“Coat of Many Colours” by Dominic Green

IZ223 cover Better. “Coat of Many Colours” is pretty much a pure old-fashioned idea story, nicely done. In an ecologically devastated South America, Jurassic Park-like tech is being used to engineer “a better, cheaper burger machine” — a food animal that can thrive in the desertified Amazon basin. But, in Experiment 2308, they appear to have accidentally created an intelligent creature. The Australian protagonist, Mullen, is ostensibly brought in to prove that Experiment 2308 is not intelligent, so that she can be killed and eaten without qualm; and there follows much Egan-ish discussion of the nature of intelligence, but in a pleasingly sardonic key:

Mullen bent down close to the bars, looking into the unfathomable eyes.
“I hope you don’t imagine,” she said, “that I am any sort of white knight. I am a cognitive psychologist, and it is my job to torture animals that are on the wrong side of mankind’s current designated threshold of nervous complexity by cutting their nervous systems apart and watching what parts twitch. I’m not allowed to do it to monkeys any more in most countries, but sea slugs and squid are still fair game.”

“Butterfly Bomb” by Dominic Green

IZ223 cover A “story-sized set of reasons” why our universe might be a space opera universe, according to the introductory notes. Sadly, neither the story nor the set of reasons is particularly exciting. An elderly man, living alone on an alien world, hitches a ride on a passing slave ship (by selling himself into slavery) in order to track down his granddaughter: the main things we learn along the way are that (a) AIs tend to think themselves into logical-philosophical blind alleys, which puts a crimp in civilization’s style but creates jobs for those who, like the protagonist, can mediate such quandries; and (b) ancient races left behind AI-based weapons that can mimic, infiltrate and destroy any societies they encounter. It’s not as perfunctory as proof-of-concept tales can be, and Green’s playfulness mostly carries it —

The superintendent scratched his forty-year service tattoo thoughtfully. “In that case, you might be of help to us. Our own mediator had arranged a system of non-overlapping magisteria between the nihilist and empiricist factions in our ship’s flight systems, but we were infected with a solipsistic virus several days ago. The accord has now broken down into open sulking. Wehave been becalmed insystem for two days while our vessel argues with itself. Our astrogator is muttering cray talk about learning to use a slide rule.”

— but I’m still somewhat surprised to see it showing up in the table of contents for a best-of-the-year volume. (And “the bunks clearly built for Svastikas, a radially symmetrical race previously conquered by the Proprietors” was pushing it a bit.)

JG Ballard: Art, Environment and Film

Over Christmas, BSFA members should have received the latest mailing, including the bumper-size Vector 261, and a copy of Winter Song by Colin Harvey. Mine arrived while I was away, and sat outside getting soggy, which is why it’s a bit rumpled; fortunately, Vector protected the novel.

Torque Control — editorial
Letters to Vector
The BSFA Awards — Donna Scott
Landscapes from a Dream: how the art of David Pelham captured the essence of JG Ballard’s early fiction — James Pardey
A Benign Psychopathology: the films of JG Ballard — Jonathan McCalmont
JG Ballard’s CONCRETE: thoughts on High Rise and Concrete Island — Lara Buckerton
An interview with Jose Carlos Somoza — by Ian Watson
First Impressions — book reviews edited by Kari Sperring
Progressive Scan: Ashes to Ashes, season 2 — Abigail Nussbaum
Foundation’s Favourites: The Voices of Time by JG Ballard — Andy Sawyer
Resonances 57 — Stephen Baxter
The New X: Careering — Graham Sleight

This issue was somewhat delayed, so the next two mailings (as mentioned in the previous post) should be following fairly hard on this one’s heels. Contributor copies of this issue of Vector will go out this week.

We’re using a new printer/mailing house, which seems to have had some teething problems. Most seriously, members have reported receiving torn envelopes and damaged or even missing contents — please contact us if your mailing was damaged,and we’ll sort out a replacement.

The thread for this issue on the BSFA forum is here; there’ll be a full news update, addressing the mailing delays and outlining plans for 2010, in the next mailing.

2010

I’ve decided 2010 doesn’t start until 17th January — that is, the day after the end of the nominating period for the BSFA awards. So no best books of 2009 from me just yet, but they will come, fear not.

In the meantime, I have more half-formed plans for 2010 than I can plausibly keep up. I would like, for instance, to read the back-catalogues of Mary Gentle and Bruce Sterling, two writers whose work I keep thinking I should really be more familiar with than I am. I want to read some of the big books lurking on my shelves: Brian Aldiss’ Helliconia trilogy, Nicola Barker’s Darkmans, Dos Passos’ USA trilogy, Paul Verhaeghen’s Omega Minor, among others. Taking advantage of my shiny new Sony Reader, which makes it much more convenient to read short fiction, I have grand plans of writing a monthly short fiction review post, as well as potential story-by-story reviews of more anthologies. I want to keep posting short reviews of books here, as I’ve been doing over Christmas, and save longer reviews for elsewhere; though I suspect I will creep back to longer and less frequent as the year goes on. I want to organise more round-table discussions of new books, of course (any suggestions?), and another run of short story club, independent of discussion of award-shortlisted stories.

