Genocide

 

Paul Leonard Genocide (1997)
I know I'm only going to end up writing the same review I always write of underwhelming Doctor Who tie-in novels, but what the fuck, why not? Maybe something nice will happen.

As I've stated on several occasions, I used to be addicted to these things. There were two published each month for a while and I bought and read every single one of them without fail, not quite to the exclusion of anything else, but with hindsight I really wish my focus had been a little wider. My subsequent tendency to sneer is therefore derived from my eventually having realised that quite a few of these books were pretty poor, which is massively embarrassing given how amazing I once believed them to be. This possibly informs my tendency to overreact when writing reviews of Who novels. I additionally tend to throw babies out with whatever bathwater happens to be available because I dislike almost anything which calls itself fandom, and I'm disappointed with anyone who can claim such a fervent degree of allegiance to bland, button-pushing generic entertainment product; and I'm disappointed with them because that was me a couple of decades ago.

Nevertheless, given the tonnage of eighties X-Men comics I've purchased over the last couple of years, I'm not really in any position to disparage the Doctor Who novel on the grounds of it being either juvenile or mass produced, because - aside from anything else - I still fucking love some of this shit even if I don't necessarily want to hang around with anyone dressed as one of the characters; so I'm going to try to break it down a little further.

Mark Hodder has observed that the once considerable popularity of the fictional detective Sexton Blake seems to have waned roughly correspondent to the rise in popularity of Doctor Who, prompting Hodder to further speculate upon their similarities, and how it could be argued that the two characters have occupied more or less the same cultural niche at different ends of the century*. Blake was initially a response to Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, an arguably more egalitarian interpretation freed from the limitations of single authorship, and even if Blake was more product than Holmes, he benefits from being born to an era prior to the full mechanisation of the production line, figuratively speaking, meaning even serials such as those featuring Blake, Doc Savage, Perry Rhodan or whoever else, might showcase the singular vision of an individual author rather than a committee or a fucking focus group. In writing terms, we're talking craft more than art but this isn't to say that we're talking artless, and for my money, the best Sexton Blake has been equal to or superior to Conan Doyle's antecedent. In other words, pulp - as is generally applied willy-nilly by persons who rarely seem to understand quite where the term came from - doesn't have to mean low quality.

I see something of this as being applicable to Who, and to how Who has evolved over the years into something which is more or less all product. Of course, it's always been a mass produced and undeniably populist deal, and anyone who ever mistook Who for handwritten Kafka manuscripts unpublished during the author's lifetime is a fucking idiot; but mass production tends to be corporate, and the nature of the corporation has changed from something which may once have supported stables of semi-domesticated creative weirdos to what it is now, wherein marketing has become so invasive as to infest every stage of the allegedly creative process to a degree which seems almost comparable to ideology. In terms of Who, both televised and written, this means we've gone from slightly cranky but occasionally inspired outsiders who drew their influences from across the board, to persons who are usually fans with all the brand loyalty implied by the term, whose inspiration is mostly self-referential, and who have been hired to fill a quota and tick certain boxes. Doctor Who went off the air in 1989 when it was discovered that only seven people were still watching. It returned as a one-off special in 1996, which - for me - approximately represents the corporate singularity, the point beyond which the whole enterprise became more akin to product than anything derived from even a diluted artistic vision. It was specifically designed to capture an audience, to corner a market, and creative considerations were subservient to this goal.

Going back a couple of years, Virgin Books took it upon themselves to publish novels continuing the series in print alone once the TV show went tits up. The series was called the New Adventures and they were mostly pretty good, or at least that's how I remember them. Having been pitched at what was by definition a dwindling audience, none of whom were children - at least not physically - the authors were free to go wild, to come up with all manner of crazy shite which we never would have seen on the screen. So even those who might be deemed slavering continuity obsessed fans occasionally shone brightly, and as a result, many of the New Adventures worked as science-fiction novels in their own right.

Then someone presumably noticed the success of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and figured it might be worth giving the Who goose another squeeze just in case there were a few more golden eggs still to be popped out; and so it came back, as described above, and because we didn't want to take any chances, we got all of our best people on the job, the award winners, the proven sellers, the stars of the marketing department. We held meetings and asked the kids what they wanted, then pulled our findings apart so as to work out what they really wanted even if they didn't know it. We published our conclusions. We talked to the shareholders. We got a great deal.

So where the Virgin books had been mostly decent, occasionally exceptional, and at least aspiring to something other than text which asks us to imagine we're watching a TV show, the BBC novels which supplanted them were patchier, with occasional flashes of inspiration arising apparently in spite of the general thrust rather than as part of the strategy; and Genocide seems sadly illustrative of this.

I remember liking it a lot but seem to have outgrown the form, I suppose you might say; and it's not even a bad book. Paul Leonard wrote a lot of these things and was generally competent, able to string a sentence together and good for just the sort of weird, screwy ideas upon which Who first built its reputation. Here we have time trees - and you can probably guess what they do from the name - which facilitate the unfortunate extinction of the entire human race thanks to a species of four-eyed horses - all of which seems to hint at the influence of Larry Niven, at least from where I'm standing. His prose is mostly workmanlike and efficient without being truly dull, and he occasionally slips into clipped cinematic non-sentences for the sake of drama or pacing without ending up looking like a wanker, as so many others often do.

This was enough for me back in 1997 but this time around, I can't quite get past those elements which seem to betray the overbearing hand of editorial direction. We're clearly reading something aimed at a younger age group, and someone at head office doubtless thought we'd identify with Sam and all of her modular teenage concerns; and we're reading something which quite clearly aspires to viewing as an imaginary television show on our mind's inner screen, right down to entire alien races represented by just three actors in funny costumes.

