The End of Summer

And so summer comes to an end. Oh yes, I know it's only the middle of August, but I've had my holidays and now begin settling in for work once more.

While I was away, I found this at The Bookman in Norwich:

Signed by the man himself!

This is why I maintain my second hand book shop habit! I actually own a more up to date version of this in the British Library publication Jack Vance: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography but who could resist a document signed by JV himself. Only a tenner, too, which is beer money, really!


While I was away, I also decided to turn my incorrigible instinct for second hand bookshops to evil: I intend to build up my collection of large SF coffee-table art books from the 70s and 80s.

Jack Vance has died

There is a human quality that cannot be precisely named: possibly the most noble of all human qualities. It includes but is larger than candor, generosity, comprehension, niceness of distinction, intensity, steadiness of purpose, total commitment. It is participation in all human perceptions, recollection of all human history. It is characteristic of every great creative genius and can never be learned: learning in this regard is bathos - the dissection of a butterfly, a spectroscope turned to the sunset, the psychoanalysis of a laughing girl. The attempt to learn is self-destructive; when erudition comes in, poetry departs. How common the man of intellect who cannot feel! How trifling are his judgments against those of the peasant who derives his strength, like Antaeus, from the emotional sediment of the race! Essentially the tastes and preferences of the intellectual elite, derived from learning, are false, doctrinaire, artificial, shrill, shallow, uncertain, eclectic, jejune and insincere.

Life, Volume IV by Unspiek, Baron Bodissey, quoted in The Killing Machine.

The Cadwal Chronicles

Fantasms & Magic

The Durdane series

Lurulu (review for The Zone)

A short profile (also written for The Zone)

Reading report Q1 2013: Kindle is King

For me, the first quarter of this year was dominated by February, when I fled the winter chill of London for a month of summer in my antipodean mother land. I won’t bore you with how great it all was – great weather, old friends, family on good behaviour, plenty of good wine and beer and so forth. Instead I’ll bore you with far less interesting chat about reading.

I’ve had a Kindle for a couple of years and have taken it on holiday a couple of times, but this is the trip it was made for. I always end up taking what I consider a sufficient number of books (perhaps six) and then while I’m in NZ one thing like to is search second-hand bookshops for obscure SF paperbacks from the seventies and eighties. What I particularly love is a small town book exchange (every small town in NZ has got one) with a SF section that looks like it might have come from the estate of a lonely farmer and SF fan.

I’ve done pretty well with Jack Vance, picking up nice seventies and eighties editions from Grafton and the New English Library with cool covers by Jim Burns, Mick van Houten and Peter Elson, etc. But this year I discovered something that’s killed that hobby dead: The SF Gateway. 

It’s changed my holidays for ever and I may now never visit New Zealand again.

The Cadwal Chronicles by Jack Vance

This series of three novels – Araminta Station, Ecce & Old Earth and Throy – sees the arrival of Vance’s late style. It sets the tone for Vance’s final sequence, Nightlamp, Ports of Call and Lurulu, a series of elegiac novels set in his established far future of galactic civilisation, the Gaean Reach.

The Gaean Reach isn’t an especially detailed setting. It’s more like a set of conventions that look a lot like pulp-era space opera: easy interplanetary travel, wide-spread human settlement, near-universal currency, language and police force across the galaxy, and thriller plots based on simple motivations of greed, lust or revenge. Vance uses this classic setting as a background for his vividly detailed imagination for place, his ear for droll, self-regarding rhetoric, particularly on the part of his villainous characters, and the extraordinary vocabulary he deploys with such effortless flair.

However, the pulp-era elements he leans on so heavily are built on attitudes that are these days considered naive, and even offensive. Many readers will find the sexist thriller clichés and character types distracting, and the rough and ready evolutionary anthropology suggested by the numerous depraved or backwards societies of the Gaean Reach has disturbing implications.

Could it be that hiding behind the jovially cruel Vancian world view lies a racist and sexist tract?

Reading log - Q3

Here we are again, and me much delayed. Unfortunately I’ve had a few other things on. I was busy with my Marvel Essential Warlock series – which belongs properly in Q4 – and wrote a review of The Fractal Prince, the sequel to The Quantum Thief, which belongs also in Q4. Plus, of course, the perennial nuisance of DIY.

I have been reading, though, and in the three months to 30 September, I read:

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce

The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen

A few John Service stories by Algernon Blackwood

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Marvel Essential Super Villain Team-Up vol 1 by various.

Dune by Frank Herbert

The definitive Dune cover illustration!

I haven't read Dune since I was a teenager, deep into my personal golden age and reading up everything I could lay my hands on. Dune is still a classic, but back then it stood out even more distinctly in the field that wasn't quite so crowded. By the time I got to it, there were already two or three fat sequels, which was still a remarkable feat. I remember stories in Starlog and Starburst about the abortive Jodorowsky movie, and there was a board game that I never could quite fathom.

When I actually read it, though, I was a bit disappointed. I found it a bit baffling and a bit dull. I couldn't work out what everyone wanted, and there was a lot of talk compared to action. I liked bits of it – the imperial backdrop was really cool, and the weird powers and strange magic mixed with high tech appealed to me, but because I didn't quite “get it” it left me a bit cold. My impressions were further confused by the David Lynch movie, which I also found hard to follow (and I haven't seen since except in snatches on TV, but inevitably, it is available on youtube).

I can't help thinking that I didn't do Dune justice; maybe I was a bit young, and I read it in a concentrated blast in the week before the movie came out (demonstrating even then my particularity about reading a book before seeing the movie). It's been on my vague re-read list for a while, but I never picked it up. However, when I came across this marvellous old New English Edition at a book sale, I knew the time had come! This is the same edition I read back in the 80s: who can forget those thrilling Bruce Pennington covers? They were definitely a big part of the series' appeal, suggesting all sorts of of exotic fantasies within!

Elizabeth's Misfits by Arthur Freeman

There are two things that really appeal to me about genre fantasy: magic and history. The attraction to magic is well understood, I think, a symptom of that affliction shared by all fans of fantastic literature. Anyone that reads fantasy, SF or horror knows it, the warm rum of the mysterious, the otherworldly, the macabre, the uncanny and the outré.

