Eric S. Raymond's Blog, page 39

Review: The Chaplain’s War

As I write, the author of The Chaplain’s War (Brad Torgerson; Baen) has recently been one of the subjects of a three-minute hate by left-wingers in the SF community, following Larry Correia’s organization of a drive to get Torgerson and other politically incorrect writers on the Hugo ballot. This rather predisposed me to like his work sight unseen; I’m not a conservative myself, but I dislike the PC brigade enough to be kindly disposed to anyone who gives them apoplectic fits.

Alas, there’s not much value here. Much of it reads like a second-rate imitation of Starship Troopers, complete with lovingly detailed military-training scenes and hostile bugs as opponents. And the ersatz Heinlein is the good parts – the rest is poor worldbuilding, even when it’s not infected by religious sentiments I consider outright toxic.

Harrison Barlow is a chaplain’s assistant in an Earth military that is losing a war with mantis-like aliens bent on wiping out humanity. He and a remnant of the fleet are penned up on a Mantis-held planet, and the force-field walls are literally closing in. Then, the reason they were not instantly wiped out after losing their battle is revealed when Barlow is questioned by a Mantis anthropologist he comes to think of as the Professor.

The Mantes do not understand human religion. They have previously wiped out two other sophont species who engaged in religious practices. The Professor is of a faction among them now thinks this was over-hasty and that some effort should be made to understand “faith” before humanity is extinguished.

In the novel’s first major event, Barlow – with nothing to lose but his life – refuses to answer the Professor’s questions except on the condition that the Mantes call a truce. Much to his own astonishment, this actually happens; Barlow is repatriated and celebrated as humanity’s only successful negotiator with the Mantes.

The rest of the novel cross-cuts between (on the one hand) flashbacks to Barlow’s boot-camp experiences and the events leading up to his crucial meeting with the Professor, and (on the other) the events which follow on a Mantis decision to break the truce while Barlow and his superiors are negotiating with the Queen Mother who initiated the war.

What follows is deeply flawed as SF even if you’re not put off by Torgerson’s religious evangelism. The Mantes are too obviously authorial sock puppets; they (and the Queen Mother in particular) swing too readily and rapidly from being profoundly alien to seeming excessively human-like in psychology considering the given details of their biology and society.

By the time the Queen Mother begins having pangs of conscience over her previous behavior, believability has already essentially collapsed. The Mantes have become humans in funny-hat carapaces. Lost is any of the illusion, so necessary in fiction but especially in SF, that the author’s characters and his setting have any causal autonomy.

The ensuing redemption narrative is so obviously manipulative that it’s wince-inducing. It gets worse as it goes on, and the ending is positively mawkish. Even a religious person should squirm when an apologia is this clumsy.

Then we get to the essential anti-rationality of the author’s religion. There are several crucial beats in the plot at which the day is saved by what the author none-too-subtly hints is divine intervention; I think this is a direct crime against science fiction’s core promise that the universe is rationally knowable. But this book is a tepid mess even if you don’t see that as a problem.

Science fiction from within

There are so many interesting points being elicited in the responses to my previous post on why the deep norms of the SF genre matter that I think I may have passed a threshold. I think the material I have written on critical theory of science fiction is now substantial enough that I could actually expand it into a book. I am now contemplating whether this is a good idea – whether there’s a market in either the strict monetary or other senses.

I haven’t read a great deal of the critical literature on science fiction. Most of what I have seen I’m not very impressed with. Too much of it is dismissive and reductive. Even analyses that intend to take SF seriously often seem to want to talk about everything except what I think is important. Here, for example, is part of a synopsis I found when I googled for “anatomy of science fiction”:

This wide-ranging collection of essays re-opens the connection between science fiction and the increasingly science-fictional world. Kevin Alexander Boon reminds us of the degree to which the epistemology of science fiction infects modern political discourse. Károly Pintér explores the narrative structures of utopian estrangement, and Tamás Bényei and Brian Attebery take us deeper into the cultural exchanges between science fiction and the literary and political worlds. In the second half, Donald Morse, Nicholas Ruddick and Éva Federmayer look at the way in which science fiction has tackled major ethical issues, while Amy Novak and Kálmán Matolcsy consider memory and evolution as cultural batteries. The book ends with important discussions of East German and Hungarian science fiction by Usch Kiausch and Donald Morse respectively.

