SF, the problem of genre and News Night Review

Recently, in my inane rambles around the world-wide-wub, in the dank subterranean worlds of the mediasphere, such as forums and blogs, such as the one you are reading: where lonely and potentially psychotic individuals rant and rave like inmates in one of Queen Victoria’s less salubrious institutions, I’ve become increasingly aware of a debate, perhaps the debate, which has been haunting philosophers over the ages since the dawn of man; subliminally weaving its way through the subtext of the Gilgamesh, Plato’s Republic, Kant’s ’sublime’ and Dan Brown’s stinking Code. What is this debate which has been setting cyberspace on fire, you say? No, not the War in Iraq, nor the fuckin’ Credit Crunch, not Swine Flu, an no not even bookmarking vs. dogearring. No, none of these. No, the debate that has been springing mostly to my attention is the humble and strangely eternal debate of ‘why do the toffs hate science fiction?’ By the toffs I mean the literati: the mainstream: academia: the bourgeois – call them what you will. By science fiction I mean everything from horror to fantasy to, yes even science fiction. The whole speculative spectrum.

In fairness I’m not sure how many people have really been engaging in this debate. And when I say ’set cyberspace on fire’ I perhaps would have been more honest to say caused it to smoulder – briefly. But Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent criticism of the, ever shite, Booker Prize has certainly stirred things up a bit, but, let’s be honest, beyond a few cantankerous individuals jousting with semantics on a few forums and a few equally narky lit. crits jousting in the broadsheet press, there has been little new to this debate, other than it has made me think more about the problem of genre a bit more than I previously had. However imagine my surprise when, what do I see on the ever pretentious late-night review show, the News Night Review, decides to dedicate a whole half-hour programme on all things SF, while even touching upon the war of words surrounding the innate prejudice of the Booker Prize! Shit! Things must be getting serious. What next? Will the BBC have it’s own science fiction affairs correspondent to cover Obama’s intervention in peace talks between Kim ‘Arafat’ Robinson and the expansionist state of Man Booker?

However, what last night’s News Night Review science fiction special really showed was the total lack of respect that those pretentious cunts have for the subject. The panel, hosted by Kirsty Wark, consisted of Jeanette Winterson, who obviously fancies herself to be Margaret Atwood or some such, Natalie Haynesa, a sexy geekete comedian, and, perhaps the most moronic, banal and wretchedly bad film-maker of all time, Kevin Smith: a man whose films are so fuckin’ bad that he makes Guy Richie look like Kurosawa for fuck sake! Okay it was obvious that all three were loosely familiar with SF – more so in Kevin Smith’s case who turned up in his dressing gown in homage to Arthur Dent – but surely a single dedicated SF author/pundit wouldn’t have been beyond the Beeb’s grasp. They covered the popular rise of SF film and TV (specifically FastForward and District 9), which they seemed to equate with a qualitative rise, they covered the Kick-Ass comic and they covered the new Hitch Hicker’s sequel. Hardly inspiring. Most of the show was dominated by the latest kewl offerings. There was a brief segment upon the status of SF literature, which made the most intelligent points of the show, but other than that they treated the genre with the total lack of respect it deserves (yes, I do mean that in the main SF deserves the lack of respect it gets), by not covering anything beyond the most banal and populist forms and by being unable to discuss SF without also stigmatising it with so-called geek-culture. I think the points the raised about the post-Micro Soft rise of the geek were valid, but I fail to see why they took such a cultural studies stance to SF when the News Night Review as a whole tends to take a more traditional literary art criticism standpoint when reviewing almost every other subject. When did they last cover the latest Shakespearian offering at the Globe theatre by stereotyping the Globe’s demographic as the brown-rice munching, silver-spoon, conservative ass-wipes that they so obviously are? Never. Absolutely never. Instead they have a predominately textual discussion, which is at it should be.

Now I’m probably overstating the level of offence I took at the show. In fact I took none (I just like the sound of my own rant). SF and geekdom are intricately linked and the genre is dominated by kewl yet banal products, so it’s coverage was probably about right. However I think the attitude of the News Night Review helped sign-post the real problem with genre: they (the literati) have no fuckin’ idea what the fuck SF is. The Natalie Haynes tried to establish her SF credentials by saying that comparing all SF to the lowest common denominator is like hating Pride and Prejudice because you don’t like Mills and Boon novels. A fair point. But one undone by her going on to name check War of the Worlds, Brave New World, etc… as good examples of SF literature and saying that it would be wrong to dis these novels just because someone doesn’t dig the worst of the genre. Again a fair point, but one I’m afraid that underlines her own total lack of knowledge of the contemporary SF. All the books she mentioned come before the widespread division between the pulps and literature, and the eventual artificial birth of genre. All the books she mentioned are widely considered classics among the literati already and can hardly be said to be excluded. She, and (not wanting to just target her) no one else on the show, failed to mention any examples of current SF literature in the discussion, instead concentrating on the popular forms of film and TV. No mention of Iain M. Banks or China Mieville or any of the other current wave of genre writers, which really just emphasises Kim Stanley Robinson’s point. Now I’m not saying that SF’s current crop of authors are necessarily comparable to the proto-SF mentioned in the show, but not to discuss any contemporary SF novels, other than the comedy cash-cow sequel to Hitch Hiker’s and a brief mention of Kim Stanley Robinson in regards to the Booker Prize, only shows the panellist’s colossal ignorance. Why were they, and they alone, on the panel? Why no Kim Newman, Brian Aldiss or Iain Banks? All of whom are regular SF pundits in the media? Even the inexplicably ubiquitous Mark Gattis would have been a more knowledgeable improvement. I’m not wanting to dis the panel entirely. They all have at least some knowledge and obviously like the genre. But they blatantly weren’t good enough.