The attraction of history is a more specific appeal, more intellectual than emotional. The typical fantasy occurs in some version of western Europe around 1300, before the invention of guns or movable type, but after the discovery of steel, but even those interested in more exotic settings – ancient China or medieval Japan, for example, or Native American or African cultures – have a similar almost documentary approach to the setting.

There's a degree of implied erudition in these worlds, a commitment to a sort of pseudo-historical veracity, although this diminishes the further one departs from real history: John M Ford's The Dragon Waiting, for example, a highly fantastical but recognisable version of fourteenth century England, has more of that erudite quality than, say, Moorcock's The Stealer of Souls set in the entirely made-up Young Kingdoms, despite the latter's pseudo-historical trappings.

As a rule, the historical and magical elements seem to act in inverse proportion: the more history you want, the less magic you can insert; conversely, the more magical the world, the less historically accurate it will be.

Thus, it follows that history is just fantasy with the magic turned down to zero, and perhaps this explains the appeal of books such as Elizabeth's Misfits.

Back soon!

Well, August is nearly over and the summer holidays draw to a close. Writing time has been very disrupted for me, thanks to various holidays and summer events eating into to my time. Just to complicate things, after a week away I discover my desktop has mysteriously given up the ghost. So I've had to dust off the spare laptop and rely on that, wonky keyboard and all.

I've also wasted a good proportion of the day trying to get the old desktop working, and thus didn't get done get half of what I wanted to do today, including much needed updates here. I've had a pretty frustrating couple of months, productivity wise, and that's why I took this official break, to try and catch up with all the chores and re-focus what I wanted to do... God, it never frigging ends does it!

Ah well, I still plan to get cracking again in the beginning of September and there's all sorts of treats ahead, assuming I can get them out of the hard drive of my old PC. I've got a review of Robo Hunter Vol 1 coming up as part of my series of retro-reviews of 2000AD, plus I've started buying new progs again and I'll be casting my world-weary eye over them.

Book-related OCD is satisfied!

I've been busy buying and reading books, and you can expect reviews soon. My formal review of The Quantum Thief is live on the Zone, so you can check that out, and I may or may not provide some further commentary. There's more I wanted to say about the hype surrounding this one that didn't fit in the review (and I think it's unfair to criticise the book based on my dislike of hype), but is increasingly relevant, I think, in today's hyped up world.

I've also found a cool, second hand bookshop while I was away (in Much Wenlock) and will have a couple of reviews of the obscure treasures i found there. One treasure was a Coronet edition of The Brave Free Men by Jack Vance, to match with the vols one and two of the Durdane series I already owned. I can now chuck away the ugly Ballantine edition I've had to make do with  up to now and have lovely matching spines on the book shelf. Hooray!

So, come on back on 1 September when Pointless Philosophical Asides will ride out of the wildnerness and back into action... if the wobbly internet connection on this shitty laptop will allow. Grrr!

Short Fiction Wednesday

Comedy is something dear to my heart, and this week we have two funny stories.

From Futurismic comes Westminster Executive Solutions by Chris Nakashima-Brown and Bruce Sterling. I'm a huge Sterling fan, and I remember Nakashima-Brown from his previous appearance in Futurismic, so I had some idea what to expect here.

This irreverent Dystopian satire squeezes a lot of content into it's short space. The events unfold in a collage of chat room conversation, blog rants and police walkie-talkie chatter that strips away the artifice of story. It's like a modern day epistolary story, using incredibly close points of view that admit only what a character says, and you have to piece the story together from these different perspectives on events. The story's a lot of fun and the constitutional crisis it describes seemed deliciously timely.

Tom Holt's Brownian Emotion is a gentler sort of comedy, a sweet rom-com via Dr Who, maybe. Holt's name rang a bell, and a quick web search revealed he's the writer of a large number of comic novels with a fantastical tinge, so I was interested to see what he did here.

This is a fluffy bit of quantum nonsense that sees a hapless history lecturer in Oxford on his way ask his girlfriend to marry him, when he meets a woman who claims she broke his heart ten years ago. I won't give the twists and turns away, but I think you can see where this tale of lost love and rifts in the TimSpacFlux (“that's what we call it now”) is going. In contrast to the minimal characterisation in Westminster Executive Solutions, this one's full of character, depending on the likeable leads to engage us in the story and the mix of soap and romance.

I'm a big comedy fan, and SF is a genre that really lends itself to the funny. I grew up on a diet of cheap paper backs full of the stories of the great American SF humourists of the fifties and sixties, writers like Vonnegut, Dick, Harry Harrison, Robert Sheckley and Jack Vance. Combined with early exposure to Monty Python, this put my brain in perfect shape to receive 2000AD when it arrived, and it seemed to be instantly talking my language.

I prefer grim humour to the lighter types, I have to admit. My favourite writers all have a dark sense of humour, writers like Sterling, Steve Aylett, J G Ballard, Jack Vance, Greg Egan, Jon Courtney Grimwood and Alan Moore. Some of the signature works of SF have strong satirical elements Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, The Handmaid's Tale and even 1984 have an undercurrent of satire and even farce about them.

It seems to me that the lighter fair focuses on problems of reason and common sense, but I think the absurdity of life is impervious to reason. Life is nasty brutish and short, but you might as well stop and smell the schadenfreude. That's the sort of thing I like!

Arthur C Clarke Awards - decision time!

It's the night of the Arthur C Clarke Awards, and those of us with an interest in such things now face the Ultimate Decision: what to wear?

My tweedy-jacket-and-bowtie look is very dapper but has been colonised by the eleventh Dr Who. Still good look for me, by and large, all avuncular, donnish umbers and earth-toned checks, but I don't wish to be mistaken as a cosplayer at an event like this. Not that anyone could possibly mistake my distinguished (shall we say) phiz for the young and handsome Mr Smith; that would make it worse, in many ways - not just a cosplayer, but a remarkably rubbish one.

New suit? Well, new suit also equals cheap suit. Not bad, but after a drink or two the posture slumps and the Designers At Debenhams structure doesn't have the wherewithal to provide back up.