Paul Leonard does as good a job as he can within the limitations of the revised form, and it starts well and doesn't read like fan fiction - as was often the case; but once the big ideas have been delivered, there's not actually a lot of story to be had. It certainly didn't need three-hundred pages and sags horribly after the first hundred or so, descending into inconsequential scrapes and running around until it's time for The Generation Game. It really feels as though these BBC novels were the last good thing, or at least the last with any potential beyond mere sales figures and pushing that consumer loyalty button. Genocide had potential, but time was running out.

*: Unfortunately I can't remember where he made these speculations, so it was probably some private correspondence or other.

The Stars My Destination

Alfred Bester The Stars My Destination (1956)
This is why I've tended to steer clear of the classics. I'm sure everything said of this novel is approximately true, but as with Asimov's Foundation, Zelazny's Lord of Light, Larry Niven's entire body of work, and many, many others, I probably should have read it when I was a teenager; because I'm nearly fifty-five and I think the moment has gone for myself and this novel. I don't recall being particularly knocked out by The Demolished Man either, for what that may be worth.

The Stars My Destination tells of Gully Foyle, a raging thickie stranded in space who swears bloody vengeance on the crew of a passing spaceship which fails to respond to his distress call. He's eventually rescued by other means, has his face tattooed, receives an education, acquires superhuman powers, disguises himself as the bon vivant owner of a weird futuristic fairground and, in pursuing his vendetta, saves the world from a super-weapon which presumably serves as part of some cold war metaphor. It's weird, fast-paced, imaginative, and ticks all of the boxes which might require ticking, and yet I just wasn't feeling it. For all it has in its favour, it tends to jabber in much the same way as C.M. Kornbluth, lending the text the slightly disagreeable jazzy quality of those Marx Brothers movies amounting to somebody saying something stupid very fast, and that's before we even get to the parole in libertà of the finale.

Some men on the internet said that The Stars My Destination is a precursor to cyberpunk with its pacing and corporate espionage, but I couldn't really give a shit about cyberpunk, so one might just as well call it a precursor to Joe Dolce's Shaddap You Face for all the difference it makes. Certainly it's hard not to think of said Ultravox defusing novelty record each time Gully Foyle asks what's a matter, you?, which he does with frequency sufficient for me to have noticed.

The story is actually, on close inspection, a little too weird to be sustainable under ordinary circumstances and is as such exactly the sort of thing A.E. van Vogt churned out on a fairly regular basis, except van Vogt usually made it work in spite of itself, screwy shit that doesn't quite add up being his natural literary habitat. So The Stars My Destination is good, or at least it's not bad, but it could have been better and probably was when I was fifteen. Never mind.

Halcyon Drift

Brian Stableford Halcyon Drift (1972)
Back in what I calculate to have been 1978, or 1979 at the latest, my second (or possibly third) year English class was running some sort of book club whereby we could buy cheap books direct from the publishers. Amongst the promotional material we were sent was a poster featuring the covers of thirty or forty science-fiction novels published by Pan including Michael Coney's Brontomek!, Simak's Werewolf Principal, Heinlein's Green Hills of Earth, Dick's Galactic Pot-Healer and others - notably this one. The other side of the poster was Angus McKie's gorgeous cover art for Brian Stableford's Rhapsody in Black, a spaceship called the Hooded Swan which likewise appears on the cover of Stableford's Halcyon Drift, which is the first in a series. The point of this extended digression is that it was this poster which most likely imprinted me with those spacecraft painted by Angus McKie and others, and which has ultimately informed my reading habits for at least some of the last decade; and when I happened across this one in a used book store with that immediately familiar cover, I nearly lost my shit.

Inevitably, Halcyon Drift could never have lived up to four decades of expectation, but it's decent of its kind. It's space opera, essentially a western set amongst the stars, but is well-written, even crafted, and with just the right quota of mind-expanding concepts to keep things interesting and even unpredictable without stretching the genre too far. I'd say it's in the vein of Larry Niven, except I always seem to find myself irritated by Larry Niven; and whatever his crimes may be, Stableford manages very well without them. Being space opera, a genre with which I feel entirely sated by this point, I would say Halcyon Drift does very well in instituting a series that I very much doubt I'll read, but - let's face it - a few more with Angus McKie covers would probably be enough to swing it.

Four Circles

Meg McCarville Four Circles (2019)
I assume these would be four circles of hell, or thereabouts. This is the first Amphetamine Sulphate title to be issued with the warning that some of the content may upset readers of a nervous disposition. It didn't particularly upset me but then maybe it wouldn't being as I've only ever had consensual sex, and that's a bit of an unfortunately grey area within these pages. I was bothered by something which happened to a cat, not least because this is the third book in a row to go there - excepting the recent Niven and Pournelle yawnfest - but Meg was clearly unhappy about the occurrence, so at least we're on the same team. Otherwise, it's a ninety page dirty bomb of terrible sex, grinding poverty, disease, meth, crack, sweat, and arseholes detonating over and over right into your face like a sort of explosive diarrhoea singularity, and I don't get the impression she made any of it up, because had she done it probably wouldn't have been quite so relentless. Some of it may upset you, or it will hopefully upset you and thus serve as an indication that regardless of whatever else you may have going on, you're approximately sane; but as for trigger warnings, what little I've read of de Sade was worse, and somewhere there will be someone who was once traumatised in such a way that digestive biscuits now send them into a psychological tailspin.

Meg McCarville gets through this nightmare whilst somehow managing to retain a sense of humour and providing the rest of us with one hell of an education. Weirdly, it reminds me of nothing so much as a real life Johnny Ryan cartoon. I'm not sure that's a good thing, but given that she's written it all down, I'm glad that it's been published.

I knew there was a reason why I've never been drawn to crystal meth, and Meg McCarville articulates it quite well.