My response to this is best expressed by the words of the immortal P.J. O’Rourke: “What the fuck? I mean, what the fucking fuck?” I think you have to be carefully trained into a kind of elaborated insensibility to the actual subject before most of a book so described could possibly be interesting. I see nothing there about what I think are the really interesting questions. Like:

What are the defining constraints or generative rules of the SF form?
What are the canonical works that exemplify these rules?
What goes on the minds of readers of SF that is different from what goes on in the readers of other genres?
How do the answers to that question believed by SF writers affect their artistic choices?
The genre conversation in SF exhibits features not paralleled in other genres. Are these historically accidental or essential given the genre’s defining constraints?
Can we identify stages and transition points in the evolution of the rules?
What does the past of SF predict about its future?

This is a program for an inside-to-out analysis of the genre, rather than an outside-to-in one. Really informed readers will recognize the influence of Northrop Frye here; it is similar to what Frye called “rhetorical analysis” of literature. Also, as I’ve previously noted, I owe a huge debt to Samuel Delany for teaching me that the rules of the SF genre are discoverable through its reading protocols.

I’ve been chipping away at this program since the early 1990s, both directly in several essays and indirectly through my reviews. Maybe it’s time to pull that together into a book.

I have, therefore, two requests for my commenters.

First: what previous works about SF criticism can you suggest that would either assist or challenge this program, and why?

Second: Discuss the objectives. In particular, what other questions about the field are interesting from within the field? Stuff like “epistemology of science fiction infecting modern political discourse” is not very interesting to me even though the epistemology of SF itself is.

Review: Fortunes of the Imperium

Nobody will ever confuse Fortunes of the Imperium (Jody Lynne Nye; Baen) with great SF, but it’s a likeable, fluffy little confection of a book that had me thinking “Wodehouse…in…spaaace!”

Lord Thomas Kinago and his imperturbable aide Parsons ride again (this is a sequel to the earlier Views of the Imperium). Following a regrettable incident involving a skimmer race and an extremely ugly statue, the young lord’s formidable mother, acting in her capacity as as the First Space Lord, has (horrors!) saddled him with actual work, sending the duo on a diplomatic mission to the Autocracy of the Uctu.

Hostile aliens are bad enough, but Kinago is also saddled with his cousin Jil, a glittering beauty who believes she has reason to want to be far away from the Imperial capital for a while after having rebuffed an infatuated gangster. How’s a man to get anywhere with his real assignment – investigating arms smuggling to the Autocracy for the Imperium’s intelligence bureau – with a shopping-mad relative and her entourage making him so dashedly conspicuous? Worse yet, rumor has reached Kinago’s ears that two of the vivacious and undeniably attractive young ladies attending Jil have been qualified by his aunts as matrimonial prospects…

Complications ensue in the form of an unexpected reapparence by the aforesaid gangster, a most curious and alimentary form of smuggling, and a dastardly plot against the lonely young Autocrat of the Uctu. Can Lord Thomas’s wits, luck, generosity, and genetically enhanced aristocratic charm carry the day? Will cousin Jil ever get enough shopping? Can the specter of matrimony be successfully evaded? And how will Lord Thomas cope when he discovers the ubiquitous and indispensable Parsons to be helplessly immured in an Uctu prison cell?

It’s all good silly fun that Nye obviously had a good time writing, only slightly marred by the fact that one of the central plot conceits doesn’t actually work. To reassemble a solid object from nanite dust you’d have to pay the energy cost of all the covalent bonds that would have been present to begin with if the object had been manufactured in bulk. For anything metal this is comparable to the cost required to melt it, and that energy has to come from somewhere at reassembly time.

Ah well. This sort of thing is why SF has the one-McGuffin-but-FTL-doesn’t-count rule. Enjoy; I did.

UPS I did it again

I had to buy a new UPS for my desktop machine yesterday after the old one succumbed to battery death, so Cathy and I made a run to the local MicroCenter.

UPS designers have been pissing me off since forever with designs that require you to throw away the entire device when the battery craps out, unless you’re willing to go to great length to avoid this – finding the exact right replacement battery from a specialty supplier, then taking the unit apart and reassembling it yourself.

This is never practical under time pressure, and I’ve never had the luxury of no time pressure when trying to cope with a dead UPS. Sure didn’t this time; my area was under a severe-thunderstorm watch.