So, good suit then, even though I appear to have had a very well-catered Christmas between when I bought it and today.

Next - shirt and tie. I mean the next thing to consider, not that I bought my shirt and tie at Next! Just what do you think I am?

The good suit's a little too structured to rock the bow tie look, and I'd ironed a couple of good shirts in preparation. I lost my nerve over the John Francombe liquorice all sort strips, and the Duffer of St George is good for job interviews but a bit business bland. Despite the cuffs beginning to show its age, I opted for my black and white Reiss shirt and black silk tie.

Combined with my silver converse, the whole ensemble has a pleasing unity of colour (grays, blacks, silver with a hint of blue) and if I keep my shoulders back and button done up, no one will even notice the alpha male belly poking out over the waist band.

Ah, well, I suppose I should say something about the books, too.

Let's start out in the territory of the unknown - I haven't read Gallileo's Dream. Only available in hardback and what with all those bills to pay... So, that one might win, might be the best of all but I can't comment.

Moving up, we come to Retribution Falls, which would not be my pick and will not, I think, be the pick of the committee. It's a fine adventure story, but I felt it was pretty thin, thematically, and I wasn't as swept away with it as I might have hoped. The bar to meet here, to my mind, is Jack Vance stuff like Big Planet and The Demon Princes, and this felt half-hearted in comparison, with a rather linear plot and no real gut punches, IMO.

Next, Yellow Blue Tibia, which is delightfully wry and has a lot of well-turned farce, but once again I felt the thematic material was a bit unsatisfying. It seemed to exist independent of the comic elements and the finale felt shoe-horned in. Aside from Konstantin, none of the other characters was especially believable or sympathetic (although the Asperger's guy was excellent comic material). I also had my doubts about the setting - particularly the way that some of the gags could only possibly work in English, that were articulated nicely in this blog post from Rules for Anchorites. I wouldn't choose this one, but my reservations appear to put me at odds with the critical consensus, so the committee may go for it, who knows? It seems kind of unlikely to me, though.

That's half the list disposed of. Next up, Spirit. I read this one about this time last year, and hadn't started blogging back then, but I discuss it in passing in my post of the year from January. This kind of big space opera isn't really my bag, and I struggled somewhat with the political machinations of the setting. With benefit of many months hindsight, however, the middle section where Bibi is imprisoned still haunts me. The scene where the little baby alien thing dies was like a kick in the guts to me (reminded me a little of the death of Grofinet in Vance's Lyonesse in that regard) and I'm thus inclined to feel that there was definitely some very strong writing here. I wouldn't pick this one, but there's big dollop of prejudice in that opinion. I suspect, though, that I'm not the only one that scratched their head of the setting, and the climax did not quite pay off, so Im don't think it's going to be Spirit.

We come now to the final two books, and this is where I really think the competition is. I have been confidently predicting a win for The City & The City, which I enjoyed a great deal both as a reader and in a more detached critical way. I vacilate on whether the split is a psychological or a supernatural effect, and have recently decided that Miéville leaves it deliberately - and deliciously - ambiguous, a move I admire and applaud. It's let down by the flaccid thriller plot, but the central metaphor is so compelling and beautifully achieved that all other considerations seem like grousing. This one seemed like a shoe in.

However, I am now a third of the the way through Far North and my socks have been knocked entirely off (black, NB, to co-ordinate with the rest of the outfit). Here is a novel firing on all cylinders. The effortless prose is laded with nuggets of insight that shoot from the setting like sparks. The central voice is steady and consistent, believable, likable and wise. Already we've had heartbreak and breath-taking danger. Already we've been moved and unsettled. I'm a long way from the end, so it's a bit early to say whether it will all come together, but right now, I'm just loving this book!

So, I think it's a toss up between those two. If it was me I'd go for Far North, assuming it continues as it's begun. I feel that Méiville is a very fine writer in the SF/F context, but I'm less convinced by his chops in the wider literary scene. Theroux, on the evidence so far, seems like the real thing - intelligent, careful, wise, spurning gimmicks while unafraid of the new. It could be that the sublimity of Méiville's broken city will win through, but it could equally be Far North.

Short Fiction Wednesday

This week, we've got two stories that demonstrate contrasting approaches to fantasy.

Knowing Neither Kin Nor Foe by Nancy Fulda, from Beneath Ceaseless Skies, is shaped like a traditional hero's journey, and maps to Campbell almost exactly – a call to action, the denial, the journey into the underworld and all. Fulda focuses on the “denial” phase of the hero's journey here and Kitjaya's conflicted feelings about being "the chosen one", but plot isn't the focus of the story. The main thrust of this story - it seems to me - is the exactingly realised alien society and, while it's published as fantasy, there's nothing here that doesn't fit within the bounds of science fiction.

K J Bishop's Saving the Gleeful Horse, published at Fantasy Magazine, on the other hand, takes place in a psychedelic Gaimanesque fantasy of a world that overlaps between the material and the numinous. Bishop's sideways portrayal of ordinary objects infuses them with magical powers, and portents. I say psychedelic deliberately because I thought it caught the hyper-real details of life and they way they get infused with meaning by mind altering substances. Molimus the Great, the story's protagonist, is one of those wise fools who is perhaps always living in an altered state, and the local whitch woman White Ma'at tells him as much. The story occupies that curious place where it could just be a fantasy, a hallucination projected on the world by deranged minds, or perhaps a vision of the true world, with its opaque robe of materialistic vision swept away.

Fulda's story reminded me a little of the planetary romances of Jack Vance, with a well-imagined society and distinctly alien aliens. In general, he keeps these creatures relatively remote, as in The Fetish Makers (or whatever) but Fulda goes right into their world. I always have a bit of a problem with these kinds of non-human societies, and Fulda doesn't entirely win me over. While Kitjaya's world is convincingly created, Kitjaya never seems anything other than human on the inside (which can be taken as a compliment or a criticism, I suppose). The insecty elements don't really seem to interact with the nature of her quest, and they are perhaps too exactly mapped to matters of human kinship, to the point where they cease to be metaphors and become alien analogues. However, it's written with a sharp eye for the telling detail that creates a very vivid picture of the world.