The Mote in God's Eye

Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle The Mote in God's Eye (1974)
This may have been the most boring novel I've ever attempted to read. It's less hateful than Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, but that's hardly a recommendation. I'd promised myself no more Niven because whilst he has some great ideas, they are often the only thing going for an otherwise irritating novel; but Pournelle seemed kind of interesting when I read about him in Charles Platt's second Dream Makers book the other month, and I suppose I must have wondered about the title at some point.

I started, then eventually decided I couldn't read another word at around page three-hundred. The next two things I tried reading both featured cats being killed - albeit accidentally in the case of Sid Vicious - which depressed me, inspiring a return to Mote on the grounds of feline destruction being one sin it seemed unlikely to commit; but after another couple of days with less than a hundred pages to go, I realised that it really was as dull as it had appeared during the previous sitting.

The story is set against a backdrop of humanity as a well-established galaxy spanning empire which encounters alien life for the first time and is thus obliged to have a bit of a rethink; and somehow they found a way to make it about as interesting as a sales report.

Niven's weird alien civilisation is kind of engaging up to the point at which it started to remind me of the cantina in Star Wars or something written by Douglas Adams, as always seems to happen; and no - I don't actually care whether or not he got there first and should thus be hailed as the father of smirking aliens who crack knob gags. The rest is your basic military science-fiction bearing a suspicious resemblance to sixties Star Trek:

'Commander Sinclair, have we enough energy for a report to Fleet?'

'Aye, Skipper, the engines hold verra well indeed. Yon object is nae so massive as we thought, and we've hydrogen to spare.'

Unless I imagined it, the great majority of the text seems to be taken up with important space navy types holding ponderous conversations about how such and such an alien discovery is likely to influence the political economy of such and such a colony world. This is savoured with military protocol and ensigns screaming sir, yes, sir. It gives the impression of an author enamoured with his own martial testimony, imagining that a military background has furnished him with an experience so much richer than the rest of us could begin to imagine, and now he's going to afford us a glimpse of the magic by describing nervous young recruits summoned to the offices of grizzled old warhorses covered in medals. What heady days those were!

Additionally, it's not particularly well written and every other page seems to throw in some element that doesn't make sense.

'We'll have to go through it,' Whitbread's Motie said. She twittered to Charlie for a moment. 'There are alarms and there'll be warriors on guard.'

'Can we go over it?'

'You'd pass through an x-ray laser, Horst.'

'God's teeth. What are they so afraid of?'

I've read that passage seven or eight times, and I still don't understand why Horst would pass through an x-ray laser. I can't tell whether it's a prediction or a facetious comment which says something or other about Horst, most likely suggesting that he lacks a due sense of caution, but even with this potentially being the case, the phrasing doesn't quite work; and there are similar weird semantic hiccups throughout.

While we're here, there's one human woman in the entire book, who is naturally married off to some military dude at the end. The sexism wouldn't ordinarily bother me, except it's clearly symptomatic of a wider problem. Stephen Baxter and even Peter F. Hamilton did this sort of thing so much better.

So yes, well done, lads - you've knocked Heinlein right off his throne with this one.

The Crossing Line

Fabian Nicieza etc. The Crossing Line (1990)
'Back on the Shakespeare, I see,' observed my wife as I lay in bed reading my sad little mylar bagged stack of Avengers comics. I didn't blush because there didn't seem to be much point. I freely admit that I bought the six issues of The Crossing Line because I was rifling through the used comic book racks at Half-Price when I noticed one of these with guest starring Alpha Flight proclaimed on the cover.

'Ooh Alpha Flight!' squealed the little voice within, and they had four of the six issues there in the racks which seemed nice and tidy, and for just a dollar a pop, and it was easy enough to find the other two online, and why the fuck not? In any case, half of my facebook friends list - admittedly the half I've unfollowed so that I don't have to read their characteristically inane reportage on cosplay, Funko Pops, or watching four thousand episodes of Charmed in a single sitting - are either Harry Potter fans, grown men presently engaged with a Puffin Books reading marathon, or people who are actually able to discuss what Steven Moffat was trying to say in such and such a terminally shite Who episode, so fuck you!

Anyway, I've been trying to read The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, and Jesus Christ it's boring. It hasn't quite reached Heinlein standards of loathsome which is why I'm still dutifully ploughing through page after page of space opera tedium, but I needed a break, and this seemed sufficiently unlike The Mote in God's Eye as to serve as a palate cleanser. Being a kid's superhero comic from the nineties, it quite naturally takes itself far too seriously, but no more so than Mote's wearying starship commanders responding to security breaches and other important sounding military shit.

The Crossing Line is a story of terrorists hijacking a British nuclear submarine, and how the mighty Avengers rush to the scene to save the day only to find themselves embroiled in a massive clusterfuck with Canadian and Russian superhero teams who had the same idea, just as the forces of Atlantis once again decide to wage war on the surface dwellers. There are probably about five persons with speaking roles in the entire story who don't have super-powers, or who haven't acquired super-powers by the last issue, so it's like that Simpsons comic in which the power plant blows up, irradiating the entire town of Springfield, transforming everyone into superheroes. It's deeply fucking ludicrous, but is a lot more fun than A Mote in God's Eye, and the fact of almost every single character being able to fly or to shoot beams from their hands roughly shuffles the story closer to science-fiction than most caped material; and besides, describing this as deeply fucking ludicrous implies that there's such a thing as the ponderous superhero equivalent of Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, which there really isn't.

By my understanding, the appeal of eighties Marvel lay in its being a huge shared universe viewed only one small piece at a time through reading the comics and trying to work out who was who, what they could do, and what the hell was going on; so storytelling aside, it appealed to anyone who liked to collect sets of things as a kid, anyone who ever decided that their Shogun Warrior model kits could inhabit the same continuity as Micronauts action figures. That's how this stuff first drew me in, and how it still works up to a point. I'm older and wiser, but it's still kind of interesting trying to work out who the fuck these other Avengers were supposed to be, given that I don't even remember them from back in the day and otherwise recognise only Captain America and the Vision.