Imagine my pleased surprise when I found a big stack of varied models branded APC that are not just significantly less expensive and with longer dwell times than when I was last UPS-shopping, but designed with removeable and replaceable batteries, too.

Progress does get made. Dunno whether this is a standard feature on all UPS brands yet, but doubtless it will be within a few years.

Some of you may find my UPS HOWTO of interest. I’ve shipped a 3.0 update with the glad news of replaceable batters and a few other minor updates; it may be up by the time you read this.

Why the deep norms of the SF genre matter

In the book reviews I’ve been writing recently I have been applying some very specific ideas about the nature and scope of science fiction, particularly in contrast to other genres such as fantasy, mystery, and horror. I have not hesitated to describe some works found in SF anthologies as defective SF, as non-SF, or even as anti-SF.

It is not fashionable these days to be so normative about any kind of artistic form, let alone SF. The insistence that we should embrace diversity is constant, even if it means giving up having any standards at all. In a genre like SF where the core traditions include neophilia and openness to possibility, the argument for exclusive definitions and hard boundaries seems especially problematic.

I think it is an argument very much worth making nevertheless. This essay is my stake in the ground, one I intend to refer readers back to when (as sometimes happens) I’m accused of being stuck on an outmoded and narrow conception of the genre. I will argue three propositions: that artistic genres are functionally important, that genre constraints are an aid to creativity and communication rather than a hindrance, and that science fiction has a particular mission which both justifies and requires its genre constraints.

(Some parts of this essay are excerpts from earlier related writing.)

First, I want to be clear on what I think a genre is. It’s two things: one is a set of expectations a reader has about the kind of experience an instance of the genre will deliver, the other is a set of genre-specific codes and expressive techniques that the genre writer uses in the expectation that readers will receive them as the author intended. Like all codes and languages, the purpose of genres is to make communication easier by allowing both parties to assume a repertoire of common referents. Genre art fails when the production of the writer fails to match the genre referents and constraints as known by the reader.

This analysis generalizes Samuel Delany’s observation that SF is not merely, or even mostly, a way of writing; it is a way of reading, too. The same is true of other genres, in different ways.

Genre is functional. I’ve already described how genre conventions help artists and audiences communicate. Another obvious way is that genre categories reduce search costs in the market for art by helping artists signal about their production and giving art consumers a language for requesting what they want. This is a benefit to both artists and the audience.

Genre has a more subtle function as well – it assists creativity. Meaning relies on context; the frame defines the picture. Usually, artists do their best work when grappling with and using the constraints of a genre or artistic medium rather than attempting to abolish them. “Back to zero” sounds brave, but tends to produce art that is flabby, self-indulgent, and vacuous.

A genre can be seen as a conversation among its authors and readers (what postmodernists call “shared discourse”). As in every long running conversation, a genre tends to develop internal themes, motives, and a shared history. Writings that are disconnected from the main conversation may be seen by people in that conversation as outside of the genre even if they fulfill many of its thematic and structural requirements and seem like they ought to belong “in” to outsiders.

For historical and contingent reasons which would be worth an essay in themselves, the conversational aspect of the SF genre has been exceptionally important relative to other fiction genres. SF works are often written as implicit or explicit replies to other works. Authors and fans cultivate a detailed awareness of how works are situated in the conversation. This makes analytical and normative analysis of the SF genre both more fruitful and more contentious than it would be otherwise.

Now we will require the following definition of science fiction (due in its most developed form to Gregory Benford): that branch of fantastic literature which affirms the rational knowability of the universe, and has as its most particular reader experience the sense of conceptual breakthrough – of having understood the universe in a new and larger way.

Benford’s definition of SF implies that SF stories must have important structural features in common with murder mysteries, and a reason crossovers between these two genres are so often successful. In both forms the author is required to play by the rules of rational deduction. The writer wins the game if the reader reaches the big reveal without having anticipated it but with the realization that the solution is correct; the reader wins the game if he or she gets to the truth before the author’s reveal.

The author plays fair by leaving open the possibility that a sharp enough reader can win, the work is judged as much or more by how well and how audaciously the author plays the game more than by conventional literary criteria. Within discussion of the SF genre (though not to my knowledge among mystery fans) “the game” has the specific meaning of this dance between author and reader.