By contrast, Bishop's is a more metaphorical approach. If a world of magical influence existed, how would it be perceived? She imagines a fantasy where magic isn't a psuedo science – all cauldrons and alembics, and huge tomes of ancient knowledge. Instead, it's a perception of meaning and pattern between objects. It's a world where thoughts can become real and reality can be changed through metaphor. If I have a problem with this approach, it can appear to be a bit random, because it depends on the author making the thematic connections clear without allowing them to crystalise into the gross matter of the other approach. It demands a lot of the reader, too, to puzzle out the skein of symbolism and metaphor, and in this regard I think you need to let it settle a while before deciding if it works or not.

For all people complain about vanilla fantasy, the genre has acquired quite a breadth of approaches over the years. Writers like M John Harrison and Mervyn Peake are no longer obscure or cultish, and the mainstream fantasy has a strong enough hold on the public imagination to attract writers of real ambition like Joe Abercrombie and Richard Morgan. I think the explosion of fantasy in them last couple of decades has produced a space this more thoughtful material can thrive. On the one hand you have a maturing audience looking for a new take on the old ideas, while at the same time a generation of writers fed on the good, bad and indifferent fantasy of decade gone by ready are ready to take up the challenge.

Short Fiction Wednesday

Two very different stories this week. I don't plan along themes or ideas when I choose stories, and in fact, the whole process is embarrasingly random: I use the fiction sidebar on Futurismic to choose a venue, poke around, see if the content catches my eye and then choose somethihg from the contents. I don't choose anything too long - I'm not reading novellas or even novellettes. I don't comment on the presentation of the stories because I don't read them online. In fact, I copy the text into a Word doc, that's formatted in the style I find easiet to read, and print them out (at work - sh!). It takes me an hour or so to read a couple of stories - I can do it between eating my lunch and the commute home - and another hour or so to ponder and write about them. Fascinating! Let's get on with the stories.

Like last week's publishers, Subterranean Press produce an online fiction zine to help publicise their print products, a print magazine and expensive collectiable editions from well-known writers and fan favourites. It's similar to the model of PS Publishing, but PS is print only. They feature a lot of well-known names in their online offering, and the winter 2010 issue from which this story comes, includes stories from Ian R McLeod, John Scalzi, Kage Baker and Brian Lumley.

Harboring Pearls: A Lucifer Jones Story, is not really fantasy or SF, but a kind of a yarn, a tall tail that makes me think of Damon Runyon or mid-century American humourists. The central charatcter and narrator is a kind of roguish wise fool, which is a hard thing to pull off without it sounding like an annoying Mary Sue. Authors are not roguish brawlers and card sharps, by and large, and when they try to pretend to be they can come unstuck. It requires a kind of affectionate mocking tone necessary to avoid the protagonist becoming a Mary Sue, and successful examples of it are George McDonald Fraser's Flashman and Vance's Cugel. Both these characters are nicely undercut by their authors, balancing the character's self regard with the author's more aware stance on the character. Resnick provides a strong example of the genre here, with crosses and double crosses that leave the central character finally unstuck. It's a gentle, genial story, and I gather part of a series relating to the Lucifer Jones character. I did feel like I missed a bit of continuity jokes, but the tale lived up to its genre and the voice flowed easily and convincingly.

Mindflights is also planning to release print anthologies, but the print side seems less dynamic than the online fiction output. Mindflights decribe themselves as striving "to provide quality fiction, poetry, and exposition, all in means that respects traditional values and Christian principles." It's an interesting market distinction to take, but there's aalways been a vigorous strand in SF that adrresses Christianity rather than ignoring it or lampooning it through subtle or not so subtle fantasy analogies.

It's another tricky genre, of course, and I can understand how materialistic cynics (of which I am one) might be nervous about the genre. Doug Kolacki's The Never People demonstrates, however, that Christian and fantastical themes can be successfully intertwined to create fascinating and insightful fiction.

The Never People addresses a character question: how would you explain to a bunch of immortals the idea of going to heaven? How does it feel to die when everyone around you lives forever? We're not interested in the whys and wherefores here - the world of the immortals is only lightly portrayed - the immortals live in a kind of edenic eternal bliss, childlike and filled with joy and love for the world, and Leo doesn't do a lot of exploring of their world. We never find out what this place is - is it the future? another planet? another dimension? Could it be Heaven itself? THe immortals themselves are childlike and naive, ready to accept everything Leo tells them, but one suspects only lightly. With no concept of death or pain they don't really understand the Crucifiction.

At the heart of this story is Leo, at first confused, then angry and finally accepting at being thrust from our world into the world of the immortals without explanation. The story resonates deeply with Christian themes - Eden and the fall, the Crucifiction and the resurrection - but it never asks us explicitly to believe in Chirstianity. This is to the story's great credit, as it explores the ideas of sacrifice and resurrection implicitly and never asks us to believe the metaphysics of Christianity while giving us great insight into Christian ideas.

Fantasms & Magics by Jack Vance

I have a horror of being left without something to read on public transport. Even if I don't actually read whatever it is, it's a comfort to know it's in my bag, ready to hand if I need it. On the other hand, though, I don't like to plan my reading out too far in advance. I find a big pile of books lined up to read gets intimidating after a while, and is often populated by things that were a good idea at the time, but are now no longer attractive.

These competing impulses and delivery snafu on the part of amazon UK (I had to pick the parcel up from a warehouse on a side street off the Old Kent Road on Saturday morning) have coincided to leave me without anything new to read. I had Rogue Moon on hand as an emergency book, but that was the last of these I had to hand.

I clearly need to pay a visit to my regular second hand haunts, but in the meantime, I reached for Fantasmes & Magics by Jack Vance. I've read this short story collection before, but Vance is a writer who rewards revisiting. The fine details of his musical style, are always a pleasure, and he is a canny thinker on matters of practical ethics and human nature, and his quaintly told stories have the the sonorous authority of fairy stories.

