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Michael Chabon The Yiddish Policemen's Union (Harper Perennial, 2007)

Well, it took some doing, but I got through it. Michael Chabon seems to be one of these writers caught up in the post-genre fiction snobbery circus (in other words, fiction which borrows heavily from science-fiction and yet dare not speak that name for fear of being read by people with BO), and mystifyingly so being as he's evidently an unrepentant fan of genre fiction who lists Lovecraft and Moorcock amongst his favourites, and who once submitted a proposal for the third X-Men film. How this squares up with Jeanette "space travel is such a boy thing" Winterton I've no idea, and this book certainly benefits from being read once you've stopped caring about such self-important elitist bollocks.

My first impression was of a book that struck me as somehow very pleased with itself, and I found this conclusion echoed across numerous threads on various forums, unanimously so but for Felice who liked it. Curiosity inspired by such overwhelming disdain, contrasted against the numerous awards this book has won and Felice's impression, I tried again. And again. And again, until something clicked and I'm no longer quite sure what it was that made for such a problem in the first place.

To get this bit over and done with, I doubt it's so much the case that snobbery (something Chabon does not seem guilty of) precludes this from being called science-fiction as that if you're going to call this science-fiction then never mind even Will Self or DBC Pierre, you might as well call Thomas Hardy a science-fiction author on the grounds of his stories being set in the fictional Wessex. It's alternate history, true enough, but not on the scale of Warlords of Utopia or The Man in the High Castle, and this picking at straws is beginning to look a bit pathetic.

Anyway, yes, alternate history - in this case Sitka, a temporary Jewish state occupying a small part of Alaska granted to refugees after the second world war: a fictional reality spun upon an actual proposal which never came to fruition. The Yiddish Policemen's Union follows Detective Meyer Landsman as he himself follows the trail of murdered chess genius and potential Yiddish messiah figure Mendel Shpilman. It's basically a hard-boiled crime novel written by someone of a literary prowess above and beyond what one might expect of the genre. I'm assuming my false "smug" reading must have come from too much prejudicial foreknowledge (all the post-genre bollocks) because it now seems entirely beyond me how I ever could have failed to appreciate the sheer poetry of Chabon's text. Like DBC Pierre (thinking mainly of Ludmilla's Broken English here) his attention to detail and imagery absolutely unsullied by the hand of cliché is constantly surprising and breathtaking. And perhaps this provides some clue as to my initial difficulties.

As great literature this is faultless, as a detective novel - the florid pace is perhaps not quite up to the job, and the stumbling blocks of the occasionally astonishingly vivid phrase further slow the proceedings to a sometimes frustrating tempo; and this itself makes for further difficulties when the proliferation of Yiddish slang means this is a book which requires a certain degree of concentration. But having said that, although I'm not sure about the numerous awards, it remains a largely compelling and profoundly evocative novel and one I think I'm highly likely to return to at some point.

Poul Anderson Genesis (Tor Books, 2000)

I started Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, and it was shaping up as a pretty darn fine yarn (note Texanisation of speech patterns here) but proved unfortunately difficult to finish whilst poo began to impact fan. I'll come back to it from scratch, but I thought I'd give it a few months first. So there was this which I remember picking up purely through some odd feeling that I might regret it if I didn't. Anderson impressed me immensely with his Queen of Air and Darkness collection, so this looked promising and promising enough for me to warm to overuse of words like 'yonder' in the first chapter.

Unfortunately, reaching the 150 page mark (not a good sign) I realised I was still waiting to enjoy the fucking thing. So far there had been a promising interlude in which one Christian Brannock rescues a robot buddy on the dark side of Mercury, but otherwise....

Well, it's set in an impossibly distant future with remnants of Brannock's intellect inhabiting some vast universal machine intelligence, and Earth has gone a bit screwy under the guidance of its own vast universal machine intelligence (Gaia in this instance) so Brannock's vast universal machine intelligence poos out a tiny human version of itself for the purposes of finding out what sort of game that pesky Gaia thinks she's playing at. Potentially, that would be fine, but I can't help feeling that this was written at a period in Anderson's life where he knew he'd probably get published no matter what and was thus allowed to just go all the way without anyone daring to point out that actually, some of Genesis is a bit shit. The 'Yonder' and 'thou' and 'behold' begin to grate after a while, and the whole thing is written from the literary perspective of a man wearing a sparkly cape, perched upon a marble plinth, throwing Jack Kirby cartoon shapes. They could have titled this novel And Lo There Walks He Whom Men Shalt Know As Wayfarer except that might detract from how seriously it can't stop taking itself at each and every turn.