Whilst Fabian Nicieza has written some ropey stuff in his time, he always had something interesting going on, and was distinguished amongst the Marvel script droids of his era as someone with a distinctive style, even with themes common to his writing - specifically a pronounced tendency to draw from the real world politics of the time in ways which seem quite perceptive once you get past the people in costumes cracking jokes whilst fighting. This also means that we get to see not only George W. Bush in a nineties Marvel comic, but even the Thatch!

The Crossing Line is, as I guess we have probably established, ridiculous, although it differs only from more recent Grant Morrison efforts in method rather than substance, but it doesn't matter. It does everything it sets out to do and held my attention for a couple of hours without inducing either depression or embarrassment. I doubt anyone will ever collect this material as a graphic novel, but maybe it's fine as a stack of six comic books.

Dream Makers volume two

Charles Platt (editor) Dream Makers volume two (1983)
In addition to the first volume, Santa also bought me this, apparently thanks to my Amazon wish list having been consulted by more than one of his little helpers - so that was all very nice and tidy. Once again Platt, former editor of New Worlds, travels all over, hangs out with a number of seminal science-fiction authors, and interviews them; except it's so much more than is promised by the description. One might almost call it a manifesto, or at least something with equivalent purpose.

This time, Platt opens it out a little further, bringing in a healthy cross section of female authors missing from the first book, in addition to a few persons arguably on the fringe of what is generally termed science-fiction. Throughout the interviews, the one constant seems to have been an acidic disregard for the explosion in the popularity of sword and sorcery which came about towards the close of the seventies. Platt is clearly coaxing his people into slagging it off, but not without some justification, and Joe Haldeman's observation seems particularly broad to the point of neatly summarising what I at least would regard as still very much a problem with culture in general.

'I think I understand the kind of person who reads this stuff. It's not quite as bad as sitting watching situation comedies day after day, but I think it's the same kind of mentality: someone who likes having the same buttons pushed over and over.'

Political sympathies represented come from across the board, left, right, and all points in between, and I found it interesting that relative political polarity seemed to have no bearing on the subjective worth of what is said. Indeed, Jerry Pournelle, seemingly an author much further to the right than I would ordinarily enjoy, gave considerably more thought provoking testimony than at least a few with whom I expected to empathise. At the other end of the scale, James Tiptree, Jr. - the pseudonym of Alice Sheldon in case anyone didn't get the memo - particularly impressed me.

'Life is a denial of entropy; it's a striking manifestation of negative entropy. So I believe it can be shown that things with a high degree of organisation, meaning a low degree of entropy, seem good to us. For example, Nazism is a highly entropic form, and democracy is far more complex. An altruistic act is more complex than a selfish one.'

William Burroughs doesn't disappoint, and nor does L. Ron Hubbard, while the peculiarly humourless Robert Anton Wilson comes across as a massive tosspot, and Larry Niven was about as interesting as I expected him to be.

Naturally it's a mixed bag, but even when interviewing hopeless arseholes, Platt gets something useful from the situation; which all adds up to a collection which is both inspiring and slightly depressing - inspiring because I'm definitely going to have to hunt down the works of a few of these people, and slightly depressing because this is a world which has passed, one built upon worthwhile aspirations which I half suspect have largely been replaced by cosplay, songs about hobbits, and other stuff which serves little purpose but to pass time and signify allegiance to the consumer demographic.

Dream Makers

Charles Platt (editor) Dream Makers (1980)
Well, this was a nice surprise - something added to an Amazon wish list way back whenever, mainly out of passing curiosity, then promptly forgotten until Santa saw fit to bring a copy forth from his mighty sack. Here Charles Platt - former art director for the Michael Moorcock version of New Worlds - travels around America, hangs out with a substantial cluster of big knobs of sixties and seventies science-fiction, and interviews them. It's mostly conversational, often illuminating, and does well to capture an era which seems to be slowly and unfortunately disappearing from the collective memory. There are a few writers whose work I wouldn't touch with yours, mate, but who nevertheless prove sufficiently fascinating to have me wishing I could work up the enthusiasm to read their books. Weirdly, A. E. van Vogt, whose work I find compelling, even fascinating, is about the only author who didn't have much of interest to say, possibly because he spent the time discussing his writing system with which I am already intimately familiar; but everyone else scores highly, even Asimov, and Moorcock's observations regarding the work of Larry Niven had me punching the air and barking ha! loud enough to scare the cat. Also, Brian Aldiss has gone up a little in my estimation, so that's nice.

Envoy to New Worlds

Keith Laumer Envoy to New Worlds (1963)
I've passed Laumer's adventures of Retief as they've sat on the shelves of Half-Price many a time, never having been drawn to the character. Retief is, very roughly speaking, James Bond in space, and, with a couple of exceptions, I'm generally wary of science-fiction authors who specialise in the adventures of recurring characters. Initially, I knew of Retief only as a black and white comic from the eighties, an independent, but one of those independents which aspired to be DC or Marvel, or at least Eclipse or First. I never read the comic but saw the ads in the back pages of The Trouble with Girls - or something of the sort - and it looked fucking awful, one of those strips where everyone wears the exaggerated angry grimace of a biro rendering of Iron Maiden's Eddie drawn on the back of a denim jacket worn by a fourteen-year old boy in a rural English town between the years of 1984 and 1986. I didn't even realise Retief had been based on a series of novels until recently, and I own this mainly because it's an Ace Double sharing a spine with Flight from Yesterday by the magnificently peculiar Robert Moore Williams.