What distinguishes an SF story from a murder mystery isn’t the absence of murder but the presence of at least one premise in the story that is fantastic, e.g. counterfactual or even impossible. There’s a convention in SF called the “one-McGuffin rule”; you’re allowed one impossible premise per story, but FTL travel doesn’t count.

Larry Niven is famous for this prescription: “Make one change to the world as it is now, and then explore the ramifications of that change – but don’t mess with anything else.” Similar definitions go back to the beginnings of modern SF, as invented by John W. Campbell and Robert Heinlein in the 1940s. They are not really adequate; good SF can change lots of things about its settings. The “don’t mess with anything else” should be read as “keep your secondary world rationally accessible to the reader” in Benford’s sense.

Note the absence in this analysis of any reference to the obvious stage furniture of genre SF – spaceships, robots, aliens, time travel, and the like. These things in themselves do not an SF story make; when the structure underneath them violates the core promise of rational knowability you get what is at best defective SF and at worst a sort of anti-SF which informed readers of the genre are likely to receive as willfully perverse.

One of SF’s central impulses is to extend the perimeter of the rationally knowable, sweeping in not merely unknown places and times and aliens accessible to science but also motifs and images that originated in myth and fantasy and horror. The evolution of SF can be charted as a steady widening of that perimeter – to other planets, beyond the solar system, to other times and alternate histories, then to technology-of-magic and possibilities even more estranged from the world of immediate experience.

Having advanced this definition of SF, I’m now going to make a temporary concession to people who consider it too narrow by relabeling what it covers “classical SF”, or cSF. Those with a little historical awareness of the field will recognize that the classical period began in 1939 with Robert Heinlein’s first publication under John W. Campbell, the then-new editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine.

Almost anyone with any exposure to SF will recognize that much but not all of what is popularly labeled SF is cSF. The question I will address in the remainder of this essay is: why should we consider cSF normative? What grounds do we have for regarding a work that claims to be SF but is not cSF to be defective SF, non-SF, or anti-SF?

One reason is historical. Previous attempts to abandon the deep norms of cSF while preserving its stage furniture and surface tropes have not aged well. The “New Wave” of the late 1960s and early 1970s was spent by the early 1980s. Later insurgencies within the field, notably the cyberpunks of the late 1980s and early 1990s, retained cSF’s assumption of rational knowability (and all that followed from it) even while trying to radically transform the genre in other ways.

The reason beneath that history is reader response. SF doesn’t exist in a vacuum; people who want fantasies or Westerns or romances know how to find them, and in general the kind of person who can be attracted by the way SF is packaged (spaceships and other high technology on covers, etc.) wants rational knowability and wants to play the kind of game with the author that is characteristic of cSF, even if he or she is not very introspective about that desire and not very good at the game yet.

This is why SF readers – even inexperienced ones – often experience violation of the deep norms of cSF as a kind of dishonesty or malicious subversion. They can tell they’re being cheated of something even if they don’t know quite what. Forty years ago this feeling was often articulated against the New Wave by complaining that its works were “depressing” – which was true, and remains true of a lot of defective SF and anti-SF today, but doesn’t get at the actual root of the problem.

Correspondingly, most of the demand for non-classic SF comes not from readers but from critics/authors/editors (people who think of themselves as tastemakers) who are bent on imposing the deep norms of other genres onto the SF field. Such people are especially apt to think SF would be improved by adopting the norms and technical apparatus of modern literary fiction, itself a genre which developed not long prior to modern SF in the early 20th century but which has preoccupations in many respects diametrically opposed to those of SF.

One reliable way to spot one of these literary improvers in action is unending complaints about the low standards of characterization that the majority of both SF readers and writers and readers consider acceptable. If you scratch a person making this complaint you’ll generally find someone who doesn’t realize that, while characters may be required to give an SF story emotional life, the idea is the hero. SF readers treat emotional realism as optional because the experience they really crave is Benford’s rational knowability and conceptual breakthrough (though they may only dimly understand this themselves).

(How do I know this is what SF readers want? Why, I look at what sells and what lingers on best-of lists. Within SF – and only within SF – big-idea stories with flat characters both outsell and outlast character studies decorated with SF stage furniture. This was already true at the beginning of the classic period in 1939, it remained true even at the height of the New Wave in 1971 or so, and it continues to be true today.)