Anyway, as I said, for a while I’ve been thinking about the little problem of Sf and genre. And I don’t think the problem lies wholly at the door of the lit. crits. As some one whose name I can remember on the News Night Review’s Booker Prize featurete said last night: SF’s ghettoization stems both from the prejudice of the mainstream and from the appalling low standards of the genre’s fandom; a fact which I’m sure will be received like an angry elephant’s cock up the ass for many SF fans, but something they desperately need to hear. Yes, almost everything you like isn’t actually good enough to win the Man Booker Prize! Yes, it is also true than almost everything that wins the Man Booker Prize shouldn’t be good enough to win it either, but don’t assume that it is just prejudice which is stopping Peter F. Hamilton’s latest space opera from gaining mainstream respectability. It might have something to do with it, but it’s not the whole story. I think the widely touted myth that the only thing which separates Ringworld from Slaughterhouse Five is acceptance by the mainstream is wholly wrong and utterly moronic. Don’t get me wrong, I love both pure genre SF (well some of it) and the other stuff which has some how gained acceptance in the mainstream (well, again, some of it), but I think it is wrong to say that 1984 is just Dune that got lucky is simplistic and actually undermines the case for SF.

I think the problem stems from the fact that genre SF has been terribly diagnosed, both by its idiotic fan-base and the ignorant mainstream. Few definitions seem to satisfy me. Of course distinctions between genres are wholly artificial and subjective, but as Bruce Sterling says in his intro to Mirrorshades: labels are both ‘a valid as a sauce of insight’ and ‘great fun.’

We all label things anyway. Feminism has labelled (ha ha) all objectification as evil, but in reality we all do it and rarely is any harm done. Let’s face it, we have to objectify. To take every human being as an individual, all the time would be exhaustive. Our assumptions are great for time saving, if nothing else and can save us a huge amount of hassle. ‘He looks like a nutter, I’ll cross the road.’ But from our assumptions prejudice can raise its ugly head. Labelling genres is the same, although admittedly the results are exponentially less significant. The SF section in a second hand bookshop allows me to bypass all the guff I couldn’t give a shit about. We all use labels all the time. Yes, even Kim Stanley Robinson does when he belittles historical fiction. SF authors slag of fantasy novels all the time. Of course labels are subjective, but that still doesn’t reduce their validity. Anyway, I’ve written up some thoughts on genre and have come up with a definition which satisfies my own criteria. Only problem is it’s about 10 pages of A4 long, which is too long for anyone to read online, so I need to cut it down a bit before I post it. But as I’m one of those lonely and psychotic individuals who occupy the depths of the media-wub , I feel it’s only right that I too have my say…

StarShipSofa Stories vol 1 – OUT NOW!

Here’s the lovely cover for the SSS Stories cover – clicky on pic to follow link to buy or download the anthology as a free pdf! Yes, it looks as lovely and retro on the inside as the out and the story selection is excellent.

StarShipSofa Stories Volume 1

Here be a press release from the mighty StarShipSofa podcast…

The wonderful StarShipSofa podcast will soon celebrate their 100th show on the 16th of September. To celebrate, they are releasing a Print-on-Demand anthology called StarShipSofa Stories Volume 1. There will also be a free PDF of the book available to download and a new website. All monies made from the books and donations from the PDF will go into keeping StarShipSofa in the skies.

