a conspiracy by a "fascist megalomaniac" to use all this for evil. What japes.

Final two. I recently enjoyed M John Harrison's Light, an underappreciated and seldom-acknowledged space opera. And here we have a collection of his early short fiction. One of the stories recounts the adventures of a galactic pimp. I'm sure the old beards of hard SF would not have approved. And as coincidence would have it, the final title in this wee haul comes from Arthur C Clarke. In The Songs of Distant Earth, our pearl of a planet has been consumed by a nova, and the colony ship Magellan is all that's left. We're off to find a new home, then. We happen upon the friendly aliens of the planet Thalassa but - oh no - some interspecies intimacy brings issues to light.

These are my recent pick ups. What about yours?

What I've Been Reading Recently

It's been over a month since the last one, so here are the books that have kept me ticking over since.

The Conservative Party after Brexit by Tim Bale
Fools by Pat Cadigan
Our Bloc: How We Win by James Schneider
Far from the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson
The Reader by Bernard Schlink
The Dog Stars by Peter Heller
Wifedom by Anna Funder
The Darkness on Diamondia by AE van Vogt
The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini
Azanian Bridges by Nick Wood
The Agony of Power by Jean Baudrillard
Count Zero by William Gibson
We Do Not Part by Han Kang

Shall we get the non-fiction out the way with first? Many thanks to Tim Bale for kindly sending me a review copy of the second edition of his latest book on the Tories. I will write about it soon, promise! The appearance on this list of Baudrillard's final book marks not a descent into nihilism, but a side project that has quite a bit to do with hegemony. In The Agony of Power, he refers to simulation, simulacra, and their logics as hegemony. But untangling it meant going back to Symbolic Exchange and Death and his other key subsequent works. They will get featured on the next round up, but I will say they were all enjoyable as well as useful reads. On the subject of the H-word, I also read James Schneider's short book answering the perennial 'what is to be done?' question. And his argument was for a coordinating organisation that could network across and facilitate solidarity between an array of protest and social movements. Apparently this influenced Jeremy Corbyn enough to set up the Peace and Justice project, and you can see parallels between his remarks on what the new party should look like and the arguments in this book. Though, as we know, the practice has fallen somewhat short. Last here is Anna Funder's Wifedom, an excoriating expose of how George Orwell and his biographers have suppressed Eileen Blair, his wife, out of his writing and accounts of his life. It somewhat undermines the saintly pedestal sundry centrist writers have put him on.

Two works of mainstream fiction cropped up thanks to book club commitments. The Reader is probably best known for the 2008 Kate Winslet flick, and it was good group fodder. Plenty in there about post-war trauma, war crime blindness and forgiveness. It was a very easy rid. On a not dissimilar theme, Han Kang's We Do Not Part was dreamlike, chilling, melancholic, and beautiful. A meditation on a series of massacres that prefaced the Korean War, it is an elegant piece of writing.

On the science fiction, at the bottom was van Vogt's tedious tale of slow-burn alien rebellion in Darkness on Diamondia. Do not recommend, and not ideal for a first foray into his oeuvre. Better but not great was Tade Thompson's Far from the Light of Heaven. I do like Tade and follow him on social media, but this - again a first try of his work - did not sit with me. Pat Cadigan's Fools began with promise and fizzled out amid a mess of melding personalities and confused memories. And, I'm sorry to say, William Gibson's follow up to Neuromancer didn't leave much of a lasting impression. I remember Count Zero being entertaining enough, but it didn't stick. Nick Woods's Azanian Bridges had promise: an alternative South Africa where apartheid had persisted to the mid-2010s, someone invents an empathy/mind-reading machine. A well-constructed piece but, I don't know, it just missed something. Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves, with a lovely Ken MacLeod intro doing the contextualising, was also interesting but I didn't find the speculative dimensional physics babble in the last third that gripping. Perhaps I'm getting harder to please and going off hard SF? To Sleep in a Sea of Stars was a thick chonker of a space opera, and paused before giving it a go. And it was a bit mid. Christopher Paolini's background as a fantasy writer shows through with SF analogues of magic items and lich lords, but also dump in Cthulhu-style aliens, mutated zombie hordes, periodic down times for exposition, and the sorts of battles that read like a first person shooter/end boss fight narration - that should give you a flavour of what to expect. Only one SF novel properly stood out, and that was Peter Heller's The Dog Stars. The plague has come and gone, nearly everyone is dead, and what's left has to get by in a brutal and nasty world. Somewhere between The Road and Station Eleven in the violence/brutality department, it was well written enough to earn a recommend.

The highlights then? Undoubtedly the two mainstream novels, and the Baudrillard. What have you been reading recently?

Science Fiction Book Haul #4

Book hauls have never stopped being popular on YouTube. But written versions? Somewhat less so. As you can tell from this place's paint job, being fashionable has never been a concern for this blog. And, sadly, these days science fiction is far from the flavour of the month either. Therefore posting about recent SF acquisitions on here is something of an apposite match, and perhaps a waste of time. Not that this bothers me.

Up first is Nevil Schute's On the Beach. I'm sure most readers, even if they're not sf or literary buffs will have heard of this thanks to the Gregory Peck film. A rare exercise in the hopeless everyone-dies-in-the-end scenario, nuclear war in the northern hemisphere has created a radioactive cloud that is slowly enveloping the Earth. Australia has escaped the fall out, but weather patterns mean it's closing in and with it, certain death. How do you cope when the end is nigh, and what happens when a submarine captain receives a radio signal from the irradiated shores of the United States?

