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T. J. Bass The Godwhale (1974)

Science-Fiction seemed in very short supply in 1975, particularly if you were ten years old at the time. There was a few years worth of memory of Who with Baker or Pertwee, Target Books still being few in number and not that vast archive of times past they became; there were various Gerry Anderson things; a few films, though mainly at cinemas and aimed at older viewers (the trailer for Zardoz, for example, looked phenomenally weird); there was The Whizzers from Space in The Topper, which wasn't as good as it probably sounds; and that's about it. Thus the promotional poster for this book (nice airbrushy picture of a CYBORG WHALE!!!) had a big fucking impact, at least big enough for me to remember it once the title had disappeared into 1970s never-to-be-heard-from-again-sort-of limbo alongside Shardick (whatever the hell that was), Moonbase 3, It Shouldn't Happen To A Vet, Watership Down, and Barry Blue.

What a strange book - nominated for awards (and I can see why), none of which it won (and I can also see why), and maybe best tackled in two parts.

On the positive side, the first third or so is absofuckinlutely phenomenally good. Senor Bass only wrote two novels (the other being Half Past Human which is set within the same environment as The Godwhale) and one nutrition and biology (or summink) text book. Clearly a man with some knowledge of medicine and anatomy, he pulled out all the stops here, battering the reader about the head with non-stop weirdness (hemihumans, cryogenics, hive humans) justified in a dizzying tsunami of stuff about amino acids and genetic codons, BUT doing it in a way that feels not only entirely free of lectures, but actually feels pretty damn good. As mentioned elsewhere, this part of the book (certainly the first chapter) reminds me a little of Simon Bucher-Jones' writing (esp. Ghost Devices) the bizarre rendered utterly credible by the sheer opulence of the poetic language, guvnor - that part in Ghost Devices where the factories come down to the water's edge to drink... Anyway, the set up is amazing and compelling: a future world in which humanity has split into hive dwelling subterraneans or a scattering of aquatic Benthics. The sea is sterile, and the land is less than fertile. The Godwhale of the title is Rorqual, a cyborg harvester once used to gather krill but now without purpose - hive humanity never ventures above ground so Rorqual believes her creators to be extinct. The environmental message is not dissimilar to that of Margaret Attwood's Oryx and Crake and initially seems much more convincing, not least through the horror factor of life in the hives - the description of GM tapeworms bred inside shit filled sewer pipes as a precious source of nutrition is probably one of the most stomach churning things I've read recently (and as such is far more effective than Attwood's tiresomely shocking references to child porn). So far, so how-the-hell-did-this-book-vanish-into-obscurity...

Annoyingly, the pace goes floppy pretty darn quick after the opening, and as we follow the cast of characters around the aquatic battleground of a hive-Benthic conflict, it feels like a series of short stories hastily bolted together (which may be the case) without much care taken over how well they may fit, or whether the end result reads like it was either made up as the writer went along, or at worse - is just there to bring the whole thing up to a novel length page count. The turning point seems to be that at which the world's oceans suddenly become fertile, fish-filled, and once again full of plankton. There's two paragraphs of ideas about why this may have happened, and then the story just carries on like it's no big deal.

"Yo, Dude. Is the sea still entirely lifeless and sterile?"

"You bet it- oh wait a minute. No, the fish are back."

"Far out."

The explanation arrives in the final chapter, but in the meantime you're left wondering whether the author's just trying stuff in an effort to keep himself interested. Worse still, is the concluding religious discussion which just seems to come out of the blue... an idea based on the anthropic principle of Earth's suitability for sustaining life proving the existence of a benign creator. Not only is this argument reliant upon an equation which strikes me as dubious (gy = c, meaning if you multiply the length of a planet's year by its gravity and find the figure is equal to the speed of light, then that planet will be habitable in human terms. I'm no mathematician but is that not a somewhat meaningless equation? By what comparative systems do you measure both gravity and the length of a year?), but er... isn't the whole idea of using some perceived aspect of nature as proof of a creator kind of missing the point?

Thing is, it's impossible to tell by the end whether Bass even supports this idea himself or is just throwing it into the stew for the same reason that (prejudicial remark incoming) students always seem to think it doesn't matter how you make a curry so long as you put a half ton of creamed coconut in there.

Shame. This starts off so well (better first third than most books in this thread in their entirety) but just turns so quickly into flavourless slop.

felice wrote:

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War Arrow wrote:

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(the trailer for Zardoz, for example, looked phenomenally weird)

A trailer that gives an accurate impression of the movie, then? But it would be quite a challenge to make a trailer for Zardoz that didn't make it look phenomenally weird, at least without splicing in footage from completely different films.