Here’s the table of contents:

StarShipSofa Stories Volume 1

1. “Into The Blank Where Life Is Hurled” by Ken Scholes
2. “London Bone” by Michael Moorcock
3. “The Second Coming Of Jasmine Fitzgerald” by Peter Watts
4. “Lest Young and The Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues” by Gord Sellar
5. “Vampire Kiss” by Gene Wolfe
6. “Vinegar Peace (or The Wrong-Way Used-Adult Orphanage)” by Michael Bishop
7. “Godzilla’s 12 Step Program” by Joe R Lansdale
8. “Jesus Christ, Reanimator” by Ken MacLeod
9. “The Sledge-Maker’s Daughter” by Alastair Reynolds
10. “Mars: A Travelers Guide” by Ruth Nestvold
11. “The Empire of Ice Cream” by Jeffrey Ford
12. “The Ant King: A California Fairytale” by Benjamin Rosebaum
13. “In The Olden Days” by Spider Robinson
14. “Tideline” by Elizabeth Bear

Although I’ve not hear all of them, it looks like a pretty amazing collection to me. Best tales on it in my opinion are: London Bone and the Ant King. Not sure what the price is, but it could be worth snuffling up. Pity there is no Ted Chaing or Larry Santoro on it, as they, in my opinion, have been the two main highlights of the podcast in recent years.

Survivors: The Novel (1976)

Here follows part 2 of my Survivors retrospective.

Part 1, covering the original series (75-77) can be found here and Part 3 which compares Survivors 1975-77 to 2008 can be found here.

The original cover to the novelization of Survivors

A year after the first series of Survivors Terry Nation published his novelization of the series, which tells the original  Abby and Son story-arch and the long-term consequences of the aftermath. Out-of-print since the late 70s, the novel has recently been republished by Orion Books (UK £6.99) in conjunction with the new BBC television incarnation of the show broadcast in the Fall of 2008, which, much like the recent republication of John Christopher’s Death of Grass, allows post-apocalypse and Survivors fans to experience the novel without having to spend an arm and a leg on an overpriced second-hand copy. Unfortunately the new version of the novel comes with a terribly bland cover showing actors from the new Survivors posing like models in a Little Woods catalogue rather than the edgier graphic cover of the original print, although this – I suppose – is a small price to pay to save some cash in these credit crunch times we live in.

The first two-thirds of the novel stays pretty true to the first six episodes of the first series and is probably guilty of spending a little too long on setting the scene before the catastrophe rather than concentrating on what the post-apocalypse junky is really interested: i.e.  getting on with the aftermath itself! Nation’s prose is functional and generally terse, but his TV heritage shows, as the novel lacks a literary edge of other better post-apocalypse novels and we get little inner-dialogue of the characters. Still Nation can tell a good story and his writing is no worse than much to be found in genre fiction: his plotting is tight and the action is punchy.

Interestingly he chooses not to go into the minute details of the agrarian rebirth of society as the series does, instead he paints a picture with broader brush strokes. The story told in the first series of Survivors covers no more than six to eight months of th aftermath, whereas this novel finishes some five to six years after the ‘Death’ as the plague is called. Admittedly I think this kind of more expansive storytelling is probably much easier to handle in the context of a novel than an episodic TV drama, but still it is hard to understand why the series spends so much time micro-managing the apocalypse.

Parts of the novel are a little clunky. Perhaps it is also a little episodic in places and the emphasis on Abby’s sexual fantasies/frustration (an aspect which the series doesn’t delve into at all) is hackneyed to say the least. However the real reason to check out the novel if you are a fan of the original series is to find out what exactly happens to Abby’s search for her son, which the television series drops like a brick after series 1. And here the novel gets a big two thumbs up! The Survivors novelization delivers a sucker punch that puts many ‘real’ novels to shame. Of course there are other ways of finding out the plot if you just want to know without the hassle of reading the novel (the extras on the DVD lets it slip for a start and I’m sure you wouldn’t have to Google too long for our friend the good old internet to spill the beans), but if spoilers were good enough then no one would ever read a book or see a movie. No, we want to experience the ending through the story (or at least I do) and not just be told what happens. Needless to say that there is a sting in the tail for Abby, although I won’t spoil it for you here.

Although Survivors: the novel, is no classic, it is a decent enough read if your expectations are not too high and probably quite enjoyable for even for those who don’t know the series. For fans of the series, it is pretty much essential reading: for it shows a direscton in which the series could have gone in  (surprisingly in the direction of the Mediterranean as it turns out) and – more importantly – it shows us dramatically what happens to Abby in the end, poor thing.

If you think this cover is better then you have the aesthetic tastes of a toad and should poke your own eyes out - you don't deserve them any more

The Death of Grass by John Christopher

Not sure if you noticed but last month (March 2009) John Christopher’s (real name Samuel Youd) post-apocalyptic novel The Death of Grass came back in print for the first time since the late 1980s: meaning that I, and presumably many others like me, could check out this lost gem from the British sf cannon without me having to justify spending £30-40 on a tatty old paperback. I’ve literally lost count of the number of times that I have competed against equally desperate bidders on eBay for a dusty old copy, only to loose out, yet again, to another last minute bid only to feel the grinding irritation as yet another copy of The Death of Grass slips through my fingers. Of course now The Death of Grass is available at the more affordable and justifiable sum of £8.99 in the Penguin Modern Classics range, I can sit back cigar and brandy in hand and congratulate myself for my obvious, cunning, prudence and foresight in not giving in to the temptation of gazzumping my virtual competitors with some colossal bid that I could ill afford. Of course I’m kidding myself. It could have been me had my eyes been only slightly bigger than my wallet. Well, presumably those tatty paperbacks have still retained some value and, despite the musky smell, they probably retain more aesthetic charm than the current edition does, although I do quite like the semi-abstract close-up of dewy grass.