On top of all that (or even: before I get to any of that), there’s two issues of Vector coming relatively close together (ie both in the first quarter of the year), which still need some work; and the survey book should be mailing to BSFA members with one of those issues, assuming I get all the author bios done; maybe we can get a new Vector website up and running at some point this year; and there’s the Strange Horizons reviews department (plus new Clute column) to keep on top of, of course.

Anyway. I had an excellent holiday break; hope you all did, as well.

Interzone Update

The eagle-eyed amongst you will no doubt have noticed that my reading of Interzone has somewhat fallen by the wayside in my quest to finish various books before the end of the year. (There’s something to be said about saving up a stack of highly-praised books and then reading them in an indulgent yet satisfying splurge over Christmas, it has to be said.) The new plan is to restart on Monday, and finish the last two and a bit issues by 16th January — aka the deadline for nominating for this year’s BSFA Awards. (Send in your nominations now!)

Cyberabad Days

Cyberabad Days cover After a novel as thorough as River of Gods (2004), any add-ons have to earn their keep. The stories collected in Cyberabad Days do so by fleshing out the timeline of the future, and (perhaps less nerdily) fleshing out perspectives excluded from River of Gods — and not just in the sense that none of the characters live in Bharat, the seat of the novel’s action. So, for example, in the first story, “Sanjeev and Robotwallah” (2007), we see the collapse of our India into the nation-states of McDonald’s novel, and the arrival of the “lighthoek” personal computing devices that will become ubiquitous; and we see it through the eyes of a village boy who becomes a combat-robot fan, is drawn into the circle of the child-soldiers who remote-pilot them, and confronted with the terrible mundanity of war. Convincing youthful perspectives are a feature of the book, actually, from the bratty Westerner in “Kyle Meets the River” (2006), whose father is involved in (redundant) nation-building efforts after India fractures, to “An Eligible Boy” (2006) caught, by changing demographics, in a wife-drought. The first-person, subjective account is also common, with slightly more mixed results: Hugo-winner “The Little Goddess” (2005) reads even better this time around, smoothly exploring McDonald’s future from the perspective of another kind of outsider, a young girl chosen as the Royal Kumari of Kathmandu, while “The Dust Assassin” (2008) is probably the closest thing the collection has to a weak story; it’s not long, but feels too long for the ground it covers. “The Djinn’s Wife” (2006) conceals the identity of its narrator until its final page, and in doing so plays with the idea of McDonald’s India as “exotic”, as a location for outlandish tales. Each story’s protagonist, however, is their own person; each provides an angle we haven’t had before, each explores new facets of the social and technological changes that run through this future.

Put another way:

India is her people and we are all only, ultimately, the heroes of our own lives. There is only one hero’s journey and that leads from the birth-slap to the burning-ghat. We are a billion and a half heroes. (297)

(Or indeed: “if it were a different man preparing to blow up the same bridge it would be a different story. Most idea-driven SF that purports to treat of character misses that.”)

The blockquote is from near the end of “Vishnu at the Cat Circus”, the collection’s only original work; although to compare it to any of the other tales in the book feels rather unfair, since at a shade under 100 pages it truly is a short novel, not a short story, and surely would be published and considered as such in any other genre. Couched as the seemingly-garrulous life story of an aging Brahmin, one of the genetic elite of River of Gods — engineered to live twice as long and age twice as fast as regular humans — it is both a brilliant study of another convincingly different character and, because a crucial part of that difference is the ability to see “the connectedness of things … the biggest picture” (236), the most complete description McDonald has produced of this future history. I did feel just a little pandered-to by this, actually; the transparency of what elsewhere is left to inference, the pulling-together of many threads, the revelation of What Happens Next. But to linger on that feeling would be to sell “Vishnu at the Cat Circus” very short indeed, since it’s surely forgivable in a swansong to a setting as rich as this, and since (among other things) the story is, without ever being heavy-handed, precisely about the act of storying a future, of standing back as an author (or a critic) and trying to get a sense of the whole (the sense that River of Gods refuses to allow its characters), trying to make sense of the whole. Easily worth the price of admission, as they say; one of the best things I’ve read all year, in fact.