Hmmm. Point taken. In my defence I only saw Zardoz a few years ago whilst somewhat drunk, so wasn't sure if it was just my imagination or it really was like that. Quite impressed by the giant flying stone head full of guns. It's difficult to think of a film which could not be greatly improved by the addition of a giant flying stone head full of guns. Certainly Bridget Jones' Diary would be a very different kettle of fish.

August Derleth (editor) From Other Worlds (Four Square Books, 1964 / first published 1952)

I'm quite keen on these paperback collections of definitively pulpy material, not least because the Four Square editions tend to have covers that are so beautiful you could cry - just something very evocative about 50s/60s book covers and design. Although the front of this is an (admittedly lovely) generic space rocket in front of a circular blob painting (presumably representing a planet), the back is a photo of a bunch of drinking straws seen from above, tinted green and set on a dark background so as to look weird. Weirdness on a budget, necessity mother invention etc etc. sigh....

Another interesting point of these collections is the variety of authors whose shorts tend to get crammed in between the covers - both the famous and those who've vanished into richly deserved obscurity. Here we get Isaac Asimov (thankfully in his post-robot, concrete evidence of talent phase), and John Wyndham writing under two different names (though neither story is exactly a classic).

Jack Williamson (of whom I know little) epitomising his times (as do the predominance of nuclear war fixated themes in this collection) with a tale that, unless I'm mistaken, seems to suggest that Stalin and Lenin were in fact malevolent entities from outer space, or maybe just influenced by malevolent entities from outer space... hence evil empire, commies and so on. Oddly enough, this serves as a vivid illustration of the point made elsewhere on this thread (sorry, either Doloras or Bthogg I think) that for whatever faults he may have had (see The Complete Robot moaning) Isaac Asimov was a vocally liberal author writing in a very conservative climate.

Williamson's story isn't actually offensive, but it's kind of scary how gormless it is. Surprisingly though, it's far from the worst here, as Kendall Foster Crossen's tale of plant creatures from Venus is so definitively "of its time" as to impinge upon Plan 9 from Outer Space territory and almost be worth a read on the strength of its high level of earnest stupidity.

The last two stories here derive from Derleth / Lovecraft pals Donald Wandrei and Clark Ashton Smith, and for whatever reason they are by far the most readable tales of the collection. Although the stories themselves are far from earth shattering (Smith more or less transposes War of the Worlds to Venus), both benefit from being served up by authors who really could write, and in such a way that their works remain entirely readable today without anything (pipe smoking men called Herbert for example) leaping out of the page to scream 1951 in your face. It's a bit frustrating in some ways, Crossen's basic story is no more intrinsically ludicrous than Smith's football shaped Venusians, but in terms of writing a bit of edumacation clearly goes a long way.

David Louis Edelman Infoquake (Solaris Books, 2006)

The background: Some indeterminate point in the future, following various cyclical ups and downs of civilisation of which the most recent (the Reawakening) has resulted in the calendar going back to the year zero (so this is set in 359). More than half of humanity is linked up to the Data Sea, and thus they walk around full of OCHREs (nanotechnology devices capable of effecting actual physiological changes upon the nervous system and fooling the senses into seeing, hearing, smelling, or touching things that aren't there). The consumer society's growth industry is Bio/Logics - programmes which can be downloaded from the Data Sea which interact with one's OCHREs so that you can see in the dark, have your eyes change colour to match whatever type of flower you happen to be holding, have perfect skin, or whatever - plus Bio/Logics communicate with the OCHREs of those around you if necessary so that other people will perceive you as sexier, funnier, more persuasive and so on. At the extreme, one outgrowth of this technology is the Multi projection by which you can exist as a holographic copy of yourself in a distant city, seeing, hearing, and even feeling all you would experience were you really there - conference calling taken to its conclusion. The whole idea neatly reinvents that whole cyberpunk/matrixy thing without recycling any previous incarnations of same, and Edelman's world of the year 359 is less to do with virtual reality cliches than having Matrix-style computer logic forcibly stamped on the real world.

Tart that I am, I liked the title, and the cover sealed it for me, so I bought the book in more or less complete ignorance of its subject and author, and now that I've emerged four days later from the heroin stupor of being lost in this fucking thing, even dreaming about it at one point... pardon my language but FUCK ME SIDEWAYS WHAT A BOOK! and they can print that on the jacket if they like.

Cyberpunkwise I'll admit to being a bit of an ignoramus. The William Gibson book I liked (Pattern Recognition) wasn't really cyberpunk (or whatever you want to call it), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (which I should probably try to read again) just seemed like a load of style over substance, plenty of fetishy descriptions of gadgets and cyberspace connections, but no characters or story. Anyway, Infoquake feels like something very different, and a few of the million praise singing quotes in the first couple of pages describe it as a cross between Wall Street and Neuromancer. I'm only vaguely aware of what Wall Street may be (talking book or film here rather than actual place, obviously) but I gather it's businessy. Something about the subject makes me uneasy, it relating to capitalism (etc. etc.), but not sufficiently uneasy to prevent my enjoying The Apprentice (both Sugar and Trump versions) so er...

