Catching up for 2010: Books

The second in my woeful catch-up posts. Still hoping for better in 2011.

The Great Science Fiction Stories 2 (1940)

Once again the collection of the best of a year runs against the stereotype of what constitutes speculative fiction. Beautiful women and fast spaceships need not apply, as this collection of authors use speculative fiction to explore (pardon the cliché) the human condition from unearthly points of view. Perhaps my favorite story in the collection, "It" by Theodore Sturgeon, leans more towards horror and appears to set up the tropes that later lesser horror works follow.I was also pleased to finally read the story that is the inspiration for perhaps my favorite SF film: "Farewell to the Master" is a poignantly different story from the one told in The Day the Earth Stood Still but is still very strong and readable today.

One of the things I find most interesting is the authors of whom I had never heard before picking up the collection—Willard Hawkins, Robert Arthur, Oscar Friend, and the author of "Master," Harry Bates. Some of these authors are so obscure that Asimov's generally obsequious commentaries are short as he recounts that he doesn't really have any memories of the author in question at all. Such lack of recollection is a pleasing divergence from his longer commentaries. And still, it would be lovely if those introductions, either by Asimov or co-editor Martin Greenberg, told us how the story being introduced made the cut, what makes them the best of that year.

One mystery is solved, left over from the first volume: Heinlein's stories are not included because "arrangements for their use could not be made." I really would like to find an account of this circumstance, since Greatest SF Stories follows this announcement by pointing the reader to Heinlein's own collection, The Past Through Tomorrow, published over a decade earlier. I can't help but feel that Asimov's commentary in the previous volume soured the opportunity to include Heinlein in future volumes.

By and large this is a very good read with no real clunkers. The stories may not have aged very well in some cases—the humor sometimes appears trite and a little sophomoric on occasion—but any reader really interested in the history of the genre should be fascinated by the collection of known and unknown.

The Best of Leigh Brackett

In the mid-70s, Ballantine published what they referred to as the Classic Library of Science Fiction, an assortment of nearly 20 collections of the best of various writers. Today we know very little about these authors beyond the current reprinting work being taken on by Planet Stories/Paizo Publishing. I felt if I was going to increase my knowledge with the best of various years, I could also look at the best of specific authors, including some whose names I know but about whose work I know very little. There's even one author collected, Raymond Z. Gallun, about whom I know absolutely nothing. The first volume of this series that I was able to find contains the best work of Leigh Brackett, introduced by her husband Edmond Hamilton )which seems only fair since Brackett introduces the volume about Hamilton).

I already had a feel for Brackett because of the aforementioned reprints from Planet Stories, and the stories in this volume are mostly the same kind of thing. I've had trouble in other blog entries explaining the odd feeling I get from most of Brackett's writing, but I discovered that she has done a good job of describing it herself in her own "The Jewel of Bas":

He wasn't a human, attached to a normal human world. He moved in a strange land of gods and demons, here everything was as mad as a drunkard's nightmare, and [his wife] was the only thing that held him at all to the memory of a life wherein men and women fought and laughed and loved.

I've speculated before that Brackett's work owes more than a little debt to the Weird Tales pulps, using settings and situations where the mortal characters can't begin to know the ancient and mysterious powers which they go up against. And that inability to know is reflected in the narration, whereby the reader doesn't really get to fully understand the events and characters all around him. Despite the difficulty that such not-knowing would present to the enjoyment of the stories, Brackett shows her craft extremely well. Her pieces are moody and atmospheric, sucking the reader in just as they do the protagonists, wrapping things up in auras of weird until the protagonist and reader feel lucky to survive at the end.

One of the more accessible stories, "The Woman from Altair" still reflects the awesome ignorance humans have about what is Out There. In this story, the scion of the leading spacefaring and industrialist family returns to Earth with a bride from a previously undiscovered planet, which shocks not only his family but all of Earth. Tragedy strikes his family again and again, and his overlooked brother tries to figure out what is happening, only to discover just how poorly humans actually try to understand. In this way, "The Woman from Altair" presages Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and the tragic consequences of mistakenly believing that one can understand an alien culture in the matter of a few days (or even years, in the case of Russell).