In Fantasms & Magics, Jack provides a foreword reflecting on the theme of the paranormal that could come straight from the mouth of one of his quick-witted protagonists:

Phenomena such as telepathy and poltergeists may well be manifestations of different and distinct principles: there may be two, three, four or more such realms of knowledge, each as rich and intricate as physics or astronomy. There is little systematic study. Conventional scientists shy away from the field because they are, in fact, conventional; because they fear to compromise their careers; because the subject is difficult to get a grip on; because scientists are as susceptible to awe and eeriness as anyone else.

This is the ostensible theme of the collection, but Jack himself admits that “the stories in this volume are by no means homogeneous” and it includes reflective shorts like “The Men Return” and “Noise”, a format that allows him to express pure atmosphere and character without directly addressing any particular theme, let alone that stated in the foreword; Guyal of Sfere from The Dying Earth is also reproduced here, but I admit I didn't read it this time around.

The foreword seems to have been written with the opening story in mind, a novella called “The Miracle Workers”. The action takes place in a typical Vance setting – a distant planet separated from the mainstream of human civilization, a closed society with its own rules and morés. In this case, the descendants of star ship crews fleeing a galactic war have degraded into warring medieval clans, battling for supremacy with swords and bows and the occasional piece of ancient technology, no longer understood but lovingly maintained.

As well as lords and knights, there is a technocratic class of wizards called jinxmen, who arrange for supernatural aid in their masters' battles, using powers of sympathetic magic and possession. These are clearly based on the voodoo cultures of the Caribbean and given a gloss of sci fi psionics of the type that was popular in the fifties and sixties. In these skeptical times it's easy to forget that ESP and psionics were respectable, if speculative, subjects for believable SF - it's integral to classics SF like the Lensmen, Dune, the Foundation series, Stranger In a Strange Land, Slan and numerous novels by Phil K Dick.

This “explanation” of the jinxmen's hoodoo is a trifle ambiguous, the question of how much we're supposed to credit the power of suggestion and how much is genuine psychic phenomenon is left open. The jinxmen themselves are typically Vancian martinets and acerbic rivals, competing for the favour of their commanding Lord while pretending lofty aloofness from material matters.

However, while effective against human opponents, the jinxman's powers turn out to be no use against the insectile hive mind of the First Folk, the winsomely named indigenous inhabitants of the planet. When the First Folk attack the humans, the jinxmen turn out to be unwilling to accept new ways of dealing with the problem. This being Jack Vance, there's a an iconoclast on hand to save the day. On this occasion the roles is split between the wise head jinxman Hein Huss and the free-thinking apprentice Sam Salazaar who finally triumphs using the discredited ancient principles of evidence-based research.

It's a wonderful story told with the wit and imagination I love Jack Vance for, and rendered with great clarity through his typically well-judged prose. It distils so many of Vance elements themes into a single small package – petty rivalries, erudite debates on based on imaginary metaphysics, the challenge of the new, and in the First Folk, matters of colonialism and the nature of the alien.

This was well worth a re-read, and its good know there are writers like Vance that one can return to again and again. On the other hand, I'm glad I've got my amazon package at last and can get on with reading something new now.

The Blade Itself

I don't read much bookshop fantasy, as a rule, as it's not really my bag. I'm not sure what it is exactly, but I find all the thees and thous, and related mullarkey a bit annoying. It seems too stagey to me, unnaturalistic and unconvincing. The fantasies I do like tend to empahsise the artifice rather than attempt naturalism. Jack Vance, Clark Ashton Smith, Michael Shea and Gene Wolfe dress their stories up in melodrama and ornate language which lends them an archaic style as if the texts themselves originate from another world.

The contemporary fantasy series strives for a kind of naturalism similar to a historical novel. We are asked suspend disbelief and inhabit their world for a while, as if it was a consistent reality realated to our own. For whatever reason, I've always had trouble doing this and so I struggle to engage with fantasy a lot of the time.

But, there's a lot of experimentation going on in genre fantasy at the moment and it's obviously a bad idea to cut onself off from that sort of thing. Writers of intelligence and craft who grew up with the genre have started to appear - China Meillville being perhaps the most notable, but also Jeff Vandemeer, Richard Morgan and George RR Martin (among many others I probably don't even know about). The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie is a book that comes up when the new fantasy writers are mentioned, and so when I saw it in the remaindered bookshop for a pound, I snapped it up!

The buzz around the new fantasy writers reminds me a bit of the buzz around super hero comics in the 80s. Back then, the fimiliar form of the super-hero comic was being similarly re-examined by a new generation of writers. The Blade Itself is like a gritty Frank Miller super-hero book. Abercrombie establishes the reality of his world through its muck and grime and blood. The vividly described action is full of crunching bones, spurting blood and dismembered limbs; the world around the characters elsewhere is filthy and smells bad.

Like the grubby reality of the fnatasy world, we're introduced to the grubby reality of the fantasy archetypes, which emphasises darker traits of humanity. The three main characters are a Jezal Luthar, the dashing egocentric scoundrel of the Flashmanesque type, the hulking Northman warrior Logen Nine Fingers who is raddled with aches and regrets and the crippled inquisiotr Sand dan Glokta radiates hatred for everyone and everything. Abercrombie deftly shifts style with each point of view, giving each character a unique feel. The outstanding character is Glokta, portrayed by Abercrombie through well-chosen and vivid details of his physical agonies and tortured spirit.

It was Glokta that kept me reading but Jezal's story was full of excellent intrigue and the adventures of Logen with the mage Bayaz and the rest of the fantasy spooky crew is obviously does the most work for outlining the cosmic scale of the conflict. I was a little frustrated by the introduction of more voices about two-thirds in, but I guess they'll be important in later volumes.

The plot is standard fantasy fare, but deployed through characters who have convincing motivations and drives. As the super hero comics of the eighties generally stuck to the standard generic elements - secret identities, colourful spandex, ultraviolence - Abercrombie sticks with the standard generic elements of epic fantasy but lends them great depth through characterisation. The standard elements spring from the personalities of the cast as well as the engine of the plot. Even the legendary bust-up of the wizards millennia before seems to have its origins in the coolly bellicose personality of Bayaz.

