science fiction Archives - malcolmtattersall.com.au

SF bookshelf

This is a collection of mini-reviews of science fiction and fantasy books which I liked enough to recommend but haven’t reviewed at length, often because I couldn’t find time. It began as a string of comments to an identically-titled post on Green Path which now continues independently as Environmental Science Fiction.

The most recent additions to the collection are at the top; dates given are the dates reviews were added.

Index

The Year’s Best SF Vol 2 • Tales from the Inner City • Anthropocene Rag • Zen Cho • Every Version of You • The Scar • Babel • The Year of the Jackpot • Children of Memory • Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits • Reconstruction • The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida • The Anomaly • Flyaway • From Here On, Monsters

The Year’s Best Science Fiction Volume 2

This fat volume published by Saga presents ‘the best SF short stories published in 2020’ in the expert opinion of its editor, Jonathan Strahan, and I’m not going to argue: it’s a terrific collection. Nearly thirty authors, newbies to veterans, explore our most pressing current concerns (race, gender, AI, social justice, climate change) by projecting them into possible futures. Others have fun with future crime or the implications of hard science.

Bonuses are an outline of what happened in the SF scene and a critical overview of the best novels and novellas of the year. I was pleased that so many of my own favourites rated well. Let’s see: Anthropocene Rag, The Order of the Pure Moon, Flyaway, The Ministry for the Future, Agency, and books by Wong, Tchaikovsky, Johnson and Doctorow. This volume’s only negative is a small one, its totally generic title. There must be hundreds of collections called The Year’s Best Science Fiction, with various subtitles, so include the editor’s name in your search for it. To add to the confusion, ‘Volume 1’ (which I’m sure was just as good) is actually the previous year’s collection from the same editor and publisher. (14.3.25)

Tales from the Inner City

Shaun Tan’s Tales (2018) will probably be shelved amongst children’s books in your local library or bookshop. They are variously whimsical and surreal, gentle enough not to frighten small children, and they are generously illustrated with his own paintings, which are sometimes more important than the text. But don’t be deceived: they are subtle, profound fables about our relationship with the animal world. Buy the book for a child by all means, but be sure to read it yourself. (8.3.25)

Anthropocene Rag

Alex Irvine’s Anthropocene Rag (2020) is a roadtrip, somewhat in the manner of Spinrad’s People’s Police, through territory explored by Cory Doctorow, William Gibson and Greg Egan among others.

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Stross: Rule 34

• I reviewed Rule 34 when it was published in 2011 and it has been on my bookshelf ever since, far too good to throw away but challenging enough that I didn’t pick it up for a second reading until last week. Here’s my (old) review, shortened slightly but otherwise unchanged, with a (new) afterword to bring it up to date.

Rule 34

Charles Stross

Orbit, 2011

Rule 34 is an internet meme which says, “If it exists, there is porn of it,” and Rule 34 centres on an Edinburgh policewoman whose daily job is dealing with its consequences.

Not that DI Liz Kavanaugh has any hope of stemming the tide of porn sloshing around the web (it’s about ten years into our future and all law enforcement agencies have tacitly abandoned the attempt), but her unit tries to prevent the worst of it from spreading.

On secondment to another unit, she is called to take charge of a murder scene as bizarre as any porn fantasy. Continue reading “Stross: Rule 34”

A bookish ramble

Magic and Mystery

A friend passed this very old, battered copy of Magic and Mystery in Tibet my way amongst others she was discarding recently. I found it fascinating as an historical artifact and impressive in an intrepid-traveller kind of way.

The author, Alexandra David-Neel, was part of the early Western engagement with Asian religion, along with the theosophists (whom she knew well).

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Key classics of fantasy and science fiction

Once upon a time, no-one was considered truly educated unless they knew Shakespeare’s plays. More recently, but still not recently, an influential critic published a really big list of books which he thought were necessary for an understanding of western culture – sorry: Western Culture.