Well what we have are 500 pages of future industrial espionage, in a world where centralised government seems to be a thing of the past, and the big crescendo of this novel is (cough cough) a corporate presentation to announce the launch of MultiReal, a new Bio/Logics package which will revolutionise the industry... and yet this is one of the most gripping, and utterly convincing things I've read in a long time (at least since Coalescent anyway). I think the key to the success of this novel may be the fact that Edelman has put such an immense amount of work into sculpting this version of the future, describing a society we can scarcely recognise in terms that seem deceptively familiar. For all the Bio/Logic weirdness, MindSpace and Multi projections, this feels somehow close to home, very much an extension of the present, and certainly the same world in which HBO's The Wire occurs even to the point of Natch (central protagonist) being played by Aiden Gillen (mayoral candidate and late of Queer as Folk), at least in my mind anyway. The pace is tense, thrusting, and businessy (as I suppose these things would be in real life) without resorting to cheap literary tricks or airport blockbuster cliches (excepting an incongruously hammy confrontation between Natch and an old rival, the novel's only weak point I thought) and you might almost be forgiven for thinking that not much really happens here - loads of board meetings, a bit of historical detail, a big conference, the launch of MultiReal, it's not exactly a winning pitch for a film but er WOW for want of any more coherent assessment.

I'm not even sure what this book is about, if I'm honest. The opposing forces seems to be the Natch fiefcorp and the authoritarian Defence and Wellness council, so this might be an argument for the freedom of the market (or summat) against that nanny state that I keep hearing so much about, but there seems to be too much grey here to support such an obvious polarisation: Natch (the central character) is something of a slimeball (although oddly likeable despite this) whilst the theoretically oppressive forces of the opposition seem to have good reasons for curbing the excesses of the Bio/Logics industry, not least in order to prevent the catastrophic infoquake of the title.

Amazingly this is Edelman's debut novel , part of a trilogy (The Jump 225 trilogy, named after a Bio/Logic program) and I get the feeling he's only just getting warmed up, and whatever the hell all this stuff is about will become clearer as the story continues. Certainly there are some vastly loose ends, not least the rest of the world's population which remains locked out of the Data Sea (suspected first/third world metaphors incoming) and the identity of the individual who pumps Natch's OCHREs full of black code at the end of the novel (intrigue, conspiracy, corporate hypocrisy)...

I'm all gushed out. Fucking AMAZING novel, quite frankly...

Clifford D. Simak City (Four Square Books, 1965 / written 1952)

The first of this author's books to win a Hugo or a Nebula or a Falafel or one of those awards, and it's not difficult to see how it might have stood out in (checks notes) 1954 given that it remains pretty weird even by present-day standards. It has become apparent to me that Clifford D. Simak did not fall into the hard science-fiction camp. In fact it would probably be fair to say that he fell quite some way away from it, so far away in fact as to make Brian Aldiss into a rigorous non-fiction author by comparison, but as we're all here due to mutual appreciation of a time-travelling voodoo cult who live in the eleven days excised from the English calendar, none of us are in much of a position to start moaning about lack of realism.

As may be obvious from earlier reviews, if your science-fiction novel features a grizzled old timer called Chet who lives in the Wisconsin backwoods with his faithful hound, then you're probably reading Clifford D. Simak. City runs happily true to form in this respect, bypassing any cynicism I may have about manipulative, cosy narratives, with a shot of full strength rural Waltonsisms laced with just enough weirdness (actually, maybe a little too much) to keep it interesting - think John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men but with a wisecracking robot making up a George, Lenny, R-VsM X5 trio of drifters. Robots feature here as inhabitants of the rural idyll, robots that remind me a little of, if anything, Pat Mills creations (from 2000AD comic) - they tend to have names like Jenkins and Andrew, they're very much human, and one or two seem to have developed psychic powers. More startling though are the dogs of City....

City is set some ten thousand years in the future. Humanity is more than simply history, it has as good as vanished altogether (a few hundred humans remain on Earth - although by this time they are known as websters - the rest have all fucked off to Jupiter), and we are left with talking dogs and their robot helpers. The eight sequential short stories of City (which narrate this future history from present onwards) are interspersed with the commentary of an unnamed future canine who remains sceptical of the existence of these so-called websters and suspects most of these stories are fables. True enough, City itself is pretty much a fable, or at least a debate between either Simak's mild utopian tendencies (expressed when all future animals turn vegetarian) and his sense of realism, and/or hard logic (the wild robots) versus the intuitive (the canines and their relation to alternate realities, here referred to as cobblie worlds). Despite the Steinbeckisms, one should not be fooled by City's simplicity, or even its apparent naivety, for just when you think you've got it all figured out as a precursor to one of those cock-obvious 1960s Star Trek episodes ("They're ugly as fuckin' sin, and yet somehow they're the good guys - Wow!") he flips the narrative upside down with either a talking racoon, a statement of nature without violence being something other than nature, both, or something else that constitutes the absolute last thing you expected.