The more conscious variety of improver at least dimly understands the deep norms of cSF but thinks they should be subverted and deprived of their authority in favor of something “better”. In this view SF readers don’t really know what’s good art and need to be educated away from their primitive fondness for linear narratives, puzzle stories, competent characters, happy endings, and rational knowability. It’s not caricaturing much to say that the typical specimen of this type thinks the only good conceptual breakthrough is an unhappy one.

One reason to vigorously assert cSF as a norm to which anything labeled SF should aspire is simply to defend the genre conversation on behalf of the readers from the well-intentioned (or not so well-intentioned) meddling of the improvers. Thus, wherever SF is discussed among actual readers you tend to find exhortations like “Science fiction should get back in the gutter where it belongs!” When you hear that, you can be sure the speaker doesn’t think SF ought to become an apologetic imitation of literary fiction (or any other genre).

I think the reader-response theory of SF norms (confirmed by the historical record of what fans value and what they have rejected) would be a sufficient reason, even today (2014) to hold SF to the standards of cSF and consider failure to meet them a defect. But there’s a reason that I think tells even more strongly than that.

SF has a mission. There’s a valuable cultural function that SF, alone of all our arts, is good for. SF writers (and readers) are our forward scouts, the imaginative preparation for what might come next, the way we limber up our minds to cope with the unexpected future. SF is not just the literature of ideas, it’s a literature of thinking outside the box you’re in, one that entwines escapism with extrapolation is ways that are productive for both ends. At SF’s best it provides myths and role models for people who want to make the world a better place in a way no other art form can really match.

That, ultimately, is why we should assert the norms of classic SF – because they are an instrument tuned for and by SF’s futurological uses. What this does for the people who read SF is help them imagine and create better futures for all of us.

Feline behavioral convergence

The new cat, Zola has been with us for about a month now. My wife and I observe an interesting convergence; as he feels increasingly secure around us, his behavior is coming to resemble Sugar’s more and more, to the point that it sometimes feels like having her back with us.

What makes this a surprising observation is that Sugar was not your behaviorally average cat. She was up against the right-hand end of the feline bell curve for sociability, gentleness, and good manners. Having Zola match that so exactly is a little startling even if we did improve our odds by keeping an eye out for a Maine Coon that liked us on sight. It still feels rather like having 00 come up twice in succession on a roulette wheel.

This is ethologically interesting; it suggests some things about how the personalities of cats – and even specific behavioral propensities – are generated. In the remainder of this post I will use detailed observations to explore this point.

First, some differences for perspective. Zola, as we expected from our first few minutes of contact with him, is a calmer creature than Sugar was – a bit more self-sufficient, a bit less easily startled. His kinesic repertoire is a bit different; he leg-strops routinely and often assumes the play-invitation posture of flopping over on his back (Sugar almost never did these things). She liked to express affection by climbing onto a human and licking hands or face, which Zola doesn’t. If Sugar were human she’d have been a wide-eyed ingenue; if Zola were human he’d be a mellow dude a la Jeff Bridges.

Still, the similarities greatly outweigh the differences, and have been increasing rather than decreasing. Both cheerful, sunny personalities; both extremely gentle, careful with their claws and teeth; both love(d) human attention and respond to it with a touching degree of trust. The trust is/was manifested, for example, by casually napping near humans and not startling when touched unexpectedly.

Zola is moving towards Sugar’s pattern of not wanting to ever be out of sight of a human for very long, and has recently developed the same tendency Sugar had to hang out at the one place in the hallway where he can keep an eye on both Cathy and myself at our work desks in different rooms. Also he’s started to greet us at the door when we come home from places. That almost hurt the first time it happened, it was so like Sugar.

We haven’t tried to directly train behaviors like keeping a eye on both of us and greeting us at the door, and wouldn’t know how to do it if we were trying. I’ve written previously about how you train a cat for companionability, but that’s a more general thing; that’s a matter of helping the cat feel secure and rewarding it for being affectionate, with the hope that behaviors you like will emerge naturally.

I can see how greeting us at the door could emerge naturally; on the other hand, I certainly don’t know how you’d go about training a cat to bond equally to both of the humans it lives with if it had the tendency to be a one-person pet that runs in some breeds. Kindness only goes so far; the cat has to have the personality to respond to it. Some cats very clearly don’t.