To get my facts straight, Retief is actually a diplomat, and is as such extrapolated from Laumer's time spent in similar employment here on earth, mostly Burma according to Wikipedia. The stories are short and to the point - this is actually a collection of six - and might be seen as thematically ancestral to Larry Niven, Star Wars, 2000AD, Red Dwarf, and all those other narratives in which aliens are basically funny foreigners. There are certain colonialisms here, as you might reasonably expect, so the recipe isn't promising; but nevertheless, it turns out that these tales of Retief are very enjoyable - too short to outstay a welcome, plenty of pleasantly weird ideas, breezily written, and with a refreshingly high quota of wit; and even with aliens as funny foreigners, there's nothing objectionable. Strangest of all, I found myself reading one particular page as an exchange between Arthur Lowe and John Le Mesurier in their Dad's Army roles, and somehow it worked. I'm not sure whether I'll be reading more, but that's definitely a recommendation.

The Dreaming Void

Peter F. Hamilton The Dreaming Void (2007)
I'm still unable to work out what it is that Peter F. Hamilton does which makes his books so readable. They're the size of housebricks, this one is eight-hundred pages, and I just slip through the thing, reading fifty pages in the time it would otherwise take to read twenty. It doesn't seem to be that the print is particularly large or the language discernibly simplified, and oddly, nor is the narrative even necessarily so gripping as to account for such page-turnitude - in terms the Daily Mail would probably recognise. Yet, there it is. Whatever it is, he does it very well, and this doesn't even seem to be one of his good ones.

I wasn't going to read any more, but having loved Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy pretty much without reservation, I had a hankering; combined with coming across a copy of this one in Henry Pordes on Charing Cross Road and finding myself relishing the typeface used on these English versions, it being so much more alluring than on US editions of Hamilton. It turns out that the story has certain elements in common with Night's Dawn, namely technologically advanced star-spanning future humanity pitted against something powerful and devouring with religious overtones, physiologically malleable animals, concerns with immortality, transcendence and the afterlife and suchlike. I have a vague impression of various details serving as allegories to Bush's war on terror, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and so on, but this may just be a case of current events repurposed as archetypes; and xenophobia and fear of progress also figure. In any case, if anything specific is said, it's either been saved for a later volume or is simply difficult to unpick from disparate strands following a slightly confusing cast of fairly generic characters. It might have been easier had I read the novels preceding this trilogy, Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained, but I haven't and it shouldn't have been necessary.

Yes... characters...

Hamilton writes great characters, it has been said elsewhere and more than once, but actually he kind of doesn't. The narrative is told through his characters, but most of them seem fairly clichéd; and given that this is 3580AD, it seems odd that everyone should be talking and acting like persons starring alongside Ross Kemp in one of those grunting ITV dramas - some wearying cop show, tough guy bends rules to get the job done, tarts with hearts, hard nut with a soft center still dealing with the pain of losing his son, tip-offs from persons oozing Cockney charm - something called Thief Takers comes to mind, as it often does for me because although I never saw it, it has the worst title ever committed to telly and I feel fairly sure it must have ticked at least a couple of the above boxes*.

To be fair, this is only what Hamilton did in Night's Dawn, but Night's Dawn had the advantage of a profoundly weird setting and attendant props - the affinity bond, living starships, sentient habitats grown from engineered coral, and everyone who ever died coming back to life, not least of these being Madonna and Al Capone. Whilst Void has plenty of nice ideas of possibly equivalent potential, they're not well drawn - presumably because I never read Pandora's Star - and it all seems a bit Larry Niven, lacking anything with the surreal flair of the voidhawks. Plus, there's the occasional sprained literary ankle - something I failed to notice in Night's Dawn, if it was even there - and this sort of thing:

'Yes. He'll get his appointment the day after the Eggshaper guild announces its sculpted a ge-pig that can fly.'

Even without noting that its should probably be either it has or it's, a ge-pig is, in the story, a utilitarian creature with physical characteristics molded by agency of human telepathy, so, as we've already seen, whether or not the resulting creature has wings and the power of flight is down to the choice of the Eggshaper doing the work; and secondly, why the fuck would that particular expression still be in use in the thirty-sixth century in a different fucking universe? Additionally, why would anyone still remember either Johnny Cash or Pink Floyd - not denigrating the qualities of either, but references to the same are a little distracting.

I'm told that the conclusion to this trilogy is disappointing and not dissimilar to the conclusion of Night's Dawn, so I doubt if I'm going to bother with the other two. There are some nice ideas, but that's about as far as it goes.

*: I find titles which are simply collective nouns for whoever populates the story somewhat lacking poetry. Being as someone will eventually make a show about members of the criminal fraternity called Crime Doers, I hereby state my having thought of it first in anticipation of any royalties which may be my due.

Eye of Terror

Barrington J. Bayley Eye of Terror (2000)
Shortly after plucking this one from the shelves at Half Price, I noticed it was a tie-in novel, and one of a series to which Dan Abnett has also contributed. This didn't strike me as a particularly good omen, although to be fair I had no idea what Warhammer 40,000 was supposed to be, and it's Barrington Bayley, so it must have something going for it, surely…

However, my first impressions seemed to bear out my fears, as briefly spunked out all over facebook.

It's pretty bloody awful - a novel which aspires to be a table full of little metal figures surrounded by grown men rolling funny-shaped dice in the basement of the mother of the one with the biggest beard. I bought it because it's Barrington Bayley, and Barrington Bayley is fab and weird, but this reads like something written to pay a hefty phone bill - such a waste of a genuine talent. Maybe it gets better. I'll give it another fifty pages.

It was embarrassing once I realised that a couple of my facebook friends were into that whole gaming business. It's not a pursuit which had ever inspired me towards any strong opinion, but what opinions I had were formed back in 1987 when some beardy dude at art college tried to recruit me into his Dungeons & Dragons enclave. He described the rules, most of which seemed to be about him controlling everything and everyone, and it didn't sound much like fun as I would recognise it. The guy was clearly a tosser and so that very much coloured my judgement of anything involving funny shaped dice; also, there's not many things I dislike so much as a novel which really, really wishes it were telly, so the prospect of a novel that wants to be a fucking game seemed depressing beyond reason.