Of course there is also an Eric John Stark story, "Enchantress of Venus", which just more firmly places Stark in my mind as one of the great pulp heroes in the genre, which unfortunately no one remembers any more beyond Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser.

By and large there is not a single miscue in this collection, but while the stories are good and passionately told, it is still slow going because the very weirdness of them impedes moving fast. I would recommend this book to the reader with, again, an interest in the history of the genre and the time to appreciate that history as well as the changes in it as it has evolved over the last century.

Surface Detail

I think it may be generally said that Iain Banks's science fiction novels are filled with big ideas, playing around with the tropes and expectations of space opera. The sticking point is that often those big ideas are just tossed out for inspection and never really developed beyond the epiphanic "that's cool" stage. Banks's earlier novels made up for this lack of development with fascinating characters and settings and skilled storytelling, especially when it comes to narration. Over time, either Banks has begun to rely too much on the "gee whiz" factor or my palate has begun desensitized to what he does, perhaps because other writers have begun to borrow from him. Surface Detail falls neatly into this description: the general idea is just cooler than cool, but the story that is told around it seems somewhat underdeveloped, leaving the feeling that something is lacking, especially in comparison to other Banks works.

Banks's Culture novels, the series of which Surface Detail is the latest entry, already posits the Singularity having occurred, and AIs being given as much power and responsibility as people. The human body is infinitely adaptable and we have relations with several other galactic civilizations. Banks merrily pokes fun at the monolith of galactic culture—the touchstone of early space opera was that galactic empires were serious and deadly stuff, something awesome to aspire to, Banks however posits that such cultures would have foibles and idiosyncrasies, just more of them and probably to a greater scale than what exists in national politics today. Fortunately, Banks remains somewhat human-centric, since our own Culture's primary foible seems to be the inability to take itself (or anything for that matter) very seriously, and thus is both the object of both admiration and scorn of other galactic powers.

Within this setting, Surface Detail ponders the now-accepted Singularity trope of uploading the entire personality and memory of individuals into massive simulations. The technology of Banks's future is so advanced that such downloading (and also the uploading of personalities into new bodies) is de rigeur, and those societies that believe in hell now have the ability to create electronic simulations of it to torment the immortal reproductions of its citizens. The more liberal-minded societies find such a practice utterly immoral and a galactic war breaks out over the practice and belief in hell. Fortunately, the parties involved are advanced enough to not have a Real war, and instead have a Virtual one, using the same personality download technology to use soldiers to fight over and over in battles with ultimate victory determining the continued existence of these hells.

It being Banks, there are side-stories, filled with bizarre personalities but with mostly tangential ties to the idea of a war for hell. Unfortunately those stories have more development than the central war story. Those side stories further define and explicate the galactic milieu and the societies within it, and upon recollection, I realize that Surface Detail and indeed a lot of Banks's later SF, can be read as a travelogue to his future rather than wrestling with the ideas he constantly throws out to his readers.

Nonetheless, Surface Detail is fun and has some hysterically black comic moments, as well as more "gee whiz" moments than most authors create in a lifetime. It is for those big ideas that I've come to read Banks, as well as the characters that do get most fully fleshed out. Banks is also a master of the small scene: interaction between individuals is usually handled quite craftily and enjoyably. You just can't come to Banks and expect a straight line to anywhere.

Best Served Cold

I've written in the past about Joe Abercrombie's genre-bending in his First Law trilogy. Best Served Cold is a standalone novel set in the same world as the First Law, and the genre-bending continues. The expectations most readers have for epic fantasy are torn to shreds by Best Served Cold, as Abercrombie inserts real people into a story usually told about archetypes of high moral character.

Monzcarro Murcatto has risen from a lowly farmer to the leadership of the best mercenary army in her world, the Thousand Swords. Most of her service has been to Duke Orso as he tries to unite separate countries into a single empire, but eventually Orso realizes that Monza is a greater hero to his people than he ever will be. So he attempts to assassinate her by throwing her, with her brother, over the side of a mountain. While her brother dies, Monza survives and, of course desire revenge upon the Duke and those who helped him.