I think the natural theory to explain the observed facts is that personality in cats is very, very heritable – much more so than in humans. But I think we can be more specific than that; while any cat will become fearful if mistreated or stressed, the capacity to respond to kindness is what the example of Sugar and Zola suggests is genetically programmed.

I see a parallel with heritability of intelligence in humans, in which genes seem to control an upper limit of processing capacity which may never be reached if CNS growth is hindered by (say) poor early-childhood nutrition.

Comparing Zola and Sugar is also interesting because of the male/female difference. Cathy and I long assumed that Sugar’s affection behaviors were partly a recruitment of circuitry for nurturing kittens and partly related to mechanisms for bonding and social signaling between friendly peers. But while the nurturance-instinct explanation probably remains partly true for Sugar, tomcats are not nurturers.

Therefore, the fact that Zola duplicates so many of Sugar’s behaviors changes my estimate of relative weights. It makes peer bonding look more important, and nurturance look less so, as sources for the behaviors that cats use to relate to humans.

One datum we don’t have yet is how Zola will behave when one of her humans is ill or seriously distressed. Sugar got rather maternal at such times, sticking close and seemingly determined to be comforting. That’s how we read it, but if Zola exhibits similar comforting behaviors some re-interpretation will be in order.

Finally, Cathy has noted that whereas Sugar adopted us as her humans very quickly and completely back in 1994, in Zola it’s been a slower process with stages. That may have an environmental explanation; Sugar had found one of her humans dead that day, and was clearly in serious distress. It’s pretty natural in both feline and human terms that she went all any-port-in-a-storm on us.

Zola, on the other hand, had it reasonably good at the rescue center – probably not getting as much human contact as he wanted, but certainly not traumatized or frightened. He could afford to be friendly but a bit more reserved. It’s been kind of fun to watch that reserve melting, measured by the steadily decreasing percentage of time he chooses to spend out of sight.

Review: Solaris Rising 3

Solaris Rising 3 (Ian Whates; Rebellion) is billed as an anthology showcasing the breadth of modern SF. It is that; unfortunately, it is also a demonstration that the editor and some of his authors have partly lost touch with what makes science fiction interesting and valuable.

As I’ve observed before, SF is not an anything-goes genre. You do not achieve SF merely by deploying SF furniture like space travel, nonhuman sophonts, or the Singularity. SF makes demands on both reader and writer that go beyond lazy fabulism; there’s an implied contract. The writer’s job is to present possibility in a sufficiently consistent and justified way that the reader might be able to reason out the story’s big reveal(s) before the author gets there; the reader’s job is to back-read the clues in the story intelligently and try to get ahead of the author, or catch mistakes in the extrapolation. As in murder mysteries, there can be much else going on besides this challenge and response, but if the challenge and the possibility of such a response is not there, you do not have SF.

Benjanun Sriduangkaew’s When We Harvested the Nacre-Rice plays the game properly, with its depiction of a very odd and subtle kind of warfare, the ties of friendship, subtle betrayal, and a privilege that may follow naturally in a future with indefinite life extension. The sense of immersion in human cultures that have been coevolving with advanced technology for a very long time is well done.

Chris Beckett’s The Goblin Hunter is more questionable. The premise is very SFnal – aliens who, as a defense mechanism, reflect all of the darkness and self-doubt in humans back at them. But the author does nothing interesting with the premise; there’s no reveal to possibly get ahead of, we don’t leave the story feeling we understand anything more about human beings or the setting or anything else than we did walking in. Instead the ending deflects into a criticism of the meddling do-gooder which, while worthy in itself, feels disconnected from the rest of the story. It seems rather a waste of a good premise.

Homo Floriensis (Ken Liu) is more interesting, inviting the reader to think about the ethical problems of first contact with a hominid species on the fuzzy borderline of sophont status. What is the right thing to do when you are not sure what ethical kind you are dealing with, and know that eventually humans less careful than you will come charging in? The author may not have the answer but he has an answer – and a thought-provoking one.

Julie Czerneda’s A Taste For Murder is a snarky, funny exploration the possibility of easy body modification for humans – and what can happen when it gets a little too easy. The reveal and the conclusion follow with remorseless logic from the premises; thus this is proper SF.

Tony Ballantine’s Double Blind is properly SF too, though of a dark and nasty kind that I tend to dislike. It turns the risks of drug trials up to 11.