I prefer single books to series, but I've read a few different series in recent years (such as Moorcock's Col Pyat quartet, Neal Stephenson's Baroque trilogy, the Book of the Long Sun and the Soldier series by Gene Wolfe, eg), but on those occasions I've already secured the necessary volumes before embarking. In this case, I have only Book One of The First Law, and I'm not even sure what Book 2 is called (google time: Before They Are Hanged). I'll keep an eye out for it though, and if I see it cheap I'll snap it up, too.

Science fiction, old and new

I was interested to read the article by Jo Walton at tor.com about the mental adaptations required to read SF, linked through various places, and this post on Futurismic, highlighting a related blog post from a guy called Will Gillis, also caught my eye.

I don't quite agree with either post, as it seems to me that both ignore that the problem with a lot of SF is that, in certain particulars it just isn't very good. Walton's argument seems to suggest not that WE see something that non-SF readers don't see, but that non-SF readers can also see it but just don't think it's very important. A non-SF reader looks at The Forever War and thinks "Yeah, yeah, war is heck, but what the hell does a tachyon drive have to do with it?" I think it seems strange to a non-SF reader that we'd need all this tachyon drive bullshit to read a novel about war being heck.

Willis's contention that "old" SF is no longer tolerated becuase the digital age audience expects something different from what earlier SF audiences expected looks like a restatement of the old saw that SF ages more quickly than other forms of literature.

I don't believe that it's inherent in SF to age badly, but I think that poorly written books will eventually fall out favour and that well-written books in any genre will endure. Some books are never convincing, despite the acuity of their eye in some regards.

In my reading review of the year, I discussed the contrast between 1984 and Pohl & Kornbluth's The Space Merchants. They came out within a couple of years or each other, and represent the polar approaches to an SF dystopia. Ultimately, it's Orwell's powerful portrait of the gradual destruction of Smith's soul that sticks with you. The cynical hipster who narrates The Space Merchants has no depth, no roots. Orwell spends time exploring Smith's nature and back-story, while Pohl & Kornbluth keep Mitch Courtenay trundling along with the story. 1984 seems real, because Winston Smith still seems real, and he brings reality to the world around him. Courtenay never feels real, and his world is therefore a construction for us to mock.

Thinking about the older writers, Jack Vance and Phillip K Dick still seem fresh to me. Dick is heavy on the allegorical, but is also one of the origin points for today's futuristic writers. His down beat, commercialised future is still recognisable today and this gives his deeper content considerable power. He also addresses his themes through characters rather than just through the futuristic metaphor. The crises of Rick Deckard in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Joe Chip in The Three Stigmata of Plamer Eldritch are perfectly embedded in the rising tide of kipple in Deckard's San Francisco or the arid, lifelessness of Chip's Martian colonial outpost.

Vance is a slightly different case. His books are also character driven, but Vance is less concerned with internal struggles. Vance's continued readability comes from his enjoyably orotund prose style and his clever and sardonic allegorical content. The two classic collections of stories (I hesitate to call them novels) about Cugel the Clever – The Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel's Saga – look more like Rabelaisian satires than psychologically true fiction of the modernist sort.

Vance is also good at firing up a pot-boiling type of plot – a tale of vengeance, or a quest to return home, a search for a murder. He gives his characters a clear goal, and then stretches it out over a long quest across across sparsely populated territory. He subjects them to horrible defeats and reversals along the way, often at the hands of the eccentric, isolated communities they encounter on their travels. I've lost count of the number of times that characters have been imprisoned or kidnapped, losing all their possessions, or when key allies have turned out to be deadly enemies. The injustice of it all fills the reader with righteous indignation, and they demand to know how the hero's going to get out of it this time.

SF's focus on secondary worlds and allegory and futurism leads to a less intensive gaze at the other fictional elements – character and prose, in particular. There are few SF writers who deploy an especially distinct style, even from work to work, and characters are often controlled by other demands that are unique to SF. SF fans are happy to over look this if the rest of the novel is sound. Non-sf fans are not – I'm sure that's true of every genre. The SF novels that can merge their futurism, allegory or secondary world to a strong plot, good prose and deep characters will surely endure.

However, it is perhaps more of a danger for a certain type of "futuristic" SF, that will embody the technological mellieu of its day, to become less relevant. Gillis highlights this flavour of SF in his opening para:

For all the talk of impenetrable singularity, it occurs to me that the modern milieu of SF writers is almost entirely preoccupied with futurism and future-shock, in contrast to yestergeneration’s focus on allegory / thought experiment.

I don't think it's a question of generations but of different audiences, as the allegorists and thought experimenters are still there. When I go into Forbidden Planet and browse the shelves, it looks to me like the SF and fantasy audience is split into three broad approaches: futurism, allegory and secondary worlds.

(Before going any further, it's worth saying that as with every other point in the matter of genre, these divisions are malleable, and become ambiguous at the fringes. Walton quotes Sam Delaney:

Samuel R Delaney argued rather than try to define science fiction it’s more interesting to describe it, and of describing it more interesting to draw a broad circle around what everyone agrees is SF than to quibble about the edge conditions.

So, these three strands represent the centres of these circles, within the broad circle of stuff we call SF. It's like a Venn diagram, I guess. In fact, the Venn diagram is the perfect vehicle for discussing these topics, ins't? It's like it was invented to demonstrate the ways that genres overlap. I guess this is all just three more circles on the great Venn diagram of genre, and if you filled them in the whole thing would be scribbled black by it all.)

Futurism “includes” the writers and works that Gillis talks about: Vinge, Stross and MacLeod, plus people like Greg Egan, Geoff Ryman, Richard Morgan and so on. These are the guys Gillis is talking about, “the modern age has given rise to a very distinguishable modern clique of SF authors interested in worlds with recognizable causal connections to our world.”

I think that Gillis is right when he identifies one of the sources for this as the movie Blade Runner. I've described here before how I felt after I first saw Blade Runner back in the mid 80s[link], that rather than being a seamless new environment of clean design and modernist purpose, the future would be crudely bolted on to the crumbling remains of the present.