I'm generally suspicious of utopian tendencies given that perfect worlds are usually built upon mountains of corpses, but on close inspection Clifford D. Simak is clearly an optimist rather than a utopian, and this is (in addition to everything else) what makes him so readable, and why there's something very comforting, even heart warming about his novels (in my experience) without them ever quite giving in to complete Disneyfication despite talking dogs, wolves, bears, and racoons. Hugely pleasurable, but certainly one of the oddest things I've read in a while. When was the last time you read a novel in which a robot read the mind (such as it is) of a field mouse?

Oh and by the way - possibly the greatest 1960s book cover ever. Absolutely beautiful. Still available at a they-pay-you price on that site named after a South American river.

George Mann (editor) The Solaris Book of New Science-Fiction (Solaris Books, 2007)

One starts to feel a bit of a charlie when it dawns that everything you've read recently was written by someone who died at least a decade ago... except Stephen Baxter. And a few others I suppose. Hence this and recently formed science-fiction short story mag buying habits; and although I may already have mentioned this - of the four, Fantasy and Science-Fiction (at least the most recent issue) sets an improbably high standard in terms of contemporary anthologies. Despite better known authors, this collection falls sadly short of this standard although there's still much to recommend it. George Mann is himself an author (of a Time Hunter novella amongst other things) so it's quietly impressive that he makes no contribution here once his introduction is done with. This at least suggests concern for the quality of stories over attempts to hitch one's own wagon up to someone else's more successful literary horse (if you see what I mean).

Anyway, the sheer range of subjects and styles is impressive - everything from literary experimentalism to hard-boiled space opera - although unfortunately this also means it's almost certain that not everything will be to everyone's taste. Also odd is that some of the stories seem unusually short, possibly a mere four thousand words in some cases (as is hinted at by mention of this figure in the introduction) which strikes me as just too short. Maybe everyone's different but I'd say that once you get below the five thousand word mark you either need really solid material or some other significant reason for that sort of word count - I'm just not convinced four thousand words is enough space for most writers to achieve lift off.

As something from which one might hope to squirrel a few names for future reference, this collection scores well. Neil Asher's Bioship (oddball Pirates of the Caribbean with genetic modification scenario), Paul Di Filippo's Personal Jesus, Mary A. Turzillo's Zora and the Land Ethic Nomads, and Tony Ballantyne's ingenious Third Person (tourists as recruits in low-level conflict) all suggest these as names worth looking out for in future. There's also Brian Aldiss and Stephen Baxter delivering their usual quality material. Plus Jellyfish, a razor sharp and hilarious (if like me you have no life) Philip K. Dick parody. And stories by airport blockie space opera specialist Peter F. Hamilton (reads a bit like an old episode of The Bill, all "muppets" and "copper's narcs"), Ian Watson, and Jeffrey Thomas which at least suggest these probably ain't the sort of authors I'm going to want to read too much more of. Oh, and there's Eric Brown (heard of him somewhere) and James Lovegrove respectively keeping the spirit of John Wyndham alive, sort of. The latter's The Bowdler Strain is perhaps worth mentioning as a minor absurdist masterpiece - a logovirus which bowdlerises profanity, turning words like arse and wank into £$%& and %@#? gibberish, all told in absolute deadpan betrayed only by a mounting quota of howlers:

"Children found it irresistibly amusing that they could utter forbidden words in front of their parents and not get told off for it. They learned to insert the words into strings of made-up nonsense. Their parents knew they were swearing, but where was the proof?"

So very much a mixed bag, but otherwise educational (regarding who not to read) when it isn't quite delivering the goods, and said goods are certainly good enough to justify sitting through a few not-so-goods, as it were. This imprint, Solaris Books certainly seems to be going places.

Frankly I was confused, undecided as to whether I was secretly enjoying this fucking terrible film, or seriously enjoying this hilarious film with a sneaky suspicion that maybe I shouldn't be. I think the whole thing was made even more confusing by my pal (aka MrTreacle of Outpost Homeworld) who absolutely insisted Starship Troopers was straight-up reprehensible gung-ho and thus terrible. I wasn't entirely convinced, possibly because Treacle arguments often seem to come from some sort of alien brain (the one about Duran Duran being the greatest group of all time (and I'm not kidding here) which went on for a good no-words-in-edgeways 40 minutes springs to mind as particularly destabilising of other arguments the boy has from time to time put forth).
Anyway, I think I preferred Aliens.