Sean Willams’s The Mashup apes one of the persistent themes of SF – technological transcendence – but there’s no logic and no reveal. It might as well be a story about meddling demons; there’s no rational knowability here, and the viewpoint character’s passivity and eventual surrender to a sea-change he doesn’t actually understand is thus more the stuff of horror than anything else. I call this sort of thing “anti-SF” because it doesn’t merely ignore the requirements of the form, it mocks and seeks to erode them.

Aliette de Bodard’s The Frost on Jade Buds is much better. The need to cope with grief and the aftermath of a shattering war is, alas, a recurring problem in human history; the author shows that when human being become sufficiently entangled with their technology it could take some novel turns.

Alex Dally McFarlane’s Popular Images from the First Manned Mission to Enceladus could serve as exhibit A for why SF writers shouldn’t get too cute. There’s a reasonable SF short story here wrapped in an odd postmodern sort of narrative structure; the problem is that the narrative structure is a stunt that only demonstrates the author’s cleverness rather than adding any value to the story. This is poor practice in almost any kind of fiction-writing, but especially regrettable in a genre like SF or mysteries where the author’s cleverness ought to be directed outwards.

Gareth L. Powell’s Red Lights and Rain turns its cleverness to better use, mixing time travel and the question of why, in a rational universe, something like the legendary vampire might come to exist. It’s well and suspensefully written.

Laura Lam’s They Swim Through Sunset Seas is a meditation on the old maxim that in nature there are no rewards or punishments, only consequences. Humans who should have known better meddle with chillingly alien aliens. There’s an ambiguous ending, probably a tragedy, but the author plays fair throughout.

Ian Watson’s Faith Without Teeth is a satire on socialism set in a weird alternate East Berlin. It’s so surrealistically funny that you may have trouble noticing that the SFnal exposition is handled absolutely straight. Well done!

Adam Roberts’s Thing and Sick is a gem – an SF story founded on taking Kantian conceptualism seriously. This is exactly what SF ought to do; question your assumptions, construct a consistent otherness, and leave you with a feeling of understanding the universe in a way you didn’t before. The conceptual breakthrough here is rather more pointed and fundamental than we usually get…

George Zebrowski’s The Sullen Engines is the worst blotch on this anthology. The viewpoint character can make car engines vanish; except no, she vanishes a human at one point. For this to be a proper SF story it would have to develop or imply some explanation of the phenomenon less silly than “wishing can make it so”. But this story is anti-SF – it violates the core promise of SF by not affirming the rational knowability of anything. Instead we get a sort of inverted power fantasy – a muddy, self-indulgent puddle of angst and eco-piety with no redeeming virtues whatsoever. Makes me want to find Ian Whates, slap him upside the head and demand to know what he was thinking.

Cat Sparks’s Dark Harvest returns to SF, but doesn’t do it very convincingly. Yes, you could ritualize the use of exotic technology as though it were Tantric Buddhist magic, if you had constructed the interface that way – but we are never presented with a good reason for the insurgents to have actually done so. Seems like the author succumbed to the tendency to construct a thin rationalization around some cool imagery. The game can be played better than this, and should be.

Benjamin Rosenbaum’s Fift and Shria, on the other hand, does an eerily convincing job on a very odd and entertaining premise; a human culture built around the assumption that individuals routinely occupy several bodies each. It reads rather like something James H. Schmitz might have written back in the day. The author put a lot of thought into this and assembling the clues to figure out everything that is going on takes work. It’s the SF game played at a very high level.

The Howl, by Ian R. MacLeod & Martin Sketchley, is another story that makes me wonder what it’s doing in this anthology. The characters’ unresolved personal issues just aren’t that interesting, and vague hints that some kind of many-worlds phenomenon might be behind the gaps in one’s memory do not lift this mood piece into the category of SF. For that the counterfactual would have to be used, would have to have logical consequences, rather than being some kind of pathetic-fallacy externalization of mere psychological confusion.

Nina Allan’s The Science of Chance is flawed but interesting. It seems to be exploring how human beings entering a superposed quantum state might present to other humans stuck with a temporal viewpoint – or perhaps I’m giving the author credit for too much subtlety. It would have been a better story without the secondary premise of a nuclear bombing that never happened in real history.

Rachel Swirsky’s Endless finishes strong with a consideration of what post-Singularity transcended humans might consider that they owe their ancestors, with a debt paid by remembering.