Palimpsest

Palimpsest cover Oh, this is a cold book. Its main characters, our four guides who contract the passport to the fantastical city of Palimpsest, are broken individuals all; there is almost no warmth in the very frequent sex they all engage in; and the closer they get to achieving their dream of permanently moving to Palimpsest, the clearer it becomes that for all its wonders, it is like everywhere else a place to live, not an answer. Reviews — Matt Denault, Dan Hartland, Deborah J Brannon, Annalee Newitz — rightly talk about how penetrating the novel is on the relationship between the real and the fantastic. I’m a little surprised that words like possessiveness and selfishness don’t crop up more often; they seem to me necessary to capture the full desolation of the desire that the Palimpsest virus induces, an addictive need to make a place ours, to make it us, to fill ourselves up with it: an need familiar to readers of fantasy that the novel at first mocks, with its absurdly imaginative glimpses of a city that refuse to become a whole, and then, towards the close, seems to concede. The great weakness of Palimpsest, as Dan is most forceful in articulating, is that to this end its characters are tools, not players, and they can feel a little thin, not to mention hapless (perhaps particularly the two men; the two women felt more sharply defined to me throughout). All four are victims of the story, not shapers of it — a feeling reinforced by the highly structured, highly stylised nature of the book, which clinically cycles between the characters, forcing more direction onto them than their individual lives ever seem to contain. But perhaps this is a final chill irony: an unresolvable struggle between the irresistable artifices of stories and something more fluid, less satisfying, that we have to try to recognise as life.

White is for Witching

White is for Witching cover If there is any disappointment associated with this book, it’s that I read it too late in the year to buy it for anyone for Christmas. Oyeyemi’s third novel is, like The Opposite House, a fierce, fluid and economical tale, more explicit about its fantastic content but still laced with sufficient uncertainties that after one quick read I don’t feel able to speak authoritatively about “what happened”. I tend more to Jane Shilling‘s view of the book than Carrie O’Grady‘s, however. So, to describe its three narrators: Eliot, whose twin Miranda is at the heart of the book, and who appears to be sincerely conscientious about her worsening health; Ore, who falls into a relationship with Miranda when the two of them meet in their first year at Cambridge, and comes to visit her at home during the Christmas vacation; and 29 Barton Road, the house where Eliot and Miranda and their father Luc live in Dover, whose voice is (mostly) the voice of Miranda’s mother, and grandmother, and great-grandmother (as Dan Hartland notes, the voice of history), speaking in chorus, fearful of and prejudiced towards anyone not of the family, anyone different. Their hold over Miranda only grows. A darkly self-aware ghost story, then, with an uncommon freshness that springs from its acuity of insight into character and circumstance; a book in which the scariest thing is what the fear of other people can become, and do.

“Silence & Roses” by Suzanne Palmer

IZ223 cover “Silence & Roses” has the misfortune to be the third robots-outliving-humans story I’ve read in the last year. All three are driven by sentiment, and on that scale Palmer’s tale sits somewhere below Ken Scholes’ cloying “Edward Bear and the Very Long Walk”, and somewhere above Deborah Biancotti’s superior “King of All and the Metal Sentinel”. As in those stories, robots designed for routine are challenged by novelty (which reveals backstory, in this case that we’re in a care home walled off from the ruins of civilization outside), and their naive incomprehension drives a plot, with sentiment generated by the gap between what they understand (the residents are falling silent) and what we understand (the residents are dying). Confronted with the pointlessness of their existence, many of Palmer’s robots go a little mad; only our hero, Button-4-Circle-Peach, survives for long enough to fall into a situation where the rules he understands can apply again. It’s competently done (and the initial reveal is quite well done), but seems somewhat rule-bound itself. And that the robots’ programming recognises silence as a problem, but not strips of rotting flesh hanging off a resident’s face, is surely unlikely.

“The Transmigration of Aishwarya Desai” by Eric Gregory

IZ223 cover Skipping over the Dominic Green stories for now: I haven’t read the 1982 Philip K Dick novel on whose title this story riffs, so I don’t know if the similarities go deeper than a first-person narrator whose sense of consensus reality is out of kilter with those around her. Gregory’s narrator is an academic, travelling to an alien world to debate the nature of the first alien life humanity has encountered (and how best to talk about that life, what it means to impose human descriptions and interpretations onto it). But in travelling, she has (I think) crossed not just space but worlds. Ships seem to jump into parallel realities, leading one character to obsess about meeting versions of herself, which she believes will allow a “perfect love”, and another to insist that “we can only jump into an improbable universe”. This may be enough for one story, but Gregory adds in a psychic bond between Desai and one of the aliens, which causes trouble and may or may not indicate that she’s met a deeply improbable version of herself. It’s a curious piece, perhaps slightly too compacted, but certainly flavoursome.