My ambitions are much smaller. All I claim is that anyone who doesn’t know the books on my list has missed key works of fantasy and science fiction, so they have missed some great books and will miss innumerable cultural references.

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Dune yet again

I’m breaking my own self-imposed rule of not republishing a review of a bad book, but for a good reason: I used the review as an opportunity to say a few critical words about what I later called “series rot” and I wanted to share those words here.
The review was published in the Bulletin in 2009 and added to this site in 2024, unchanged except for this intro and some links.

The Winds of Dune

Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson

Simon & Schuster, 2009

In the beginning was Dune, a brilliant book which quickly became, and remains, a science fiction classic. It fused Greek tragedy, space opera and (the most visionary innovation) planetary-scale ecology. Frank Herbert followed it with five sequels, none as good as the original although some came close, in the twenty years before his death. After Frank’s death, his son looked at his inheritance and saw possibilities for more stories from the Dune universe. He and Kevin Anderson, an undistinguished SF author, embarked on a series of extensions to the series: a pair of sequels, then two sets of three prequels.

After that, they turned to filling gaps in the original sequence: The Winds of Dune is (wait for it) an ‘interquel’ set between Dune Messiah and Children of Dune.

‘plot’

Paul Muad’dib has just walked into the desert, apparently to his death, and Alia has become Regent for his infant twin children. Frank Herbert didn’t think this part of his history needed telling but Brian and Kevin do it in 250 pages, padded out with another 200 pages of flashbacks. The plot is simple: before he walked away, Paul entrusted a childhood friend with the task of undermining the dangerously messianic adulation he had attracted. The friend is hunted down on Alia’s orders because his propaganda undermines her own power base. The rest is internecine political skulduggery interspersed with brief, stereotyped, action-adventure episodes.

‘faithful to the original vision’

The writers have been excruciatingly ‘faithful to the original vision’. There is hardly a descriptive sentence which could not have been lifted from the original series, so there is no trace, perhaps no possibility, of character development. Characterisation was not a strength of the original series but these characters are not even cardboard, they are recycled cardboard – papier maché, perhaps. Ditto landscapes, ditto religions, ditto technologies.

Why should any of this matter enough to take up half a page of your newspaper? Simply because this sort of writing is now the norm, not the exception, in what used to be the liveliest field in fiction. Look at The Wheel of Time or Shannara. Look at anything by Feist, Lackey, Goodkind, Harding, Asher, Marillier or Peter Hamilton – trilogies, tetralogies, sequences of up to twenty books. (Yes, I know that list includes some Fantasy authors, but that’s because Fantasy suffers exactly the same problem.) Some of them, like Dune and The Dragons of Pern, started brilliantly and degenerated into self-pastiche but none of them now have an ideas-per-page rating greater than one star out of a possible ten. In a field which was all about ideas, that is appalling.

Science fiction used to be challenging and stimulating but is now, overwhelmingly, pap. Almost the surest sign that it is going to be pap is the length of the series. The surest? The original writer has taken on an assistant or co-writer to do the hack-work, or has left the scene completely for one reason or another. At that point, the series has become a franchise and the artistic vision, if it ever existed, has given way to painting by numbers.

‘excitement, passion and sense of the miraculous’

There may be many reasons for this state of affairs but ‘Readers like it’ is the commonest excuse. Whether readers like it for what it is or because they don’t know what they are missing, I’m sorry for them.

If the first reason applies, I’m disappointed that anyone can put such a low value on their leisure time. If the second reason is the real one, they need to look back to the classics – The Left Hand of Darkness, Stranger In a Strange Land, Ringworld, Dune itself – and then look for more recent books with the same excitement, passion and sense of the miraculous. Such books do exist. Look for anything by William Gibson, Ian McDonald, Neil Gaiman or Australia’s own Greg Egan. More to the present point, look at Kim Stanley Robinson’s great climate trilogy, which brings Frank Herbert’s ecological drama home to contemporary America.

The Winds of Dune is not the worst book of its kind but it is an absolutely typical example of the least imaginative kind of imaginative fiction.