These writers are the descendants of the cyberpunks, who swiped the baton of critical acclaim from the new worlds crew and ran off with it in the 80s. You can see it evolve in the work of Bruce Sterling's work, starting with the allegorical, second worldy Involution Ocean to ultra-engaged works such as Distress and Zeitgeist (natch), via a stint in technology journalism. He's now almost entirely concerned with material futurism, re-imagining the world environment in terms of imminent tech.

These guys get some mainstream recognition – as they appeal to social critics and the politically minded, who can see through the SF façade to the economic and sociological implications. For this audience, it's informed by the new journalism, particularly in pop culture and the tempting world of electronic gadgets. Sometimes I think that the ideal neo-cyberpunk story would be a mash-up (good neo-cyberpunk word there) between a gangsta rap video and a detailed review of the latest high-end mobile phone. It's a thrilling and exciting subject, of course, and one that quickens our pulses with the imminence of it all, just as the promise of a life on Moonbase did when I was growing in the seventies.

But I think that they are in their way as out of touch with the main audience for SF as the dinosaurs of the golden age were at the time the cyberpunks first appeared. Gillis talks about “limited focus authors” who I think occupy the other two strands, allegory and secondary worlds. Gillis dismisses these as if they are no longer relavent to SF, but I think that between them they represent the biggest and most influential actual audiences for SF

Allegorical SF is a bit rarer now than it used to be, and was last in critical favour within fandom at the time of the new wave writers. Ray Bradbury is probably the proto-allegorical writer. It's this sort of SF that seems to attract the most attention from outside the genre. I don't think it's a coindidence that the new wave was the last time SF received attention from the mainstream literary establishment. It's the route taken by literary types who do SF – Atwood, most obviously, but also Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. It's interesting to compare Cloud Atlas with Richard Morgan's Black Man for a contrast in how they use the genetic engineering. I think this is difference that confounds Walton's metaphor fan. Mitchell uses genetic engineering as a metaphor in his examination of character; Morgan's book really is about genetic engineering.

The third strand is perhaps most often ignored in this type of argument, secondary worlds, those works dominated by M John Harrison's “the great clomping foot of nerdism” (remember that little kerfuffle? Good times!) My feeling is that it represents the majority of what's bought and sold under the banner of SF and fantasy, when taken at its very broadest.

This category includes everything that depends on a well-developed secondary world for its impact, be that the hard SF distant future, battling galactic empires or medieval fantasy worlds, from Star Wars & Trek to hard sf epics by the likes of Alistair Reynolds and Dan Simmons to Harry Potter. The big franchises mix heavy doses of allegory into world building, but it's usually of the more banal and aphoristic sort, to an extent that it becomes so divorced from reality or context that it it is no longer a useful philosophical or moral observation but only makes sense in the context of the setting itself.

This is the stuff that tomorrow's young firebrands are reading: Warhammer novels, Star Wars tie ins, Harry Potter and Neil Gaiman. This is what that generation will think of as the golden age. Those guys won't be getting to Charlie Stross or Peter Watts for years, in just the same way as I was feverishly reading everything by Isaac Asimov and Harry Harrison and Robert E Howard when I was a kid, I wasn't ready for Philip K Dick or Ursula K le Guin or 1984.

A Long Post About Jack Vance's Durdane

One of life's great pleasures is hunting out old Jack Vance paperbacks. Wherever we are, if I spot a second hand book shop and can spare a moment, I'll nip inside and check the shelves for any of those old old Sphere, Coronet or New England Library paper backs (always with great covers by Chris Foss or Jim Burns) that I haven't read before, hoping for a new treasure.

Vance was terrifically prolific, and it seems there's always something new to find. A lot of those books are forgettable pot boilers, of course - The Five Gold Rings is one I read recently that was just a threadbare pulp fiction detective plot mechanically articulated through wooden characters, barely held together by Vance's deft turn of phrase. I suppose it's the latter that keeps me buying, as there's always some wry turn of phrase in a Vance novel to make it worthwhile. Plus they're always short and small enough to fit in a jacket pocket, the sort of book you can finish between Tuesday and Thursday on the commute to work.

I prefer to hunt my Vance in the wild rather than purchase farm-reared Vance from Amazon sellers - the hunt is part of the thrill, and life is long so why use it all up at once? - but even after twenty-odd years of foraging there are some gaps in my Vance reading. I recently got to fill one of those gaps by reading the Durdane trilogy: The Anome, The Brave Free Men and The Asutra. I owned volumes one and three for quite some time in a couple of nice matching Coronet editions (from 1975, I think) but hadn't been able to track down the middle volume until late last year. Alas, it's not a match to the other two, but a rather nasty Ace edition (from 1978) with paper so coarse you could getter a splinter from it. Maybe I'll have to replace that rotten tooth in my collection using Amazon sellers...

Anyway, Durdane is second-tier Vance (in my estimation) but still contains much of interest especially for the Vance afficianado. It has all the classic Vance elements – isolated communities with eccentric customs, a wilful boy who rebels against the local martinets, Vance's famously melifluous prose and dark imagination. I could write about all that, about the interesting political questions that Vance raises or his curious treatment of women in this story, but since finishing my course, I've been thinking a bit more about books from a technical writerly persepctive. I find myself trying to peek behind the curtain to see if I can spot the writer at work, and this series of books gives quite an interesting perspective into Vance's development.

What follows is a rather lengthy rumination on plot and structure in Durdane. Just as a warning, unless you're really, really interested in jack Vance, you might find this a bit boring. Fair warning, this is me in full three-sheets to the wind boring SF didactic mode. A few years back I wrote a profile of Vance for the Zone, and that's an altogether easier place for the casual reader to begin, and the Vance afficianado might be interested to read my review of Vance's last (perhaps last ever) novel Lurulu, also on the Zone.

