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Ursula Le Guin The Wind's Twelve Quarters Volume 2 (1975)

For some worrying reason I had no impression of Le Guin as a science-fiction author up until very recently, and had always assumed her to be purely a fantasy writer. On the strength of these short stories I imagine this might be in part due to her being less easy to categorise as she appears to use whatever genre best suits the story, some of which just happens to involve the odd spacecraft.

Anyway, after Asimov's somewhat dry and plot-heavy prose, this came as a welcome change. Settings vary from pseudo-mediaeval to anarchist utopia to a planet devoid of animal life but a strong sense of poetry runs throughout. Some of these tales she refers to as psychomyth which I take to indicate that really the story is the thing rather than any concern for whether it might fit into some sort of continuity or be pinned down to a particular version of reality - you might almost take them as fables of sorts, albeit very odd fables. The effect reminds me a little of a more readable A. E. van Vogt - that same dreamlike quality, yet oddly contrasted with a very recognisable reality in which people make jokes about Jean Paul-Sartre or lament the aging process in eloquently familiar terms.

Beautifully written and quietly impressive.

Stephen Baxter Phase Space (2003)

I'd avoided buying any more Stephen Baxter for a while because he's just too addictive, and I had hoped I'd grown out of that habit of hearing one song on the radio and rushing out and buying every single thing the artist had ever done including that £50 rare bootleg that is actually poop but I end up listening to straining hard to acknowledge as a work of genius, but I saw this cheap and couldn't help myself. I'm reluctant to go making claims like "Stephen Baxter is without doubt the greatest science-fiction writer of all time in comparison to which all others are but peddlers of poop," but er... when he's good... I mean fuck!

That said, as a collection of shorts I probably prefer his Vacuum Diagrams although that's probably due to the scope of the whole Xeelee sequence novels wherein he really pulled out all of the stops. Phase Space relates to his Manifold series which are, so I gather, largely set in the present day and in an immediately recognisable universe, namely our own wherein there may be life on distant planets but we just don't know because NASA (an organisation which features prominently here) still use chemical rockets. Given the restrictions of this much more realistic universe, he still manages to blow brain cells in his customary fashion, weaving stories (and stories with believable characterisation it should be noted) around obscure and headache-inducing points of string theory and the like. Some of these shorts work better than others - life in the early universe prior to the cohesion of matter, the twelfth Beatles album from a parallel universe, moon landings and so on - but as a whole they are nonetheless engrossing. For one example I suspect The Fubar Suit might be one of the best (not to mention strangest) short stories I've ever read, and the heart-wrenching Sheena 5 might be a close second. This latter is a wonderful example of his literary skill - genetically enhanced squid taught to pilot a spacecraft and you actually forget that you're having to suspend disbelief in any of the details as said squid terraforms an asteroid for her offspring much to the bewilderment of NASA.

I just can't think of enough good things to say about this guy. Just go out and read something by him.

Yeah - Moonseed does look good, so I expect that will be next on the Baxter list after The Time Ships. I love the way he's able to write about the moon in such breathtaking terms so that it seems more amazing than any description of planets made of marzipan inhabited by cybernetic bunny people.

Peter F. Hamilton A Second Chance at Eden (1998)

I resisted this guy for a long time, which is down to no more than inverted snobbery I guess. He's popular. His books are as thick as house bricks. I had a friend recommend him on the strength of his being easy to read. And browsing Mindstar Rising in a charity shop I just got the impression of a cyberpunk version of Footballer's Wives. So my initial impression may have been somewhat biased by this prejudice. Here's what I thought during the first couple of shorts here:

Great characterisation apparently though that's probably great characterisation in that some of the old Judge Dredd strips in 2000AD were you know - really pretty good. This isn't Charles Dickens, at least not so far as I'm able to tell, not having read any Charles Dickens. well, it isn't even Philip K. Dick. If anything it makes me think of an ITV1 gritty (etc etc) post-watershed adaptation of something from the aforementioned 2000AD, probably starring Ross Kemp or another ex-Eastender. That said, it slowly gets under your skin as whatever it is that the author does which makes me think of airport blockie writing becomes much greater than the sum of its parts. So despite the starring Ross Kemp moments, you'd have to be a complete stone to not end up feeling some degree of empathy for the characters here.

I was trying hard to dislike it, but er...

The title novella is a curiosity in that it shares a surprising number of parallels with ...Of the City of the Saved - a murder mystery occurring in an improbably idyllic and sentient human habitat wherein murder should be next to impossible, coupled with a conclusion bringing the populace to a state of post-mortem immortality within that habitat... I should make it clear that I'm not for a second suggesting that this provided inspiration for the Faction novel (and despite common ground they are two extremely different books) but it is certainly interesting in this instance to compare two very different authors taking different approaches to ideas of heaven and the transcendence of humanity.

Okay, so that's not really an opinion - just saying what happens.

Anyway, the more I read, the more I realised how wrong I had been about this guy. Although the hard science here is probably closer to Star Trek hard science than Stephen Baxter hard science, the uses to which it is applied make for some wonderful, dizzying, even gripping concepts, not least the whole idea of biotechnology (or bitek) taken to extremes - the affinity bonds amounting to telepathy, giant spacefaring and sentient habitats grown from engineered coral polyps, all instilling a great sense of wonder and yet written up in such casual terms as to be entirely believable, almost prosaic. And the writing itself - clearly he does whatever it is that the Dan Browns of this world manage to do that keep them on the bestseller list, and yet I'm fucked if I can actually tell what that is, because it's not even as if his prose is particularly simplified. Some of it reminded me a little of Ursula LeGuin of all people. And similar to LeGuin, although much of this is unashamedly space opera complete with heroes and villains (though none so patently hackneyed as in that Iain Banks thing I recently struggled with) the themes of the stories are generally quite traditional - revenge, just deserts, spurned lovers and so on. And this is where I realise that 'great characterisation' of which I had heard so much about comes in. For all the extremes of backdrop - affinity bonded servitor chimps, space warps, asteroid mining and so on - these elements are never allowed to intrude or overshadow the drama being lived by the main protagonists. I felt Jane Eyre levels of involvement with some of the characters here. God - how could I have been so wrong about this writer?

Anyway, I just bought The Reality Dysfunction - a full length novel and the first of a trilogy set in the same universe as the stories collected here. The bastard is 1,200 pages thick but not only am I not scared, I can't wait to read the bloody thing!