Anyway, even better than this is the news that, despite my ludicrously high expectations that have so often in the past been my undoing in these things, The Death of Grass is in every way the missing classic British post-apocalypse masterpiece I’d hoped it would be. First published in 1956 it only missed out in winning the 1957 International Fantasy Award to that long forgotten novel Lord of the Rings by that little known author J.R.R. Tolkien. Later in the same year being adapted to film under its American book title No Blades of Grass. Very much set in the Wyndham tradition, made famous with Day of the Triffids, The Death of Grass depicts the collapse of British society following a plague which is in the process of wiping out all the grasses across the globe. Now on the face of it that might not sound too bad. Sure the Lawn Tennis Association might not be to happy but it hardly seems up there when compared with all the other inventive ways that sf authors have wiped us out over the years: killer plagues, asteroids, killer plants, alien invasions, zombies and nuclear holocausts… But wheat, barely, oats and rye are all affected, and this is only after the virus has mutated, having previously wiped out rice crops across Asia: killing millions in the aftermath. In response the smug powers in Europe and the US starts tightening their collective belts while hoping on a miracle cure, but the cure doesn’t come and in a matter of months rationing is in place. Here John Christopher doesn’t miss a trick in showing us how interrelated our food-chain is: without grass crops there’s no cows, no sheep, therefore no dairy industry – just potatoes and pig farming: a diet of bangers ‘n’ mash, maybe? Sounds like a one way trip to rickets country to me. But the virus isn’t giving the world the time it needs to make the switch to non-grass based agricultural methods and the democratic governments are found wanting in making that decision, instead pinning their hopes that a cure will be found in time. But like real life there are no miracles to be found in this novel. In The Death of Grass when society falls, it falls hard and it falls fast.

The novel follows a haphazard collection of refuges fleeing the chaos of London, lead by John, an architect, in a desperate attempt to reach the safety of his brothers farm in a sheltered, highly defensible valley op’ North. The novel immediately distinguishes itself from Wyndham’s cozier Triffids by showing the extreme solution the new semi-fascist emergency British government who give orders to implement a nuclear strike on a militarily locked-down London in a futile attempt to cull Britain’s population to more sustainable post-grass levels. Tipped off of the impending nuclear cleansing by his cynical friend Roger, a civil servant, John and wife Ann, both bourgeois liberals, find their values immediately challenged as they are forced to decide who to leave and who to take. The Death of Grass pulls no punches and assumes that even before the full extent of the situation is understood that law and order will soon break down. En route the refuges are subject to assault, rape and banditry, and they themselves soon find their bourgeois morality irrelevant to their new world. To survive the journey John finds himself having to make a deal with the Devil: the Devil in this case being a gun shop owner and crack marksman called Pirrie, who has taken advantage of the new situation by executing his unfaithful wife, replacing her with a under-age sex slave, only after killing the young girls parents; but realising that Pirrie is vital to the group’s chances of survival, John accepts his behaviour in the short term, while considering killing him later once his usefulness is over. Indeed it is interesting that the most cynical character at the start of the book, Roger the civil servant, finds himself unable to adapt to the amorality of the violent grassless era. It isn’t till the chips are down that we find out what stuff we’re really made of and how much of the things we believe in are actually just empty posturing. With grim inevitability the novel grinds towards the sanctuary of the brother’s valley in the North leading to a highly satisfying allegorical confrontation between the bothers and rival survivors.

The introduction to the new edition, written by environmental author Robert Macfarlane, draws comparisons with the social breakdown in The Death of Grass with that in Lord of the Flies and the parallel is a strong one. Unlike many post-apocalyptic novels where the danger remains some force outside society, usually in the form of a monster or improbable scientific disaster while the norms and values of the protagonists remain largely unchanged, The Death of Grass shows that the threat to us comes from the very interdependence of the modern infrastructure on which society is built upon and society’s dependence upon these infrastructures; a dependence surely more complex and fragile today than in 1956 as we find ourselves even further removed from the natural world. The threat in The Death of Grass comes from the potential brutality that hides behind the veil of bourgeois morality.