Much good material in this anthology, only one or two conspicuous duds. It’d be nice if the editor would be a bit more discriminating next time.

Review: Ark Royal

In Ark Royal (Christopher Nuttall; self-published) the ship of the same name is an obsolete heavy-armored fleet carrier in a future British space navy. The old girl and her alcoholic captain have been parked in a forgotten orbit for decades, a dumping ground for screwups who are not quite irredeemable enough to be cashiered out. Then, hostile aliens invade human space – and promptly trash the modern unarmored carriers set against them. It seems the Ark Royal’s designers wrought better than they knew. Earth’s best hope is to re-fit and re-staff her in a tearing hurry, then send her against the invasion to buy time while sister ships can be built. Adventure ensues.

This was very nearly a bad book. As it is, it persuades me that we need a term for the opposite of “hack writer”. A hack writer plays the keys of a certain emotional register so skillfully that the reader is drawn in despite the writer’s actually caring little for the genre and themes he works in, too little to try adding any breadth or depth to them. The opposite of a hack writer is a sort of naive enthusiast – clumsy and relatively unskilled, but so earnest and fascinated by the kind of story he is trying to tell that the result is lit up by an energy and an ingenuous charm that no hack can quite duplicate.

A lot of the self-published nu-space-opera I’ve been reviewing recently (Unexpected Alliances, A Sword Into Darkness, the Human Reach novels, etc.) has the mark of naive enthusiasm on it. The skill level of the enthusiast varies from the utterly execrable (Unexpected Alliances) to the pretty-good-for-pulp-space-opera (A Sword Into Darkness).

Ark Royal is yet another book of this kind, in the middle of the implied skill range. Christopher Nuttall clearly owes much to the tradition of Napoleonic-era naval-adventure fiction a la Forester, Pope, and O’Brien. But unlike David Weber, who is the very model of a skilled hack writer working this vein, Nuttall clearly cares a great deal about that tradition in itself, identifies with it, and wants to extend it.

The result is a book whose technical defects are redeemed by the author’s infectious determination to write a good yarn in a fine old style. The prose is a bit primitive; the technology and space-combat tactics could use a stiff dose of Atomic Rockets to up the SFnal plausibilty. But the plotting is good, the character interactions vivid, and the story carries the day.

Review: Patton’s Spaceship

Patton’s Spaceship (John Barnes; Open Road Integrated Media) is a new e-book release of an effort from 1996.

Parts of the early action, in which the protagonist loses his family to a vicious terrorist group of unknown (and very exotic) origins, seem sadly dated in light of the even greater viciousness that terrorist groups of thoroughly well-known origins have since exhibited.

Nevertheless, much of this novel is an entertaining alternate-history adventure, presenting (among other things) the most grubby and creepily plausible portrait of a U.S. under Nazi domination I have seen.

Alas, I must report that Barnes tends to get a bit too cute in name-checking historical figures. In the most extreme instance of this he makes the poet Allen Ginsburg into an action hero. That move is perhaps best read as unintentional comedy; for some intentional comedy, see if you can spot Robert Heinlein’s cameo appearance.

Barnes has written better, before and since. But this isn’t bad.

Review: The Steampunk Trilogy

The Steampunk Trilogy (Paul diFilippo; Open Road Integrated Media) is three short novels set in a now-familiar sort of alternate-Victorian timeline replete with weird science, Lovecraftian monsters, and baroquely ornamented technology described in baroquely ornamental prose.

What distinguishes this particular outing is that it’s hilarious. In the first chapter of the first book, a runaway young Queen Victoria is replaced by a newt. In the second chapter (a flashback) an experiment in powering a steam locomotive from the waste heat of masses of uranium comes to a tragic, mushroom-clouded end when an accident slams them together just a bit too hard.

The books proceed in a tumbling cascade of ribaldry, parody, slapstick, and sly historical references that sends up every target in sight. And just when you think it’s all farce…Walt Whitman delivers a compassionate and psychologically astute critique of her poetry to Emily Dickinson, it isn’t comedy at all, and it’s even plot-relevant! Along the way, Herman Melville tangles with the Deep Ones and the naturalist Henry Agassiz recognizes Dagon as an ichthyosaurus…

Even if you’re not equipped to parse all the historical and literary in-jokes, this is fun stuff. If you are…I enjoyed the hell out of it. You probably will too.