I vividly recall the impression garnered from the first fifty pages which inspired the above facebook comment - far too many adjectives, an overly choreographed fight every five minutes, and all set in one of those Larry Niven universes full of alien bars wherein things with two heads get drunk, stab you, or attempt to interest you in the services of a prostitute with six tits and two fannies; but I persisted, and it got better, and after a while it began to feel like Barrington Bayley again.

The Warhammer 40,000 universe may as well be the same one inhabited by Nemesis the Warlock in 2000AD, roughly speaking, grimy pseudo-medieaval military science-fiction with Tolkien, Lovecraft, and a load of other squelchy influences thrown in; and therefore clearly entirely compatible with the sort of weirdness in which Bayley specialised. Eye of Terror is mostly space marines possessed by demons, Chaos Gods, stomach-churning transformations, and all manner of things which would probably lose a ton of advertising revenue were they to turn up in Star Wars. I don't know what it's about, if it's really about anything, but it becomes vivid and even gripping as the story finds its pace. Strangest of all, disbelieving that something so good should have begun on such poor footing, I skipped back to the beginning and could find nothing of the material which had inspired my initial groaning. Either I acclimated to the novel or the book itself changed as I was reading it.

Very weird.

The Black Cloud

Fred Hoyle The Black Cloud (1957)
I had been trying to get hold of this one ever since I saw Dawkins rate it on one of those books you read as a kid shows, back when Dawkins was less annoying. The one I ordered from Amazon turned out to be an abridged effort printed for schools, about as thick as an After Eight mint and with half of the already reduced page count taken up by teachers notes and questions along the lines of why did the scientist think the Earth would become colder when the Black Cloud arrived? My friend Andy told me there was no point reading an abridged Black Cloud, so I didn't.

Nevertheless I kept looking because I'd promised myself I would find the thing, and was buoyed along by a vague childhood memory of my granny having fetched another Fred Hoyle science-fiction novel from the mobile library for me to read when I was ill. Only recently have I positively identified said novel as having been Into Deepest Space, not Neutron Star as I remember for some peculiar reason given that the latter title refers to a collection of short stories by Larry Niven. Anyway, I enjoyed Into Deepest Space immensely, so it was probably the first science-fiction novel I read, not counting Doctor Who books based on television shows.

Of course, Fred Hoyle was primarily a scientist, and one who now seems best known for having duffed up Stephen Hawking around the back of the bike sheds on occasions when the latter failed to cough up his dinner money, although the psychological underpinning of the battering was probably something to do with Hawking's theories supplanting Hoyle's steady state model of the universe. Hoyle seems to have been somewhat discredited in recent years, which is a shame as I still think the steady state is a nice idea and not entirely without merit, although some of the stuff he cooked up with that Chandra Wickramasinghe was obviously complete bollocks.

Anyway, I kept an eye open and thus made purchase of two cowritten novels - The Andromeda Breakthrough with John Elliott, and Seven Steps to the Sun with his offspring, Geoffrey Hoyle. They're pretty much unreadable, hard science diluted with a load of crap which I suspect some editor may have suggested would help sell the books - Ian Flemingisms and unconvincing references to the manly pursuit of smoking a pipe whilst making lurve to a beautiful woman. In spite of this, my search continued and has at last been rewarded.

Hard science-fiction is sort of the Paul Weller of science-fiction literature, I suppose - plenty of clenching and suggestions of commitment and less of the prancing around in dresses or talking about feelings; or page after page of top scientists having conversations about different kinds of proton, if you prefer - the kind of thing by which Isaac Asimov made his name. That said, in hard science-fiction terms, Asimov reads like one of Michael Moorcock's more inscrutably peculiar efforts compared to The Black Cloud.

The story is fairly simple - a massive cloud of dark gas approaches the solar system and comes to rest, blocking out the sun. The Earth freezes, everything begins to die, and it looks as though we're fucked until the point at which a group of plucky scientists realise that the cloud is intelligent and that communication is possible, and I won't spoil the rest. Most of this is told in a fashion which I would describe as plodding were I a less patient man, alternating passages reading more like essays than fiction, and droning conversations about protons and temperature differentials amongst numerous tweedy scientists, with the occasional light-hearted cricketing reference just to break it up a bit. It should be terrible, but the reader is quickly accustomed to this somewhat stilted style because that which is discussed, if not quite gripping, is certainly interesting.

Four days earlier in London a remarkable meeting had been held in the rooms of the Royal Astronomical Society. The meeting had been called, not by the Royal Astronomical Society itself, but by the British Astronomical Association, an association essentially of amateur astronomers.

Charles Kingsley, Professor of Astronomy in the University of Cambridge, travelled by train in the early afternoon to London for the meeting. It was unusual for him, the most theoretical of theoreticians, to be attending a meeting of amateur observers. But there had been rumours of unaccounted discrepancies in the positions of the planets Jupiter and Saturn. Kingsley didn't believe it, but he felt that scepticism should rest on solid ground, so he ought to hear what the chaps had to say about it.

Hold onto your hats, kids, because here we fucking go!!!