The inner apocalypse of The Death of Grass really paves the way for so much of what came later in the new wave of British sf, being an obvious spiritual predecessor to J.G Ballard’s The Drowned World and Brian Aldiss’ Greybeard, but being less conceptual than the entropy obsessed new wave The Death of Grass is in many ways a more robust read, having more in common with later post-apocalypses, such as Christopher Priest’s Fugue for a Darkening Island. Possibly the only area where The Death of Grass really fails to deliver is in its relative lack of attention given to the new apocalyptic landscape. It lacks the poetry of the apocalypses to come out of the new wave: the dream-like devastation of Ballard’s ‘elemental’ apocalypse novels. Although John Christopher mentions Britain’s new brown scenery, he fails to evoke a sense of barren otherness as the iconic green green grass of home falls under the spell of desertification. The ecological and sustainability issues it raises were later echoed in more detail in the original 1975 TV series Survivors. It’s a cliché but I’ll say it anyway, The Death of Grass is probably more relevant today that ever. While probably better know in the UK for his children’s novels The Tripods, and the TV series it spawned, The Death of Grass deserves to be better known and more widely read than it is.

Links:

• StarShipSofa review can be found here
• John Christopher’s Fantastic Fiction page is here with links to AbeBooks, eBay and amazon
  
• Lost Books review here

And some old covers here:

Look over there: tatty old book covers

As I’m updating things here, I thought I’d plug my other blog , The Entropy Tango, where I’ve been posting up some ye oldie tatty paperback covers as a kind of an archive over the last few years. Not much in the way of writen content, just a celibration of those lovely old paperback covers and the occasional modern one that has caught my attention over the years. Only stuff I own is in there and sometimes condition is a bit wanting as I rarely bother buying anything other than reading copies. Anyway, it’s there if you care to browse with plenty of links to author/genre-related sites for good measure.

The Novels of Kim Stanley Robinson

For over a decade Kim Stanley Robinson has been one of the leading lights in the sf field: winning fans and critics alike with his perfect blending of both hard and soft science fiction sub-genres (appealing to fans of Greg Bear and Ursula K. Le Guin alike), eco-politics and strong character-focused writing. Although born in Illinois in 1952, KSR has spent much of his life in his beloved California, where he grew up and lives today. The influence and love of the land and history of the state can be felt clearly in his championing of environmental issues, his love of mountaineering and outdoor pursuits, and most significantly it can be felt throughout his work, most obviously in his Three Californias trilogy, and also in his understanding of the importance that setting and past play in storytelling and on human development in general. KSR has degrees in literature and English – and has written one of the more famous doctoral thesis in sf, on The Novels of Philip K. Dick (published in 1984).

The Three Californias trilogy

A loose thematic trilogy written over six years, each book tells the story of a different hypothetical future California: The Wild Shore (1984) is a pastoral post-apocalypse novel, The Golden Coast (1988) is a near-future dystopia and Pacific Edge (1990) is a near-future realistic eco-utopia. The first two parts of the trilogy show two Californias technologically out of balance: The Wild Shore, showing a future USA on its knees by a Soviet nuclear sneak attack, and The Golden Coast shows a hedonistic car and technology obsessed culture, ‘a sprawl of condos, freeways and malls,’ while Pacific Edge attempts to show a non-idealized civilization where technology and the natural world are in harmony. However, neither of the first two parts are perfect. Although The Wild Shore has its share of conflicts: a rise in American nationalism and international isolation, it ultimately paints a relatively idyllic picture of rural life, with little mention of the inevitable societal breakdown, sickness and violence that the survivors of a nuclear holocaust world undoubtedly have to contend with – the end result feeling more like the adventures of Huckleberry Flynn than Mad Max. Still it is a strong début novel: superbly written and showing KSR’s deft ability to depict believable characters that continue to develop throughout the novel. The Golden Coast suffers from being practically indistinguishable from our own society today, although it is this novel that really expresses KSR’s love of California and feels perhaps the most autobiographical. The Pacific Edge is probably the most successful: depicting a realistic utopia of anarcho-collectives, yet like The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, he shows that even a society in balance would have its share of heartache and disappointments to contend with. Again Pacific Edge shows off KSR’s talent for depicting place and landscape and it is this novel that best foreshadowed the Mars trilogy which was yet to come.

The Mars trilogy

The mammoth Mars trilogy,some 2000 odd pages in total not including the supplementary The Martians companion volume of short stories, tells the future history of Mars from the initial colonists to civil wars to the eventual formation of a Utopian Martian state over a period of two hundred years.