What follows is a story that sets up the expectations of the epic revenge story, with duels and precise killings of the co-conspirators, but ends up being a bloody free-for-all that changes the history of that part of Abercrombie's world. None of the people that Monza hires are particularly trustworthy and none of them are so perfect at their tasks that they are automatically danger-free. And lots of people dies, lots and lots. Like his earlier First Law story, most of the characters in Best Served Cold are not very likable, though they are fully realized and utterly believable. In fact, the most likable, trustworthy character—ironically named Friendly—is a mass murderer who would prefer to be back in prison, where the world is orderly, rather than the chaos of the outside world.

The story is so readable exactly because we want to see how the dysfunctional band works to enact their revenge, despite growing tensions between them all. And Abercrombie's plot gives them opportunity after opportunity to practice their various crafts as well as prove they can be functional. Abercrombie also offers plot twists galore as new characters are introduced who influence the decisions and plots of Monza's band of killers. And did I mention that lots of people die, in horrific realistic fashion? Eventually battles are fought, and Monza uses them to work out her revenge fantasies. The action is breakneck and relentless and just a whole lot of fun.

Best Served Cold is one of my favorite books of this past year. I look forward to the new series Abercrombie is starting. I cannot recommend this book enough, though you may hate me for it while you just gape at the events that Abercrombie relates.

Transition

Speculative fiction has something of a tradition (though not an incredibly rich tradition) of political commentary. Perhaps the reverse is what usually happens—political commentary and satire are disguised as speculative fiction rather than a speculative fiction novel containing elements of commentary that are tangential to the thrust of the plot. 1984 and Brave New World come to mind; I suspect that Orwell and Huxley didn't start writing these classic works by saying to themselves "I've got a great idea for a science fiction novel." Fortunately, Iain Banks's Transition is a solid speculative fiction novel firmly grounded in theoretical physics, which in turn allows him to comment on current events because he's provided himself a framework by which he can step outside those events.

The premise of Transition is fairly standard speculative fiction fare—physics demands that there are an infinite number of parallel universes, and a group of people figures out a way to traverse them. That group calls themselves the Concern, or sometimes l'Expedience, and is created with the high-minded goal of making things better in those universes without, as it turns out, any sort of definition of what "better" really means. And so long as the Inner Council are made up of like-minded individuals, the group performs its mission well: an agent appears and distracts a brilliant poet long enough that he doesn't get into an elevator that subsequently plummets to the ground floor, killing everyone within.

But not everyone agrees on what "better" means, and so factions arise amongst the Concern and with them internecine politics that drive people to do horrible things in the name of a good cause. There are fundamental issues with how the members of the Concern are able to do what they do: basically they jump into the bodies of people in the other universes, but they don't think very much about the repercussions—what happens to the personality of the body they inhabit when they jump in? How do the reconstituted individuals deal with the effects of whatever action the jumper performs while in the borrowed body? What happens to their own body when their personality leaves it?

This is the complex background upon which the action of the story is based, told in another of Banks's thoughtful narrative experiments. The novel contains several points of view, sometimes delivered in first-person and sometimes third. Sometimes those narratives take place in the "now" of the story and sometimes in the past. And it becomes apparent that some of the points of view might be the same personae in different circumstances.

Banks populates Transition with more of his iconoclastic characters, giving them full personalities and making them enjoyable to read, even when they are not necessarily the best people. Madame d'Ortolan has been a member of the Inner Council for some time and is drawing those within the Council to her opinion of how things should be run, a policy which includes members of the Council being allowed to jump into young beautiful bodies as their original bodies grow old, giving them a kind of immortality. Against her stands Mrs. Mulverhill, who recognizes that not only does this cross the line from general betterment of a culture to an act of personal selfishness (despite arguments that immortality preserves the wisdom of the beneficent Council) but also that the growth and sustenance of any organization is based in part on the ideas and strength of new members. Mrs. Mulverhill also witnesses the Concern-backed research into the nature of this ability to cross universes become an effort to militarize those powers as "researchers" become torturers in order to drive those powers to extremes.