First published in 1970 (serialised in two parts in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) it was only the second series he completed, after the four Planet of Adventure novels, having apparently abandoned the Demon Princes series after three novels in 1967.Both of these earlier series are very rigidly structured around concrete setting details: the hunt and destruction of each of the five Demon Princes and Adam Rieth's encounters with the four civilisations of Tschai. In each series, every new book starts with the plot dial set back to zero, with the previous events having little impact on what comes next. I think that's why Vance likes these isolated communities. He can have a bit of action there and then move the cast along somewhere else without having any impact on the long-term narrative. In Durdane, I think he's attempting to produce a longer narrative with rising action that relies less on the this type of episodic picaresque.

He nearly pulls it off. The first two volumes tell a reasonably seamless story of Gastel Etzwane, a young man native to the continent of Shant on the Planet Durdane. He escapes religious slavery in the canton of Bashon and vows to return home one day and and free his mother and sister from indenture to the vile chiliites. To do this he must petition the Faceless Man (the titular Anome), the unseen ruler of Shant who controls the population through explosive collars around their necks. What follows has a restless quality as Vance searches for the main narrative: Etzwane's escape from the Chiliites occupies the first third of The Anome. Over the next third he seeks his fortune as a travelleing musician while saving the money to pay for his mother's freedom, as instructed by the Anome. When he returns to Bashon, though, he finds that the inhabitants have been slaughtered by rampaging Roguskhoi, beast men who have been sweeping into Shant from north. He petitions the Anome to fight this scourge, but is refused. Incensed, Etzwane sets about to rouse the people of Shant against the Anome, and this, and fight against the animalistic roguskhoi, take the action to the end of volume two, The Brave Free Men.

These first two volumes read very much as a single narrative. In fact, The Anome doesn't end, so much as stop almost mid-scene. There's much less of the wandering picaresque in this story than Vance's earlier and Etzwane returns to various locations and meets up with continuing characters who develop and change. At the end of The Brave Free Men, however, this story is done, and the new government of Shant is established. The roguskhoi have been traced to their source (the Asutra, spidery-squiddy aliens that can infiltrate the body of a human being and control their actions) and driven from Durdane.

Unable to extend the narrative beyond the first two books, Vance falls back on old habits to wrap the story up. The third volume finds Etzwane and his ally Ifness travelling to Durdane's other large continent, Caraz, to trace the Asutra. Posing as a travelling merchant, Ifness is secretly a Fellow of the Earth Historical Institute and provides Etzwane with assistance throughout the series. He's a convenient deus ex mechina whose handy Earth gadgets get them out of many a pickle. Ifness can only be of limited assistance, as the Institute rules certain interventions as illegal. In this regard he's more of a Vancian wizard, in particular of Shimrod from the Lyonesse series who acts under principles enforced by the master magician Murgen. These two travel around Caraz for half the final novel, and the characters and situations that had been the focus of the previous two volumes are forgotten. After a series of encounters at isolated communities, Etzwane finds himself kidnapped and taken to the Asutra homeworld, where humans are being used as cannon fodder in the course of some internal conflict. There he fights and finally defeats the Asutra on their own turf.

Or so he thinks, because the ending has got a really strange coda.

While he's on Asutra, Etzwane witnesses a huge space battle between the Asutra's flying bronze disks and the familiar black globes of their enemy, but this time a new type of ship intervenes sleek and silent and powerful. A couple of black ships are destroyed before the silver ships arrive, but then the bronze ships flee. Etzwane and his companions fight their way back to the camp and over-run it. They lay a trap and hijack an Asutra bronze disc space ship to take them back to Durdane. The Asutra are strangely passive, but Etzwane is exultant – he has rescued hundreds of humans and returned to Dyrdane.

But what of Ifness? Over the many months he was a slave for the Asutra, Etzwane held out hope that Ifness would come to the rescue, but he never turned up and Etzwane assumes that Ifness was unable to convince the authorities of Institute to break their code and intervene. When he returns to Caraz, he collects Ifness's boat and returns to Garwiy on Shant to discover what has happened to his ally. He discovers Ifness in Fontenay's Inn, somewhat displeased to see him. Etzwane asks why he did not rescue them and Ifness explains bruskly that he returned to his masters on Earth where he arranged for all the humans to be freed from the bondage of the Asutra. The sleek ships that Etzwane and his fellow slaves saw were Earth ships. By the time of the battle that Etzwane witnessed, the Asutra were already defeated, that's the only reason Etzwane and his fellow slaves were able to escape: they were to be evacuated in any case.

Suddenly, Etzwane's victory is snatched from him. His enemy was already defeated. And what's more, the man whom he assumed was coming to his rescue had no such intention, and dealt with matter without regard to Etzwane's safety. In the end, after all their adventures together, Ifness hardly seems to notice Etzwane at all. Etzwane longs to travel the universe, see Earth, but Ifness dismisses him as he might dismiss a bumpkin. The series ends on a sour note: in the end, Etzwane even refuses to join his old musical band. He sits and broods and drinks.

Vance could easily have contrived matters to have Ifness and Etzwane reunited on Asutra during the attack, but he deliberately marginalises the hero and really you've got to wonder why. I think Vance was always attracted to tragedy and melancholy, but the standard heroic narrative doesn't really allow for it. The Demon Kings ends on a similatly down beat note (as noted by David Langford in Jack Vance: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography (ed. A E Cunningham).

His first great work, The Dying Earth is a kind of very fractured mutiple viewpoint novel, but subsequently he stuck to close third-person narratives until the later, longer series. In Durdane and The Demon Kings he pushes this linear plot scheme as hard as he can. In this series, he might have had a strand with Finnerack and Ifness and thus extended the action and added a bit of depth to the tale. It has the structure of those later series, but not the breadth. The multiple view-point narratives allowed him to explore levels of success and failure, and to weave in patterns of set back and victory for the main characters to drive the narrative.

This is where I need some neat homily to wrap this all up, but I haven't got one and it's my blog, you know, not a PhD panel, so I'm gonna just stop. I've read the Lyonesse trilogy quite recently (in the last couple of years, at least) but it's been a while since I read the Cadwal Chronicles, and I don't think I've ever read Throy. Consequently I'm interested now to dig them up and see how they measure against my theory here. On the other hand, I've already got a pile (three books!) and so I'll wait for now. Time is so short, the number of books to read so huge, and ever-growing!