Next is John Scalzi's Old Man's War from 2005, the first in a seven book series - the latest of which came out this year. The conceit here is that old people are being enlisted for space war. Their wizened frames are traded in for biochemically and nanotech enhanced soldier bodies that can take the fight to the aliens. It is well thought of and was nominated for the Hugo. Bringing things back to Earth, The Parable of the Talents is the second book in what would have been Octavia E Butler's near future series about the collapse of civilisation and the Mad Max-style fun that entails. Noted because the narrative jumps off in the 2020s as the US crumples beneath the weight of a right wing authoritarian president, this was to be a story of struggle, of overcoming, and building a space faring future away from the ruined Earth.

Arthur C Clarke gets a bit of a bad rap these days for having churned out, by our standards, dull and Whiggish science fiction (though I found his A Fall of Moondust entertaining enough). Does this judgement include Imperial Earth? 150 years from now, citizens from across the solar system are converging on Earth to celebrate 500 years of American independence. The futuristically named Duncan MacKenzie is making the diplomatic pilgrimage from the tunnels of Titan, but is he visiting to just make nice with the locals or are their ulterior motives afoot?

Jumping from the nearish future to the far past, Caspar Geon (AKA Tom Toner) sets The Immeasurable Heaven a long time ago in a galaxy far away. Billions of years back, to be precise, during a time when the universe was smaller and empty space was alive with a rich soup of elementary particles. There are no humans in this story, but we do have a settled galaxy - Yokkun's Depth - and a plot arising from the consequences of puncturing holes in the fabric of reality to reach the younger universes beneath. Immeasurable was published in the summer and comes highly recommended to me via several sf booktubers, so looking forward to digging in before long.

Last is the compilation Nebula Award Stories 5 edited by James Blish. In his intro, Blish takes issue with vote massaging accusations around the 1970 contest. But that's by the by. Included here are two authors' signature shorts. Samuel R Delany's Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones and Harlan Ellison's famous A Boy and His Dog. The "also-rans" are Robert Silverberg's 1969 award winner Passengers, Ursula K Le Guin's Nine Lives, Larry Niven's Not Long Before the End, and The Man Who Learned Loving by Theodore Sturgeon. There are bonus essays about the state of science fiction in 1969 from Darko Suvin and Alexei Panshin. Apart from a touch of sun fade on the spine, this is in very good nick for such an old book/

Have you picked up anything interesting lately, SF or non-sf related?

What I've Been Reading Recently

Proper blogging resumes tomorrow. In the mean time, I'm looking back over recent reads. As it's been a while since the the last round up, I'm not listing everything I've read since early July as it's quite a lot. So I'm sticking to September's tally, which is plenty big enough!

Get In by Patrick Maguire and Gabrield Pogrund
Declaration by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Grass by Sheri S Tepper
The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson
Agonistics by Chantal Mouffe
Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Birthright: The Book of Man by Mike Resnick
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
For a Left Populism by Chantal Mouffe
New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos edited by Ramsey Campbell
Toward a Green Democratic Revolution by Chantal Mouffe
Intrusion by Ken MacLeod
Light by M John Harrison

Some of my reading is groping toward issues around hegemony and anti-hegemony, hence the Hardt and Negri and the Mouffe. Re: her work on hegemony, like many socialists of a certain vintage Mouffe's famous/infamous Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, authored with Ernesto Laclau, never sat well with me. As a good Althusserian I enjoy a textual expunging of essentialisms as much as anyone else, in their case against treating politics as simple expressions of class. They argue there isn't a necessary correspondence, let alone a guarantee that ensures our class takes up socialist politics. Instead politics has to be articulated by organisations and parties through the formation of hegemonies and hegemonic blocs. While this latter point is true, there is obviously a relation between class and politics, which we see when classes and strata always tend toward certain parties. This is empirical fact, and is a pattern we see repeated across all liberal democracies. The explanation lies not in essential relations and simple correspondences, but the inertia of history and life experience. I.e. Broadly similar experiences of living in capitalist societies spontaneously produces broadly similar and shared outlooks, which inculcates certain dispositions and tendencies towards certain kinds of politics. Don't get me wrong, there is much that is valuable in Mouffe's work and I find it persuasive, but the autonomy of the political is not something I can get on board with.

More of that another time. Novels-wise, there were plenty of highlights. Tepper's Grass was a slow burn, unlike the fires that rip through the book. The world building was spot on, the characterisation well done, and the story compelling. Tchaikovsky's sequel to Children of Time was a worthy successor. As inventive as that celebrated book, it doubles down on the multiplicity vs oneness dynamic, the speculative sociology and psychology, and also is a white knuckle ride of a novel. Excellent stuff. Our Ken's meditation on New Labour-y nanny state authoritarianism was a timely read now that a worn out tribute act is in office. Intrusion is a paranoid classic, and the Kafkaesque climax is as gripping as it is technically brilliant. Lastly, Harrison's Light, the first of his I've read, was remarkable. Some of the best writing and character work you'll find anywhere, not just several thousand light years from Earth. A serial killing protagonist, shades of eldritch horror, mind games, and hard physics are seamlessly blended together. One of the best sf novels of this century.

Alas, there were downers too. I know The Wild Shore was well reviewed on release, but is very YA without realising it and, even worse, is quite boring. Not one of KSR's best. Also disappointing was the Cthulhu collection. The key note story, Stephen King's Crouch End was too heavy handed in my view. Attanasio's The Star Pools was a short of two halves, with the latter half being excellent while the first didn't work. And the others were a mixed bag, a hybrid of entertaining and try hard. Apologies if I've trodden on the toe/flippers of Old Ones fans. But truly terrible was Resnick's Birthright, a series of linked vignettes taken from his future history sequence about the rise and fall of our species. Nothing more need be said - I'm saving my venom for the end-of-year worst books list.

What have you been reading recently?

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