Between these two is Temudjin Oh, an operative for the Concern who reports to Madame d'O (as she becomes known) and was trained by Mrs. Mulverhill. Madame d'O tries to use him to infiltrate Mrs. Mulverhill's rebel organization while Mrs. Mulverhill tries to get information about Madame d'O's plans from him. As the book starts, the tension is already mounting and Oh is going to have to land on one side or the other very soon.

Banks uses this organization to talk about how groups that desire to do good can be perverted because of changing perceptions of what "good" is. Extremists are active in the Concern and while they may have begun with the best intention, it's difficult to overlook their methods. It's a nice commentary on the raging political war in the United States, where the words and deeds of those on the furthest right grow more and more violent without comment from the more moderate centrists. It also speaks to religion as well, reflecting on ongoing questions about Islam and what the tenets of the religion say about those who perform violence in its name. Mrs. Mulverhill acts because extremists can only continue to act in the name of an organization if no one speaks up or acts in ways to refute them. Madame d'O is a believer; she truly believes she is doing the right thing, but that some sacrifices must be made for the greater good. Eventually she also comes to believe that speaking out against her actions is actually speaking out against her, making the struggle within the Concern personal, further removing them from what their original charter.

Banks can also be rather pointed in his commentary rather than just letting similarities between his fictional organization and our world speak for him. For example, we discover that the Concern is not actually based in our universe, and in fact they desperately dislike our Earth, calling it "greedist": capitalism has gone way too far. On the world the Concern has arisen, they too had a period of international terrorist unrest, but it was caused by Christian terrorists acting out in the name of their god. Banks's description of the beliefs of these terrorists is chilling precisely because their beliefs are the same that many Christians in our world hold, but extremism takes them over so that they become something else.

The resulting novel is delightful. Banks is an artist at plots: while there are few individual sentences that leap out of the page and stick with the reader, his narrative and the structure it takes are delightful. His characters are fully realized. Their interactions feel very real, even when they are based on some of the biggest speculative fiction possibilities or on the very personal and bizarre. While the ultimate destination of the plot is the same for similar novels, what happens to the individuals we come to know and how they get there is not so generic. There are moments of humor and moments of real horror. Though I have concentrated on the book's political overtones, they do not dominate the story unless the reader wants them to; instead they provide some flavoring to the events of the story. And because of Banks's mastery of nuance, in plotting, in characterization…and in commentary, this is the best Banks novel I have read in some time.

Matter

Usually, I just rip through Iain Banks's books like nobody's business. Rip-roaring from the start, filled with keen ideas and lots of action, I just can't put them down. This latest one, however, just dragged on and on for me. Granted, for a few reasons, I was limited to mostly reading only when I was about to go to bed, but that has not stopped me in the past; if it really grabs me, I'll find reasons to find other times to read, or be able to stay awake in order to read bigger chunks before bed. But nothing of the sort happened as I read Matter. I'm willing to admit the fault is all mine, but I do believe this is a weaker novel than earlier Banks works.

The premise is huge, a new kind of Big Dumb Object (at least for me; I don't think it has been used elsewhere) that has enormous amounts of potential. Imagine a manufactured world, made of concentric levels, all connected to each other and the surface by a series of towers that also act as structural supports to hold the whole thing together. At the center of this "shellworld" is either the alien that built the world or a usurper of that maker, known as the WorldGod to the inhabitants of the planet known as Sursamen. There are more than a dozen concentric shells, all with varying atmospheres from vacuum to a water planet, all with "stars", suspended nuclear reactors, embedded in their roofs to provide light and nourishment. And on the eighth and ninth levels of Sursamen, two different human races at was with one another, fighting from level to level with steampunk-level weapons.