The theme itself appears to be something along the lines of whether a righteous God would intervene in human tragedy or else let humanity make its own mistakes - commendable enough as a subject, and it would have been nice to have read Anderson's thoughts on the matter whilst actually caring about them. This is just horrible pseudo-mystic porridge. Sigh.

Iain M. Banks The Algebraist (2004)

I tried with this, I really did, but it's five hundred plus pages, and two hundred pages in I still wasn't clicking with it, and a brief look on Amazon for reviews by people who had read the entire thing just netted me lots of comments along the lines of what I would have said about the first two hundred pages. So I figured maybe I should think ahead and use that time for whatever I would have wanted to do had I made it to the end and then wished I could get those hours of my life back.

It's not bad exactly. It's Iain Banks (and I loved The Wasp Factory and Walking on Glass) so there's no lack of style to the writing, but Christ does it go on!? The story is something to do with a huge alien (aren't they always) invasion fleet from a distant system causing panic around the gas giant Nasqueron. The Dwellers (an ancient race inhabiting the upper atmosphere of Nasqueron) have, legend has it, their own private network of galaxy spanning wormholes, access to which will save the day. Thus it is the task of can't-even-remember-his-name-now to unearth (or unair I suppose) the truth about these wormholes). It's basically a quest from what I can tell, complete with over the top Ming the Merciless style bad guy and rebel leaders. In other words, space opera.

In some ways it's probably not so far off Stephen Baxter, maybe the prose is a little more elegant, but Baxter spares his readers pantomime villains and has the added hook of huge doses of wacky-end quantum theory of the kind which turns your brain inside out if you're not careful. This seems more like Babylon 5 than anything, and although I wouldn't offer that as a recommendation, there's obviously plenty of Amazon subscribers who would and as such loved this book, so maybe it's just me. At best I'd say you could edit it down to about half the size (a lot of the flashbacks seem gratuitous and uneccessarily rambling) and get a mid range NA out of it.

I had an initially unfavourable reaction to The Yiddish Policeman's Union, but I'm glad I stuck with that as it's something I now wouldn't mind reading again. I don't think this is quite the same thing. It's probably okay of its type but just not of a type that grabs me. If I want Star Wars, I'd rather just watch Star Wars. Oddly enough, there's one passage here that stood out so boldly as an indication of all that's wrong with The Algebraist (or at least all that I didn't like about it) that I made a note of it:

"He wondered how much tedious ceremony and baroque speechifying they would have to sit through before anything of note happened or was said."

By page one hundred and one (from which that sentence is lifted) that's exactly what I was wondering too.

E.E. 'Doc' Smith The Skylark of Space (finished 1920 but since revised)

The father of space opera apparently, and not someone I'd heard glowing reports of with criticisms ranging from unbelievably dated to just plain crap, so it was more curiosity than anything that got me to read this despite my fears. Actually it's not bad, not amazing, but enjoyable as a bit of writing and an insight into the history of science-fiction. Smith was a doctor of chemistry I believe, so although this works as a sort of Flash Gordon narrative complete with a villain almost certainly played by Roger Delgado (and none the worse for that), it's Flash Gordon which wears its knowledge of chemistry on its sleeve. For something written around 1920, it's surprising how much Smith seems to have predicted (although to be fair, the mention of computers may be the result of later revision) and interesting for all the ideas thrown up before the science-fiction narrative got a lot more standardised. Being written before rockets became an exact science, the Skylark of the title is propelled by some obscure gravitational effect of copper combined with a rare fictional element, and furthermore it's propelled at many thousand times the speed of light (which is cute!). The story wanders aimlessly from one scrape to another both in deep space and upon various alien planets, with lots of smoking along the way - contemplative briar pipes in the hero's study or fags passed around during the historic first contact with the people of Mardonale. Even more eyebrow raisingly hilarious (providing you find this funny) or possibly appalling are Smith's female characters. Weirdly enough it seems he decided a romantic element was necessary so, being uncomfortable with this idea, drafted in the wife of a close friend (uncredited - sigh) to pen the female parts. The female characters in question er.... well, if you're writing a history of feminism there's probably not much point looking here, as might be evident from this eye-watering exchange which occurs whilst the crew of the Skylark are lost in deep space:

One day Crane suggested to Seaton that they should take notes, in addition to the photographs they had been taking. 'I know comparatively little of astronomy, but, with the instruments we have, we should be able to get data, especially on planetary systems, which would be of interest to astronomers, Miss Spencer, being a secretary, could help us?'

'Sure,' Seaton said. 'That's an idea - nobody else ever had a chance to do it before.'

'I'll be glad to - taking notes is the best thing I do!' Margaret cried, and called for her pad and pencils.

Phewee. Maybe this is just me, and I know it's possibly a bit pointless taking another era to task for having a different set of values, but the sex thing is just kind of weird. The women, whilst likable enough are generic shrinking violets (just as the men are generic pipe-smoking chaps) and the sex issue is at its most obviously repressed when one alien visitor is quantified as greatly evolved through belonging to a race which has risen 'above death and death's clumsy attendant necessity, sex.'

That's just fucking bonkers! What is wrong with these people!? If that's evolution you can have it back!!!

Anyway, whilst I feel bad for the possibility that I might be psychoanalysing the 'Doc' a little more than is healthy here, it's sort of curious that the book ends with such a detailed and lengthy account of the four main characters getting married on some alien planet, having first determined that the wedding ceremony is so similar as to probably be legal on Earth... and thus married (following curiously detailed descriptions of wedding gowns and rings) the chaps are at last free to comfort the quaking gals (deep space is no place for the fairer sex!) without fear of becoming either cads or bounders.

So it's definitely of it's time, and maybe it isn't great literature though I've read much worse, but if you can get over some of the many rather staid elements of the narrative (or even if you enjoy them) this is surprisingly entertaining. Imagine a Target ER novelisation, better written but with slightly more ludicrous characters.

Gateway to Tomorrow edited by John Carnell (1954)

Probably said this before but I find these sort of anthologies fascinating as snapshots of the history of science-fiction writing, aside from often wonderful covers, there's also the draw of those names presumably regarded as promising at the time for whatever reason, yet which have otherwise vanished into obscurity ranking not even so much as a 2009 Google hit let alone a Wikipedia stub. History tends to have a better memory for earlier versions of its own present shape, so weirder historical dead ends and offshoots often get forgotten - and collections such as this would seem to be the place to look for them.

Well, there's nothing absolutely earth shattering here although it's nevertheless a curious snapshot of English (excepting one Australian author who might as well be English) science-fiction writing at the end of the 1940s. There's a few surprises (well... mention of hyperspace and an incongruously Baxteresque reference to water ice as reaction mass in space travel) and a smattering of entirely readable shorts - not least of these being John Wyndham's exceptional Dumb Martian (which I read elsewhere quite recently but it was well-worth reading again) - but for some reason I'm left with the impression that the late 1940s view of space travel is that it would be pretty much like being in the navy but without water... or the cop, or the construction worker, or the red indian dude...

This tendency is most notable in the least imaginative stories here which feature spacecraft with speaking tubes and admirals played by Trevor Howard - well, maybe not terrible, though it's hard to say as I couldn't summon up the interest to work out what was happening. Given that many of these were written so close to the end of World War II with naval service no doubt still fresh in the minds of some of these authors, it's understandable and seems the comparable to present day space opera which (in my experience) just seems to draw on Star Wars and the like for no reason other than to get a load of explosions together in the same place.

Anyway... that's more of an observation than a quibble. The bland stuff is over and done with so quickly that you barely even notice (and interestingly enough the big name here is Arthur C. Clarke whose contribution is actually a bit pants) whilst the nuggets (though excepting Dumb Martian that may be overstating it a little) from E. C. Tubb, John Christopher, George Longdon and others were a joy to read.