Red Mars (1996): details the landing of the ‘first 100′ colonists, a odd-ball collection of scientists, engineers and misanthropes in their quest to tame the new frontier. Each chapter being from one of the characters perspective. Here KSR hits pure gold. As each chapter pulls the reader’s loyalties from pillar to post as our preconceptions are undermined by deeper and deeper character development. Most noticeably in our perceptions of the rivalry between John Boone, a flaky all American hero: kind of Bill Clinton on steroids, and the charismatic power hungry Frank Chalmers, who in the opening chapter – the only chapter in the trilogy to be told out of chronological sequence – assassinates Boone many years in the future on a colonized Mars. The narrative jumps back in time and we read of the journey to Mars and the initial stages of colonization. Not only that but we see Boone win Chalmers’ girl, Maya Toitovna. Later KSR shows us Boone’s last days, a washed up drug addict: no longer a simple stereotype, we perceive him as a lovable real person – warts and all. Suddenly we realize Chalmers’ crime. We now hate Chalmers. Obviously here I’m expressing none of the subtlety and guile of with colossal switch-a-roonie and no doubt you’re wonder what so great about that, but trust me, after several hundred intense dense pages of character development and intrigue it hit me in the chest: noooooooooo! Don’t kill him, you bastard! Clever stuff, Mr. Robinson – clever stuff. There are countless other examples of cunning character interplay throughout the trilogy. Some minor, other cosmic in scale. For are start, Red Mars barely hints at the rivalry that will develop throughout the rest of the trilogy between Sax Russell and Ann Clayborne that personifies the main political and ecological struggle between the opposing groups the Greens and the Reds, who fight over the right to terraform Mars into an Earth-like planet or to leave it untouched and pure. The other conflict that dominates the novels is that between Earth’s interference upon the development and freedom of the colony.

Red Mars is practically a faultless novel. Perhaps a little too long, but having the ambition to require the 600 odd pages to tell the story it has to tell. Maybe some of the knitty-gritty scientific detail will be a little too involved and dry for some readers, but other than that it would be hard to imagine how Red Mars could ever have been improved upon. Hard that is until Green Mars (1994) and Blue Mars (1996) came along. I’ll spare you my eulogizing of these novels, only to say that the evolution of Sax Russell from bone-dry irresponsible scientist to womaniser and revolutionary figurehead is possibly some of the greatest storytelling I’ve read in genre fiction.

One of the problems with these century-scale future histories, such as the Foundation trilogy, is the necessity of telling the story as a multi-generational saga, where every few chapters we the readers are required to drop our allegiances to the group of characters we’ve just been reading about and immediately superimpose them on the next group of characters who unconvincingly and conveniently happen to be the great grand children of the initial characters in the first chapter we read about two volumes ago. A process that the reader has to continue adopting until the conclusion. This is fine if the author wants us to comprehend that there are forces bigger than us mere humans but these continued interruptions are less than conjusive to the enjoyment of a novel. Here KSR happens upon a simple and what you might think is a rather obvious solution for any sf author worth his salt, but one I hadn’t seen adopted before, that of longevity treatment, thus making the characters effectively immortal: giving the whole trilogy a narrative consistency that, for my money, no other future history sf series has managed.

Interestingly this simple plot devise also gave the trilogy its most moving storyline: the depression, dementia and loneliness that the effectively immortal will have to contend with in a society stretched across the solar system. Things become especially poignant as we see the once beautiful Maya Toitovna look at a picture of her ex-lover Frank Chalmers and wonder who that nice looking man is. And it is in details like this that KSR most impresses. Short punchy sf novels and short stories can cope with minimal character-orientated storylines, but if you’re going to ask a reader to stick around for 2000 pages then there better be more than just a few clever concepts and wacky ideas. The novel is, after all, a medium that is usually best when used to explore the human condition.

The other novels of Kim Stanley Robinson

Of greatest note is his huge The Years of Rice and Salt (2002), a 700 year alternate history of a world where Europe fell to the plague and Asian civilizations rule. Not as sensational as it might first sound, but an fascinating and ambitious, if flawed, work that deserves greater analysis then I’m going to give it here. Although I will say that again KSR finds an interesting way of falling into the multi-generational pitfall that these multi-decadal sagas fall into: that of using the same pool of characters again and again in each era, but this time using reincarnation as a narrative tool.

His last trilogy, Science in the Capital (2004-2007), a kind of West Wing meets The Day After Tomorrow, fail to capture the scope and imagination of his early work. Probably because it failed to pave any new ground. For the first time I grew bored of the classic archetypal KSR characters and the setting, a near future Washington in a world of global warming, felt to mundane to be interesting for anyone but the most fanatical KSR fan or environmentalist. Indeed more than any of his other works it seemed to expose his biggest flaw as a writer: his apparent naivety that the human race will eventually find peaceful political solutions. Now I didn’t expect KSR to write a pessimistic Ballardian post-apocalypse, but his faith in human beings does at times make you wonder what exactly has he been smoking! Still this trilogy did predict Hurricane Katrina and the sinking of a major American city, although the immediate US action on climate change that he predicted didn’t, to the best of my recollection, ever materialize. Maybe Obama will be his real-life Senator Chase. Maybe not…

Of his early novels only Short Sharp Shock (1990) stands out. It’s his only real foray into fantasy writing, its not realistic – indeed its surreal – and its by far his shortest novel. Antarctica (1997) is little but a one volume Earth-bound Mars trilogy, which also features the green-fingered Senator Chase. Escape from Karhmandu (1989) is a fix-up of four eco-comedy novellas that sadly are neither funny nor any good. Of more interest to sf fans will be his to early novels Icehenge (1985) and The Memory of Whiteness (1985), both of which are readable, if unremarkable hard-ish sf novels, that also feature a prototype background that is basically similar to that found in the Mars trilogy.