For the first four chapters of Matter, Banks lets the natives of Sursamen speak about their home in the vernacular, using terms that are compelling (like "rollstar") and describing what life within such a structure would be like, but without actually telling the reader what the structure is. Thrown into this strange new world without any knowledge of how it is structured, the reader is forced to thumb repeatedly to the glossary at the end of the book, but without the source of the new terminologies actually being described. The glossary is comprehensive, perhaps overly so, containing information that seems to be extremely tangential to the thrust of the book itself. Does one really need a chart describing the number of years in "deciaeons"? I found that I didn't, even when the term is mentioned in the book—it's just a whopping long time. There's an interesting table describing the inhabitants of the various levels of Sursamen, but while it is an example of the breadth of Banks's world creation, since the story only ever visits about five of those levels, it really isn't that important. And then chapter five explains not only the mechanics and physics of the shellworld, it goes on to describe its place in the history of the galaxy and how it is one of thousands of similar artifacts. The chapter is exhaustive, and suddenly the terms used in the first few chapters have context and make sense.

The story begins with regicide; the king of the eighth level is murdered at the close of a pivotal battle with the ninth level. The story-telling is much like a fantasy novel, what with the opaque terms mingled with the familiar story of battle and politics. Fermin, the heir apparent to the throne witnesses the murder of his father but has been assumed dead from battle himself. Noting it would be him against a collection of soldiers and courtiers if he fought, he watches the slaying and then escapes to try to figure out what to do. Fermin recognizes that the murderer, tyl Loesp, has a vast conspiracy behind him, he decides to seek assistance from beyond his medieval-ish world, out in the far more advanced galaxy where is unwanted sister has been sent.

What follows is an interesting back and forth between the sister, Djan Seriy, who was cast off as being valueless in the medieval culture she came from but finds herself part of the most elite in the galaxy at large. The portions of the story that deal with her are travelogues of that hyper-advanced galaxy, which will be familiar to readers of Banks's Culture novels. But he doesn't go into very much depth at all in comparison to earlier stories, so a new reader would be fairly lost as high-flown concepts are tossed at him. And Banks's focus seems not to be so much on the Culture, so the ideas go by pretty quickly. Juxtaposed with Djan's story is Fermin's story as he attempts to escape Sursamen and is slowly introduced to the much larger galaxy. These pages contain an epic version of the fish out of water story since Fermin progresses from steam-driven medieval weapons to intelligent ships and thousands of alien life forms. The result is more of a primer for the newcomer to the Culture than the rest of the book. Finally, interwoven with these stories is the story of Oramen, Djan and Fermin's remaining brother on Sursamen, now Prince Regent and unwittingly caught up in the conspiracy of tyl Loesp. His is the most interesting of the stories being told, again alluding to fantasy stories as the politics rage about an adolescent young man destined to become king.

And here is where the entirety of the novel falters a bit, especially in comparison to other Banks books: these three different plotlines are kept entirely separate for more than 400 of the 570 pages. None of the three storylines are enough to really maintain my interest over long periods: I know the culture stories well, and since nothing new is introduced in Djan's story and I don't need the primer in Fermin's, there's not a lot there. Oramen's story has potential, and Banks does spend some time dealing with the physical and geographical oddities of the world of Sursamen, but never really enough to effectively use the blockbuster idea of the shellworld itself. The reader knows that eventually these folks are going to come together, but they spend most of the book separated by large quantities of light years. And then when they do come together, the plodding pace is evaporated and the reader finds himself hurtled through Sursamen—and details in the explanatory chapter suddenly have importance. And finally, in those last few pages, we begin to see the twists in plotting that have made Banks so respected and, for me, so enjoyable. But by that time, I just want to get through the last pages of the book and move on to something else.

Combined with a not-very-revealing interview at the end of the book, the result feels like an introduction to the worlds of Iain Banks and perhaps even to the genre of speculative fiction. If that is the case, clearly I am not the intended audience, which is somewhat of a disappointment. It remains a powerfully written book but that power is in service to a goal I have trouble appreciating. The last 150 pages are classic Banks, reminding me of his best work, but by the time I got there, I was tired from the first 400 pages. What's ironic is that such an introduction has never been necessary in the earlier Culture novels; Banks uses strong storytelling to introduce and then slowly surround the user with the Culture in those books, which I find to be a more evocative and interesting path to take. So, being a completist, I'm glad to have read Matter, and perhaps I'll reread those last 150 or so pages. But ultimately, I feel this book makes a great introduction to the works of Banks rather than a satisfying extension of it.