Seriously, in spite of itself, there's something in the tone and pacing of The Black Cloud which holds it all together. Despite the tweedier qualities, the somewhat predictable subtext of how everything would be better if we let scientists run the show, the suggestion of worldly experience which doesn't go much beyond handing in end of term papers and then enjoying a jolly old spot of cricket, despite all of its crankier qualities, The Black Cloud is an impressively solid novel, and - much to my surprise - one that has been worth every second of the wait. I suppose this is because, rather than having someone else come along to strip in details which might appeal to those who didn't actually want to read a science-fiction novel in the first place, Hoyle writes to his own strengths. There are some wonderful engrossing passages, not least the thoroughly convincing speculation on how intelligent life might develop within a cloud of interstellar gas, and even a few amusing steady state gags incorporated into discussion of the anthropic principal and even religion - one in the eye for the exploding-universe boys, as Hoyle puts it. The sobriety of the narrative lends the events of the story a greater and more chilling weight than one might experience were the tale to be told in more poetic terms. This shit could actually happen.

So Dawkins was right - The Black Cloud really is a classic.

A Fire Upon the Deep

Vernor Vinge A Fire Upon the Deep (1992)
I recall enjoying Vinge's The Peace War, and had since kept one eye open for this on the grounds of it apparently being his magnum opus. However, referring back to my review of The Peace War, written many, many centuries ago as a series of standing stones in a field to the right of the A46 as you pass Stoneleigh heading in the direction of Finham sewerage treatment plant, and reprinted in this collection, I find that my memory has lied, and that while I regarded The Peace War as chock full of great ideas, I found it otherwise quite a dull book. Sadly A Fire Upon the Deep isn't much of an improvement.

To give credit where it's due, Vinge is clearly a dab hand at massive brain-strangling concepts, and is able to write about them without jumping up and down shouting look at me with all my ideas so big as to make Einstein look like a wanker! For starters, I understand - possibly incorrectly but I can't be arsed to look it up - that Vinge's name is synonymous with the concept of technological singularity, the point at which technology is able to produce something superior to itself, and the future becomes a much stranger place than we could ever hope to predict. A Fire Upon the Deep appears to explore this general idea with the Blight, a near omniscient power born from a technological singularity many centuries before the story begins. To this cake he adds a peculiar yet believable race of pseudo-canine gestalt creatures, the Tines, of which an individual comprises four or five animals operating as a pack, liberally icing the result with a galaxy layered into zones by differing laws of physics, some more conducive to faster than light travel and artificial intelligence than others.

It's astonishing stuff, sure enough, and if you're going to have space opera, then it really needs to strive for the sort of scale invoked here, but...

One hundred pages in and, excepting some of the chapters depicting the pseudo-mediaeval Tine society, I was mostly too bored to take much of it in. I had a look at Wikipedia in the hope of working out what I'd just read. It sounded fairly interesting, so I started again. Ultimately it was okay, I guess, at least in so much as I made it to the end, but I'm still not sure quite why it needed to be six-hundred pages long. I think the problem is that most of it is written more or less in what I have come to think of as Doctor Who casual, the grammar and syntax of a twenty-something media studies graduate who writes television tie-in fiction influenced more by telly than by anything of the medium in which he - and it usually is he - is working. It's the narrative equivalent of Comic Sans. There's not much in the way of poetry. And sentences beginning with and abound, seemingly signifying a fear of commas, and there are parentheses all over (always an indication of someone who can't be bothered) and there's something called a godshatter, and some bloke achieves mastery over all of reality at the end just like in an X-Men comic, dramatised of course by short non-sentences which don't actually do anything, but which presumably represent some sort of ham-fisted attempt at crossing stream of consciousness imagery with a Nicolas Roeg film. Like this. Irritating. Very bad. Utter shite, in fact.

It's not terrible so much as that it lacks flair, and is in this case additionally handicapped by the conceit of having an entire galaxy chatting away, explaining the plot to itself on an enormous star-spanning internet message board, which doubtless seemed very futuristic back in 1992. The book does it's job, but that's about all, and there's a certain lazy tone wherein people decide to check it out or to take a serious look at themselves, yeah? In this regard, Vinge is a low level offender, and he at least keeps enough of the narrative together to prevent it turning into Larry Niven, but at six-hundred pages it's still far too much of not enough.

A Fire Upon the Deep is not without value, but on the other hand even Peter F. Hamilton does this sort of thing better. Actually fuck it - even Lionel Fanthorpe did this better in Galaxy 666 which similarly intrudes upon regions of the universe with variant physical laws, and did so with more charm.

Of the City of the Saved...

Philip Purser-Hallard Of the City of the Saved... (2004)
For anybody unfamiliar with this one, the setting of the title is a city the size of a spiral galaxy existing beyond the end of time wherein all the human beings who ever lived - and even some of the fictional ones who didn't - find themselves resurrected to eternal life. Neanderthals coexist with cybernetic posthumans, ancestors with distant descendants, and death is only a memory because everyone is both immortal and immune to injury whilst they remain within the city limits. It's heaven allegorised as science-fiction, an idea already tackled in Philip José Farmer's Riverworld books, apparently, although not having read them I couldn't really say how well they compare. On the other hand, I think I've read this three or four times now, and it's frankly fucking brilliant, as acknowledged by Lawrence Miles, editor of the Faction Paradox novels and never one to heap praise upon the undeserving, when interviewed by Andrew Hickey on Resonance FM's Reality Check podcast:

I am going to blow my own trumpet here, because I think I was quite a good writer of the Doctor Who books, but as an editor, I really, really came into my own. Phil Purser-Hallard wrote what was basically an eight out of ten book, and I said no, do that bit different, do that bit different, and turn it into a nine out of ten book. I am possibly more proud of the fact that I edited Of the City of the Saved... than I am of any of the books I actually wrote myself, because although I wrote a lot of books that I think, looking back, are quite good - that was the book which was already good, and I can't say that about any of my own books, that any of them were really good, because I look at them now and go yeah, I could do that better. [Of the City of the Saved...] was my proudest achievement.

