Review: Adrift on the Sea of Rains, by Ian Sales

May 16th, 2012 Posted in Reading
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(Full disclosure: I was lucky enough to win a copy of this novella through The Future Fire.)

It's really quite hypnotic...

In an alternate reality, when NASA’s funding slipped the US military stepped in and shared the bills. Now, the military have a permanent, manned base on the moon and NASA barely have anything in low Earth orbit. However, the Cold War has boiled over and left the Earth a charred cinder. The military astronauts serving their six months on lunar surface now only have each other for company and dwindling supplies of food. Their relationships are as bleak as the lunar landscape, and their only hope is a stolen Nazi experiment.

This novella is a love letter to the space program. The descriptions of the lunar landscape are beautiful and Sales’ descriptions of rocket flight are truly empathic. The science behind mankind’s voyages to the stars are described in loving detail that borders on pornography–the spacesuits and the walks across the lunar seas, the Velcro shoes used in the station’s one sixth Earth gravity and the empty bands of radio that the stranded astronauts hopelessly scan. Even the calculations needed to plot planetary orbits without a supercomputer are given the space and time Tolkein gives to his swords. This isn’t the space travel of space opera, not even the space travel of science fiction. This is the space travel of our own past, of Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong. This is the closest you’ll get to orbit without being a billionaire.

Even The Bell–an esoteric experiment ‘liberated’ from the Nazi’s at the end of the war–is treated with the careful certainty of an experiment being put out to peer review. It revs up, it pops, they argue about its power needs and the probability of it working the way they need it to.

But this beautiful hard science suffers from the same problem as those peer review journals. There’s no speech marks around the direct speech, which only serves to make the line between reader and character even thicker. I felt no emotional connection to those stranded men on the Moon, no more than I felt to the space suits or the lunar descent modules or the Bell. Like all those pieces of tech, the characters are consistent and work the way they should… They just don’t ever quite feel human. They’re just one more part of the space program, no more or less important than the rockets or the lunar base.

And as a minor nitpick, there are a couple of places where the tenses change when they shouldn’t. But Hell, if there’s an editor that can pick out every single typo they deserve a medal.

Adrift on the Sea of Rains is a wonderful hard science novella that will make you feel as if you’ve left the Earth’s surface perched atop over seven million pounds of thrust and kicked up the sand of the Moon’s seas. Maybe it’s fitting that the humans are reduced to another machine in the program, that they’re put in their insignificant place in the cosmos. I miss it, though, that uniquely human element we always carry around in our skulls.

Still, this is subtitled Apollo Quartet 1, and I’m looking forwards to the other three parts. There’s no such thing as too much human space exploration porn, and this is the top-shelf stuff your slightly odd uncle brought you after making you promise you’d never tell your parents. You know, the really good shit.

(And as an important note, the book comes with three appendices:  abbreviations used in the book; a glossary; and a bibliography.  The glossary gives a piecemeal history of the alternate reality’s space program.  I read the novella first, worried it contained spoilers.  It doesn’t.  Read it before the story.

And visit Ian Sales’ blog here.  Adrift on the Sea of Rains was published by Whippleshield Books, April 2012.  Whippleshield Books was set up by Ian to publish fiction he found was lacking in the market, fiction like Adrift.  Love to the man for setting up his own publishing company to follow his tastes.)

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Darkwar — Where the Author Went So Very Wrong

May 5th, 2012 Posted in Reading, Writing
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Why is there a feline creature on the cover of a book about canine creatures?

So. Darkwar.

When I got to the end of the book, only years of emotional repression stopped me crying. I wanted to rip out the last chapter so I could pretend it had never happened.

It’s been plaguing me since I finished it. Everywhere I turn, I’m facing it. To be honest, I’m writing this so that maybe I can escape. It’s only a book, after all… Isn’t it?

In my search for answers–well, not answers… Something else. In that search, I found quite a few reviews which do a neat job of summarising the plot and giving you a taste for the book–you know, like a review should. So I’m not going to do that. I’m going to talk about my experience with the book. It may make a bit more sense if you read one of those proper reviews first.