Against a Dark Background

I first read Against a Dark Background in the early 90s and remember being completely blown away by it. And so as I re-read the novel in a fit of nostalgia, there was an interesting dialogue in my head regarding what about it had so captivated me at its first reading. Ironically, there was not so much captivation this time around, which is not to say that Against a Dark Background is not a good book. Instead, I think the last 15 years have changed the reader a great deal.

I can see the elements that did fire my imagination at the first reading. For instance, there is the nonchalance with which Banks writes. The reader is thrown into a mysterious alien world (though populated in most part by humans) and little explanation is given to the setting. Some historical background is provided, but even that is somewhat obscured by allusions to a shared history that the reader is assumed to have. Names and references are tossed about in description and action as though the reader is native to the world and time, which has the effect of completely immersing the reader. Banks practices it in broad strokes, only moving away from it to describe the world-plant of Miykenns. In fact, I was so thrilled with my first reading that I didn’t miss this parting of the veil, and now the fairly standard narrative technique which resorts to exposition in the Miykenns passages really stands out compared to the rest of the book. When I first read this novel, it was most likely the first time I had come across this type of narration. Evidence that I appreciated it is in the list of my favorite writers of the moment, most of whom have practiced this style somewhere in their writing. Reading Background a second time, I appreciate it but am not awed at it as I was when I was first exposed to it.

Another element that I more deeply appreciate is the picaresque, wandering nature of the plot itself. Banks teases the reader with the idea that this is going to be something like the classic fantasy pattern: recover the artifact and save the princess. And much like those fantasies, the process of finding and retrieving the artifact is never so easy as it appears when it is laid out in such a linear fashion. And in this case, Lady Sharrow and her team move throughout a solar system in order to pick up the clues necessary for them to recover the sole remaining Lazy Gun. Even here, Banks plays with the trope of the magical weapon: the Lazy Gun is an artifact of an unknown type, an apparently sentient weapon capable of destroying whatever it is pointed at while deploying a very sarcastic sense of humor. Aim it at a person, and perhaps an anvil will fall out of the sky on their head, or an animated set of jaws will snap through the victim’s neck before disappearing. Aim it at a ship, and perhaps the ship will suddenly find itself torpedoed or swept away by an unexpected tsunami. Attempts to discover the nature of other Lazy Guns have ended up with the destruction of cities, so its exact nature can never be known.

At any rate, the novel appears to wander as the quest is followed. This appearance is enhanced by the narrative style—maybe the team really is traveling in a straight line, but if we don’t know the names of the cities or have a map of the world, we can never really know. This really was the first time I can remember reading a quest being so creatively deconstructed, such that later different deconstructions of the fantasy genre feel more natural to me and are no surprise.

One element I may not have noticed so much when I first read the novel is the powerful physical descriptions that Banks provides. There is little in the way of internal dialogue in Background, so the novel is made up action, dialogue, or description—and of those, only description gives a writer a lot of space to play with the language: “A cold, keen wind cut out of a sky the color of verdigris. The sun dangled like a hopeless bauble dispensing thin amounts of light. Leeward, the dark train of a departing storm trailed its snowy skirts high into the swiveling tides of light.” Banks has powerful evocative moments like this scattered throughout Background, and I suspect that my reading and own writing helps me to see those moments more clearly than I would have fifteen years ago.

Against a Dark Background really shook me up when I first read it, opening my eyes to a different, more modern kind of writing. Since then, its power has been eclipsed by other even better books, including a few from the same author. But like returning home after many years, re-reading Background has provided me with the opportunity to see my own roots with a less biased view. And while I recognize it, warts and all, I also recognize that it’s still a good solid book, a precursor and perhaps forerunner of the good speculative fiction I have enjoyed reading in the fifteen years since.