Anyway, maybe Science in the Capital indicates that KSR is now somewhat off the boil these days. I’ll be interested to see what his next novel is like. I feel he has probably explored eco-politics beyond the point that he could have anything more to say on it, so I hope he finds away of reinventing himself, while capturing the quality of his greatest work. I’m hoping The Years of Rice and Salt and Short Sharp Shock show the way, rather than Science in the Capital.

More on KSR:

• The KSR forum
• The KRS page on Fantastic Fiction
• And hear KSR on Feb 18, 2009 episode of The Future and You podcast as pointed out by PhilH on the SSS forums

The Garden Where Black Flowers Grow (book) by Tim Jeffreys

I haven’t read it yet but I’m happy to see that Tim Jeffrey has published a collection of his short fiction via Lulu so go and buy yourself a copy NOW!

Here’s the blurb:

‘The Garden Where Black Flowers Grow’ collects together twenty-seven of Tim Jeffreys short stories. The reader will find within these pages straight-forward horror stories such as ‘The Stairs to the Attic’ and ‘Night is Peeping”; darkly humorous tales like ‘Soft Clocks’ and ‘Horror Story’; sinister adult fairytales like ‘The Hand-Made Tail’ and ‘Alice and the Scarecrow’; as well as poetic, thought-provoking non-horror pieces like ‘Spanish Landscape’. The majority of these stories take the listener on a tour of dark places – down deserted streets where evil forces lurk in the cracks of the everyday, or into the thoughts of the troubled and the mad. They will dredge up subconscious fears and probe the corners of the mind. There are ghosts, ancient evil, lost lovers and lost Gods. There are Sirens, malevolent spirits, unnamed creatures locked in attics, and personal demons loosed from the mind.

>>CLICKY<< to buy yourself a copy!

Tim also has a new audio novella coming out soon so keep your eyes peeled. I’ve heard the first CD of it and it’s excellent!

Reviews by me of his audio books can be found here, here, here and here and an interview can be found here

D.B. by Elwood Reid (Bitter Lemon Press 2006)

The facts: In 1971 a man using the name D.B. Cooper hijacked a Boeing 727, ransoming $200,000 with only a note and a suitcase containing what appeared to be a bomb (a stewardess caught a quick glimpse of red cylinders and wires within it). The infamous D.B. Cooper escaped by parachuting at an altitude of 10,000 feet into a Thanksgiving eve storm without causing any fatalities or injuring any of the passengers or flight crew, and has never been heard of again and has become the subject of much conjecture, films and now a novel by Elwood Reid.

The fiction: Elwood Reid uses the bare bones of the cult crime of D.B. Cooper to construct a bizarre road trip for Vietnam vet, divorcé and drifter Phil Fitch, who decides to take the plunge and pull a once in a lifetime crime to escape his meaningless life and hop the boarder into Mexico with his small fortune in tow. Meanwhile, back in the states, recently retired and disgruntled FBI agent Frank Marshall dodges his wife’s incessant henpecking and the boredom of his empty days by drinking, fishing and more drinking. Frank’s days are haunted by the memories of an unsolved murder that he happened upon while searching the suspected drop-zone of daring D.B. Cooper and by vainly struggling to resist the charms of a female witness he has continued to ‘look after’ even after retiring. Despite his better judgement Frank gets persuaded to unofficially assist a young and eager FBI agent who has some fresh ideas on the old and apparently cold trail of a certain D.B. Cooper.

At first D.B. appears to be a fairly typical hard-boiled American crime novel that uses an unsolved real life case for its inspiration in the manner of James Ellroy. However as the novel progresses it becomes apparent that Elwood Reid has something altogether subtler in mind, as much of the novel concerns itself with following the parallel lives of Frank Marshall and Phil Fitch rather than a more predictable manhunt-style thriller that the novel seems to promise in its first few pages. Fitch, who soon drops his real name for his hijacking moniker Cooper, who finds the rambling memoirs containing information of a ‘secret land’ in Mexico and a beautiful hippy woman called Jane, decides to follow his heart, fleeing his deadbeat life in the states, and search for Jane and the ‘Hidden Territories.’ The novel tells of Cooper’s random blunderings in Mexico from hippy communes to Mexican villages and betrayal, juxtaposed with Frank’s post-retirement blues.