Although, I should warn you, I derived a lot of pleasure from the first book, Doomstalker, in the slow reveal of the wider world. And those reviews will rob you of the surprise.

Mind you, so will mine. Spoilers ahoy!

Read the rest of this entry »

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Why I Don’t Read More Fantasy

April 26th, 2012 Posted in Reading, Writing
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I’m reading Glen Cook’s Darkwar trilogy at the moment. It’s kind of enjoyable so far and I’m willing to see where it’s going.

However, it’s also reminded me of the reasons why I don’t read fantasy more often. I shall now put them in a list.

1) Cycles
Now, I know Lord of the Rings was a story spread over three books. I’m going to let it get away with it because a) Tolkien was long dead by the time I read it, so I knew Return of the King was going to be the end of the story; and b) it’s Lord of the fucking Rings.

I would like to draw particular attention to b). I’ll be coming back to it.

Now, when I reach the end of the book, I like to reach the end of the story. By the last page, all major plot elements should be resolved. Quests should be completed, special skills learnt, evil lords defeated, relationships sorted. This is a novel, not a serialised TV drama. I don’t want to get to the end and find out that the demon has been defeated but Glory is still hunting Buffy down.

2) Magical technology

What is this strange ‘talking box’, this device of evil witchcraft?

It’s a TV. You know it’s a TV, I know it’s a TV. If you’re going to take modern technology and replace science with magic, at least be honest about it. Sure, your characters don’t know it’s a TV and may think it’s witchcraft, but don’t describe it in great detail, twisting like a Russian contortionist to avoid the word ‘television’.

3) European Medieval Settings
a) it’s been done; b) our conceptions of medieval Europe–and so most likely your reconstruction of it–are entirely inaccurate; c) I want female characters, not child/mother/whore/ringer.

4) Fantasy Races
Evil, ugly orcs. Pretty, magical elves. Bearded, subterrain dwarfs.

Bored now. Very, very bored now.

There’s millions of species on the planet Earth. Millions of species, each with their own unique characters and qualities. Give me something more than ugly humans, pretty humans and short humans.

(For those of you expecting a discussion of Superman verses The Flash, my apologies. Another time, perhaps.  I mean, I know it’s been covered in the comics, but we’ve all got our opinions, right?)

 

"Legolas, what do your elf eyes see?"
"Sauron's flaming ring! There's an absolute fuckton of orcs heading our way!"

5) Olde Worlde Englishe
Oftimes. Mayhaps. Is it not for this. Whence.

I understand trying to set the scene. But we’re in the twenty-first century. Don’t pretend that we’re not. Don’t pretend we’re in some never-existed deep England where everyone used the most convoluted sentence structure possible and no one swore.

6) It’s a book, not a doorstop
I’m not saying long books can’t be good, or good books can’t be long. I’m saying when each entry in your saga could be used to beat a walrus to death, you’ve got fifty pages to convince me it’s worth investing the significant amount of time you’re asking for.

7) I’ve read Lord of the Rings
In fact, pretty much all of the above can be summed up with that one. The story, the setting, the quest, the characters… it’s all been mined, mined and mined until there’s no creativity left. Give me something new.

Darkwar has been guilty of some minor infractions so far. The language is the one that’s starting to grate on me. However, it wins significant points for having its (so far) only sentient species not humans (either normal, ugly, pretty or short) and having a setting that’s… I don’t even know. I thought it was boarder line iron age, but it turns out I was wrong. Way wrong.

I’m enjoying it and want to get back to it. (Curse this ‘real life’ that intrudes upon my reading!) I just wanted to pause to get all that off my chest.

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The Cold, Cold World of Terminus

June 11th, 2011 Posted in Reading
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I think there was a window in my life when I could have really fallen in love with Asimov’s Foundation, and both times I’ve come to that window it’s been closed.

I first came to them when I was about fourteen and found the trilogy on my dad’s book shelf (three books in their own little presentation box). I read perhaps the first half of the first book, but gave up after becoming hopelessly lost in the subtle political and social movements which make the story the way the moving of the tides makes the coastline. A certain intellectual maturity is needed, I think, and at fourteen I was lacking it.