Rightly so, I would suggest; but before we lose sight of the fact that this novel is already built upon one of the most ludicrous premises imaginable in terms of how improbably distant its setting is removed from any familiar, definitively experienced environment, it should also be remembered that here we have cameos from resurrected fictional characters, and a story the size of a galaxy told from fifteen or sixteen very different viewpoints, and Philip K. Dick himself shows up thinly disguised as a character named Rick Kithred.

By rights, this should have been the biggest, most disastrous soufflé in literary history, a deck of cards Eiffel Tower erected in the path of a hurricane, a 250 page kick me sticker, and yet not only does it hold together beautifully, the sheer scale of such an unlikely triumph accounts in part for why it works. There's a saying about the common problem of debut novels being authors who try to do far too much, and this is of course a prime example, except the basic ideas are so beautifully worked as to yield a story which seems simply tightly packed with wonders as diverse as its setting - possible evidence for the quality of the material being the continuation of the story in more recent Obverse anthologies edited by the author.

Ridiculous ambition is rarely in itself the problem so much as writers whose ideas are much bigger than the scope of their ability to communicate the same cough cough Stephen Moffat blowing up the fucking universe every five bleeding minutes which happily isn't a problem because Philip Purser-Hallard writes with the confidence and ability of someone who clearly loves his medium and greatly enjoys his art.

Thus far, I've seen only one review attempt to identify problems with this book - namely that appreciation is too greatly reliant on foreknowledge of the characters involved, and so it becomes a bit tiresome spotting all the cameos by resurrected celebrities. Even aside from the fact of Of The City of the Saved... being published as one of a series of loosely interconnected titles - which you would have to be an idiot to miss - I don't really buy the first point at all, or find the novel lacking any vital piece of information which may aid in either the reader's understanding or pleasure; and secondly I think I missed almost all of the star guests anyway, so that aspect made very little difference to me.

Having read Philip K. Dick until he was coming out of my arse - if you'll pardon the repulsive simile - or at least coming out of a sort of notional second century arse that's since been eclipsed by the iron rectums of imperial Rome - Purser-Hallard's depiction of said author is a joy, immediately familiar and entirely justified. Also, I'm fairly certain the possibly underused Dedalus character is a homage to James Joyce given the form taken by his narrative. There were other characters whom I suspect may have been borrowed from elsewhere, but nothing that impacted on the wonderfully florid momentum of the narrative, at least not for me. The conclusion, as Daphne Lawless has pointed out, echoes that of Robert Graves' Claudius novels, which I assume was entirely deliberate given the novel being, amongst other things, a discussion of free will and security as mutually exclusive in an environment which may as well be heaven; but otherwise you'll have to argue that one amongst yourselves.

It does a whole lot of fascinating and different ontological things, and I'm not going to sit here listing all of them when it would be easier for you just to read the book; but I will say that it does them with a smile on its face - and a smile quite unlike that slightly off-putting smirk of Douglas Adams congratulating himself - and it does them with the conviction of an author who knows what he's talking about, as opposed to just throwing in a few pseudo-religious allusions for the sake of texture. Even on top of everything else, I've a feeling this novel may also offer some form of commentary on our contemporary culture in which nothing is ever quite lost, and the past remains forever with us - a variation on William Gibson's idea of there no longer being any such thing as the future, which in turn feeds into Lawrence Miles' This Town Will Never Let Us Go. This may equally well be simply a pattern I've read into the text, perhaps the inevitable crosstalk thrown up by so many rhythms all running consecutively.

This is the sort of environmentally bizarre novel I always hoped Larry Niven would write, but sadly he never quite got there; and whilst we're making free with the comparisons, we might also consider the very best of Iain M. Banks, the previously mentioned Douglas Adams, and even a touch of Alastair Reynolds or maybe Charles Stross, but in each case without whatever qualities have kept their books from creeping up into my own personal top ten. Of the City of the Saved... remains among my favourite science-fiction novels of the last few decades, and Lordy I wish there were more of such calibre.

The Skinner

Neal Asher The Skinner (2002)
Neal Asher's short story Bioship made quite an impression when I read it in one of those Solaris anthologies, and this mostly delivers on that promise of sea sick space opera to churn the stomach and leave the reader smelling faintly of fish. Despite a relatively uncluttered turn of phrase, the narrative is surprisingly dense, for everything on the somewhat nautical world of Spatterjay is either weird or disgusting and requires much qualification. This is a thoroughly alien ecology of ships with living sails, huge seafaring leeches, and the salty old dogs which hunt them for a living.

The Skinner is initially disorientating, coming perilously close to doing too much - a great many characters introduced, each with their own story, and all before you've found your sea legs. This was why I ended up reading the first hundred pages twice, but it paid off and the detail is so engrossing that there's little possibility of getting bored, even in returning to recently covered ground.

In essence it's a fairly simple tale - the hunt for a war criminal - painted in very weird colours and seeming a far more likely influence on the mollusc aesthetic of the Pirates of the Caribbean films than any more obviously Lovecraftian source. The weirdest detail is probably the environment itself, a living illustration of that no such thing as a free meal poster with a succession of increasingly large fish about to vanish in a single act of recursive gastronomy. Everything on Spatterjay eats everything else, frequently by means of circular orifices lined with teeth; and everything in the food chain is infected with a viral mechanism promoting rapid mutation and healing so that even the most voracious predators need never fear depletion of their food source; so death doesn't come easy for anyone, as vividly illustrated by the Skinner of the title who, having been decapitated hundreds of years before, lives on with head and body as two independent creatures. As I said, everything on Spatterjay is either weird or disgusting.

The Skinner isn't really quite like anything I've read before in terms of story, although it hints at what Larry Niven probably should have written. As roughly contemporary space opera, it's as good as anything by Iain Banks, and superior to the work of at least a few other big names. Given how this novel is sort of like eating chocolate cake in terms of information density, I probably could have done with it being maybe a hundred or so pages shorter, but that's not a serious complaint.