Cooper and Frank are different sides of the same coin. Cooper has drifted along the shady margins of the American dream; while Frank, who is fully immersed in suburban America, is equally dissatisfied with where he finds himself. Both have empty lives with little in the way of meaningful friendships or real happiness. While Cooper is prepared to throw his old life away for a dream and take a leap of faith, Frank, despite his unhappy marriage and his desire for the witness Anne, holds on tightly to the trappings of his life. Cooper is prepared to risk it all. Frank risks nothing. It has to be said that Cooper has a lot less to loose than Frank, still the parallel is very much relevant, as the lives of both protagonists are equally dictated by their circumstances rather than their own free will. Equally, while Cooper is ultimately self-absorbed, Frank cares about others. Putting their happiness above his own.

Elwood Reid’s perspective on capitalism seems deliciously ambiguous. At first D.B. seems to be suggesting that money is the only means that a person can obtain the opportunity to escape the drudgery of everyday life, yet it is interesting to note that, despite the ransom, ultimately Cooper remains adrift. By cutting off his past Cooper has lost his roots, while Frank remains financially solvent, yet trapped in his unsatisfactory life. Just like life, no one wins.

While D.B. is not without faults, perhaps it looses its focus in the middle and perhaps it relies too heavily on an unlikely coincidence to tie its two story threads together, but nevertheless it is a very fine novel indeed. Perhaps it will leave those wanting a more traditional crime story feeling a little short changed. However for readers wanting something with hidden depth then they will struggle to find too many novels that can beat D.B. for its subtly intrigue and clever juxtaposition. A worthy read indeed.

Visits from the Drowned Girl by Steven Sherrill (2004)

Steven Sherrill’s second novel Visits from a Drowned Girl is a off-beat and – at times – vulgar tale of a simple disconnected man, who becomes increasingly emotionally isolated by a chance encounter with a stranger’s bizarre suicide. Sadly this most intriguing of novels never really reaches the heights that it initially promises. Still, Visits from a Drowned Girl is an original and engaging attempt to dissect our post-modern dislocated lives. The novel begins when Benny Poteat: our withdrawn and voyeuristic protagonist, observes a young woman stop by a flood-swollen river, set up her video camera, the leaving the tape running she undresses in front of it and calmly walk into the water. Only the video record of her strange suicide, a bag of video tapes and a business card of a manager of a local apartment complex remains as testament to her final act. Benny, torn between handing the tapes in and keeping this secret to himself, takes the tapes and slowly starts to untangle the girl’s life from the recordings, finding his own closely-woven life also starts to unravel.

As you would expect, Benny’s investigations drags him into the girl’s life and the underlying seediness of his Southern small town, but unlike David Lynch’s noir-esque Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks, which Visits from a Drowned Girl is slightly reminiscent of – where a horrific incident leads to the character’s learning of the sinister truth lurking behind the façade of their cosy communities -Steven Sherrill instead uses the suicide event and the power that this secret gives as a means of unlocking the dark side of Benny’s own character, rather than just the world around him. Indeed even the improbably long time period over which Benny plays the tapes, seems to be an act of control via denial of himself, although this could have just been a plot devise to keep us from finding out the drowned girls secret in the first three chapters.

As we see the inward corruption of the drowned girl tapes start to erode Benny’s moral compass and destroy his bustling yet disconnected life, Benny developments from an affable, if slightly stoic guy with an innate fear of relationships, into an cowedly, pathological control freak, who becomes increasingly unable to make decisions or take instinctively act, but compelled to passively observe. By the end of the novel Benny’s voyeurism, decisive paralysis and moral breakdown destroys his once simple life and drastically reduces our own identification with him, as he becomes increasingly unforgivable. Still, there is much to like in this novel: almost every character, nook and cranny of Benny’s atomised yet over-crowded community has a beautifully constructed back story to discover and while Sherrill’s writing sometimes gets a little cluttered for its own good, he has a rare gift of quirky prose and realistic dialogue, making Visits from a Drowned Girl a real pleasure to read – although there are many scenes that will make difficult reading for the more prudish reader, especially the disturbing goat scene!

Unfortunately there is little all that significant about the drowned girl herself: her life is as artificial and soulless as the society she lives in, and while we certainly get to see some of the less savoury aspects of Benny’s community, the reader will never get that investigative noir-esque sense of discovery that the novel’s splendid premise seems to suggest. While using the drowned girl’s death as a simple plot dynamic might have seemed a little cheap and – even – cheesy, there is still plenty of intelligent literary quality here that would have stopped it from becoming another genre pot-boiler.

While Visits from a Drowned Girl lacks that vital element of having a solid story, which – sadly – stops it from becoming the Great American Novel it so much wants to be, it is still a fine, intelligent and original novel, and judging by the strength of this novel, I would not be surprised if Steven Sherrill might just produce the next Great American Novel sometime soon.