I’ve come at it again now and I think it simply lacks the… well, for want of a better word, humanity to sit easily in my stomach.

The basis of the novel is that psychohistorian Hari Seldon uses a form of statistical analysis to predict the end of the vast Galactic Empire, and attempts to use the same mathematical predictions of human behaviour to shorten the ensuring period of barbarism from thirty thousand years to just one thousand years. The novel follows the first 195 years of Seldon’s new interplanetary Foundation, from its conception on the isolated world of Terminus to the rise of the first merchant prince, Hober Mallow.

I find the idea that, given an appropriately large sample size, human behaviour can be reliably predicted deeply seductive. It has an empirical edge that tastes of Truth, that cuts through the messy bullshit of human society to expose its most inner clockwork heart. And it reduces humanity to a set of rules, like the rules of physics or biology, a basic set of values which defines the universe, makes us visibly part of the mechanism of the universe and fills me with a sense of the sublime.

Hari’s philosophy presumes two things:

  1. A heavily industrialised, technology-dependant society is the ‘correct’ path of human social development; and
  2. The most basic goal for sentient life is simply to exist.

The novel follows the tools that the Foundation uses to spread its ‘superior’ art and science and ward off the barbarous Dark Age that follows the Galactic Empire’s collapse. The first tool is religion, and then money. That follows a super-speeded version of our own history up to the current day, where religion is fading and money is power.

As the power of the Foundation switches from religion to money, the story becomes little more than embarrassingly naked capitalist imperialism. At every turn are small-minded petty despots who are easily wooed by promises of riches, easily lulled into the loving embrace of the Foundation by promises of personal wealth. No where does the tendrils of the Foundation encounter a culture which says, ‘we’ve seen what happened to the last Galactic Empire… why on Earth would we want to go down that path again? We’ve found a better way’.

No where, in fact, do they encounter a culture that has not decided to imitate the cartoon cultures of our own history. Male dominated, aggressive, distrusting any form of scientific advancement, reactionary, wholly self-interested, greedy and corrupt. All in the perfect condition for the Foundation to ‘save’ them and bring them enlightenment, via free trade which is pure and incorruptible and, although driven by self-interested individuals, is a force for civilisation.

One could argue, I’m sure, that Asimov was just replaying our own history to us. To make the case, one would have to ignore any history which did not come from Western Europe, and any influence which didn’t originate from there.

I don’t know. I don’t want to take this along a ‘privilege’ route because I’m sure that’s been done before. It just seems that the book is guilty of two of the worst crimes fiction can commit: Lack of imagination; and propagandising. Lack of imagination for showing us a distorted, over-simplified version of our own history, and propagandising for the enlightenment and civilisation our current capitalist values and society is shown to bring to the barbarous petty-Empires.

At the end of the book, Mallow says:

There will be other crises in the time to come when money power has become as dead a force as religion is now.

It’s enough to make me want to see what Asimov thinks our future will be.   But…

The thing that nags at me is that the question of why is never asked. Why is reconstructing the Galactic Empire desirable? Why do we need all this technology? Maybe, on Terminus somewhere, there’s someone sitting outside watching their little sun rise over the horizon and marvelling at the beauty and life of the universe. We never see them. Humanity is a variable in a set of Seldon’s equations. It has no soul, no spirit, no love, no wonder, no hate, no passion, no violence. It is simply a set of figures in the super-charged rush to recreate a world so loud and noisy and full of technology that to try and stop and contemplate one’s thoughts is to be crushed under the stampeding mob.

The ultimate end of Seldon’s Foundation is the Empire’s capital planet of Trantor, a world where every one of its 75 million square feet is covered by a single, vast city, where there is barely a blade of grass, where natives are taken up to see the sky once a year as children and are so disturbed they scream and scream and scream.

And the only alternative is petty despotism, tyrants ruling over their lands with fear and slaughter.

In short, it’s either the American Dream or nothing.

So, well, I wasn’t too impressed with one of the most vaunted books in the history of Western science-fiction. Maybe I’ll see what follows the power of money, but maybe I’ll just read the Wikipedia article instead and revisit Asimov’s Robot stories. I might not find them quite the way I left them, though…

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Dylan Fox: Official Kindle Salesperson

May 17th, 2011 Posted in Reading
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I decided at the tail-end of last year that I needed to get an e-reader. 2010 saw a huge increase in my awareness of books and magazines which are available in various electronic formats, but not print. Apex Magazine and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, for example. Then there are magazines published in the States, like Asimov’s and Clarkesworld, which are just so much cheaper and easier to buy as e-versions. And I got hold to two .pdf books last year. I have nothing against computers, I just don’t think they’re a good medium for consuming words. The computer’s big and bulky and takes up your entire lap, it’s tied to a plug socket, needs its own bag, the screen makes your eyes tired, scrolling down is a pain, the cat can’t sit with you… It’s just not a fun experience.

I fought long and hard against getting a Kindle, thanks to Amazon’s history of being a dick. I finally decided to get a Sony PRS-650. It didn’t have wi-fi, but that was a sacrifice I was prepared to make as the only reader with wi-fi available in the UK is the Kindle. When it came to buying it, though, I couldn’t actually find one for sale in the UK. Not even in the Sony store. Good jerb, Sony.

So, I brought a Kindle with wi-fi and 3G.

Now, a couple of misconceptions I had about the Kindle:

You don’t own books you buy for your Kindle, you rent them from Amazon.
When you buy something from the Kindle store, it downloads to the hard drive on your Kindle. You can then take it off the Kindle’s hard drive and put it on your computer’s. Amazon keeps a back up of everything you buy from them, so you can re-download it if you accidentally delete your copy.

You can only read Amazon ebooks on the Kindle.
You can read, annotate, and generally scribble over most document formats… except for epub. Which is the industry standard for ebooks. I can only hope that Amazon adds support for epub and Open Office docs in the future.

It is worth mentioning, though, that the Kindle needs its own special cable to connect to your computer, and to charge. It looks like a mini USB slot, but it isn’t.

The trouble with sitting around in cafés and buses reading on my Kindle—which is the whole reason I brought one—is that people ask me, ‘is that one of those ebook things?’, at which point I’m answering, ‘yes, it’s fantastic, here look at this’ before I realise what I’m doing.

You can organise all the files on your Kindle into folders, and one book/magazine etc can go into multiple folders. So, you can have Frankenstein in your Classics, Sci-Fi and Horror folders. No need to make difficult choices about which shelf to put it on any more.

All the folders are displayed and accessible from the home screen. If you’re part way though reading something, the Kindle will automatically remember the page you were last reading, and load up the file on that page. You don’t have to put a bookmark in or anything like that.

Turning pages is done by buttons on the side of the Kindle, one for forwards and one for backwards. There’s a button for each on both sides, so you can hold it in your left or right hand. There’s a small qwerty keyboard at the bottom for making notes, searching through the Kindle store or searching the text. There’s a progress bar down the bottom of the screen to let you know how far through the file you are, and you can put the cursor next to a word to see a quick dictionary definition of it. You can make notes in the text, highlight bits, cut bits out and put them in a separate folder for later… you can even see what parts of a text other people have highlighted. And, most important, using the interface is quick, easy, and headache free. If there’s anything you want on your Kindle and you don’t want to plug it into your computer, you attach the file to a blank email and send it to an address Amazon gives you, and the next time your Kindle connects to a wi-fi network it picks it up. Amazon even reformat the file to optimise it for reading on the Kindle.

It’s a pain in the arse to flip through a book on the Kindle to find a particular place not marked in the index or looking to see how much of a chapter you’ve got left, but then it’s a pain in the arse flipping through a paperback to find a particular paragraph if you haven’t marked the page.

Reading something on the Kindle is a wholly different experience to reading something on paper or on a computer. It’s as easy on the eyes as paper, but the feel of it in your hands, the texture of it, the weight, the way the light reflects off it… all those peripheral things you don’t really notice give reading on it a different taste to anything else. It’s a taste that takes some getting used to.

Now, I don’t care what the adverts say. I’ve got mine safely sealed in a Tough Love case and hidden behind a screen protector. I don’t know why (actually, I suspect it’s all Apple’s fault), but there’s a trend in tech gadgets for slim, shiny things that need to be wrapped in bulky protection for their own good. You want to replace a scratched screen? Hah! Anyway, I want my shiny to stay shiny, so it gets locked away for its own good.

There are many, many problems with the ebook market at the moment, and Amazon is right in the thick of it. Publishers and distributors are argy-barging over pricing and rights and ownership, and of course consumers are getting shafted by both ends. If you want to get the latest releases on ebook, wait until the fight’s over and the dust has settled. Keep buying your paperbacks, and the occasional hard back of the book you’ve been really looking forwards to.

For most other people, though, it’s a good investment. There’s the entirety of Project Gutenberg you can download for free, a lot of which you can get through the Kindle store for £0.00. There’s .pdf’s people give away for the joy of having someone read their work (or for the joy of being nominated for a Nebula award…). There’s magazines. There’s old books which aren’t out of copyright but only cost 70p. There’s Kindlefeeder, which will send up to four rss feeds to my Kindle for no charge. There’s the fact that you can send .doc files to your Kindle, so you can read you friends’ writing without printing it out or being at your computer—and you can make notes as you read. There’s the text-to-speech which’ll read the majority of books to you. There’s a brilliant trick which I came up with: Go to Google maps and get your directions; print the directions to a .pdf file on your computer; send the .pdf to your Kindle—all the directions for your weekend away in one place and without needing to use the company’s printer!

So what I’m saying is that there’s two types of people who should buy one: People like me; and people like my mother. My mother is an exceptionally sharp, intelligent woman with a life-long passion for trashy romance novels. Her collection of Mills & Boon, Georgette Heyer and suchlike is measured in square feet, taking up three 4ft x 6ft bookcases last time I checked. Yes, my brother and I moved out and have been replaced by Mills & Boon. The sheer amount of literature my mother consumes means the Kindle would be the difference between doing your sales and purchase figures in a notebook, and doing them in Excel. One may be more noble, but the other just makes life so much easier.

The Kindle also has a couple of odd features like a web browser and mp3 player. The browser works but is painful to use, and I haven’t tried the mp3 player. I have an X-Fi for listening to music, but I suppose there are some who don’t mind their music mangled into a bland mess of vague noises. The browser was useful for checking email when I didn’t have an Internet connection, but you couldn’t do much more on it. One device, one function. Stick to using something for what it’s good at.

So, yeah, that’s my Kindle sales pitch. I really don’t like being a corporate mouthpiece-and-fanboy, but the sad fact of our society is that it’s only the big corporate bully boys who can break new ground, and the Kindle is really the only fully-functioning ereader available in the UK. Owning one is having as much of an effect on my life as owning a mobile phone has. Maybe in a few years, the ground will be broken enough to allow the small innovators to move in, and I can get an ereader made by some wizened old guy in his garden shed who survives on cups of strong, sweet tea and custard creams. Until then, we need to show that there’s a market and a desire and that means dancing with the devil. Still, say it with me now: At least it’s not Apple.

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Fantasty Magazine, January Stories Reviewed at The Portal

February 15th, 2011 Posted in Reading, Writing
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Not so long ago, I was recruited by the good people at The Portal, a site which reviews genre short fiction:

Our goal is to take a critical look at the stories we review, thoughtfully analyzing their themes, strengths and weaknesses, historical and contemporary context, and their context within the magazine or collection at hand. We aim to write in a clear, uncluttered style that may be easily understood by all of our readers, who read English with varying degrees of comfort. To that end, please structure your reviews keeping the following guidelines in mind.

My first review is now up on the site!  Fantasy Magazine, the four stories published in January 2011.

Go have a read!

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