Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama (1972) SFMW 65

'On a billion television screens, there appeared a tiny, featureless cylinder, growing rapidly second by second. By the time it had doubled its size, no one could pretend any longer that Rama was a natural object. Its body was a cylinder so geometrically perfect that it might have been turned on a lathe - one with centres fifty kilometres apart. The two ends were quite flat, apart from some small structures at the centre of one face, and were twenty kilometres across; from a distance, when there was no sense of scale, Rama looked almost comically like an ordinary domestic boiler.' (Loc. 191-95)

In this manner, Arthur C. Clarke introduces the titular Big Dumb Object  (BDO) of his Hugo and Nebula award winning 1972 novel Rendezvous with Rama.

One of the features of Clarke's fiction is his re-orientation of aspects of human arrangements that tradition has sanctified, and the interpolation of plausible extrapolations from current research. Rendezvous with Rama is no different, with its representation of polygamy (in all combinations; Loc. 586-88) and appealing, but effectively enslaved, superchimps or 'Simps':

Their rearing and education had probably cost as much as that of the average spaceman, and they were worth it. Each weighed less than thirty kilos and consumed only half the food and oxygen of a human being, but each could replace 2.75 men for housekeeping, elementary cooking, tool-carrying and dozens of other routine jobs (Loc. 776-78)

For all this, and as its title suggests, the main interest of the work resides in Clarke's description of the BDO itself. His description of the crew of the survey vessel Endeavour's exploration of Rama's interior is striking, and often suspenseful:

And now he understood the purpose of those mysterious trenches, the Straight Valley and its five companions; they were nothing less than gigantic strip-lights. Rama had six linear suns, symmetrically ranged around its interior. From each, a broad fan of light was aimed across the central axis, to shine upon the far side of the world. (Loc. 1279-81)

However, subsequent to the appearance of the organic automata that cleanse and maintain the BDO during its journey, the text loses much of its mystery, although it retains a good deal of interest:

'What we failed to take into account was the possibility of non-biological survival. If we accept Dr Perera's very plausible theory, which certainly fits all the facts, the creatures who have been observed inside Rama did not exist until a short time ago. Their patterns, or templates, were stored in some central information bank, and when the time was ripe they were manufactured from available raw materials - presumably the metallo-organic soup of the Cylindrical Sea. Such a feat is still somewhat beyond our own ability, but does not present any theoretical problems. We know that solid state circuits, unlike living matter, can store information without loss, for indefinite periods of time. 'So Rama is now in full operating condition, serving the purpose of its builders - whoever they may be.' (Loc. 2762-68)

Ultimately, readers may be disappointed to glean little from the work that can provide them with satisfactory answers to the two questions that exercise the minds of the crew of the Endeavour: 'Who were [the Ramans] -- and what went wrong?' (Loc. 501). This may be asking the wrong questions of Rendezvous with Rama, as one senses that Clarke's purpose was to invite the reader to capture and reflect on the sense of wonder developed within his description of the BDO's geography in this excellent addition to the SF Masterworks series, and take it with them beyond their reading of the novel, and into their own lives:

The nature and the purpose of the Ramans was still utterly unknown. They had used the solar system as a refuelling stop - as a booster station - call it what you will, and had then spurned it completely, on their way to more important business. They would probably never even know that the human race existed; such monumental indifference was worse than any deliberate insult. (Loc. 3294-96)

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Jack Finney, The Body Snatchers (1955)

Parasitic alien seed pods capable of replicating organic life settle near the Californian town of Santa Mira and begin to create copies of its inhabitants. Dr. Miles Bennell becomes aware of the invasion through his patients' reports of changes in the behaviour of family members.

Jack Finney's 1955 novel The Body Snatchers lacks internal coherence.

It is never adequately explained how the initial pods manage to position themselves next to their victims, nor what happens to those Santa Mirans who are reproduced, nor, if the pods need to be cultivated in the manner the final scene suggests, how the first generation harvested themselves, nor how the pods are able to propel themselves into and through space.

Looking beyond its shortcomings, the most productive reading of Finney's work may be as a study in the undermining of mid-fifties American values. A Cold War paranoia that speaks of a coming-to-awareness of the alienation that the seeds of consumerism have propagated in American society pervades the work. The havoc that the mindless compulsion of the parasitic invaders wreaks mirrors the power of self-interested economic individualism to erode and ultimately destroy a sense of communally forged, collectively expressed shared values, and intimates that the socio-economic enemy within is far more of a danger to the continuation of social arrangements than that which any external threat may pose.

I'd grown up here; from boyhood I'd known every street, house, and path, most of the back yards, and every hill, field, and road for miles around. And now I didn't know it any more. Unchanged to the eye, what I was seeing out there now -- in my eye, and beyond that in my mind -- was something alien.

The lighted circle of pavement below me, the familiar front porches, and the dark mass of houses and town beyond them -- were fearful. Now they were menacing, all these familiar things and faces; the town had changed or was changing into something very terrible, and was after me. It wanted me, too, and I knew it. (Loc. 1349-51; 1351-53)

Bennell and his handful of unadapted associates seem powerless to act against the alien agency, and incapable of formulating a plan to resist them:

We were[...] overwhelmed, not knowing what else to do, how to fight back, or against what. Something impossibly terrible, yet utterly real, was menacing us in a way beyond our comprehension or abilities; and we fled. (Loc. 1497-98)

"Miles, when did all this happen?" Becky gestured to indicate the length of the semi-deserted street behind and ahead of us. "A little at a time," I said, and shrugged. "We're just realizing it now; the town's dying." (Loc. 1677-80)

Unlike film adaptations of the work, Finney chose to give The Body Snatchers a redemptive, and deeply unconvincing, ending. However, the lasting impression that this uneven yet highly readable entry to the SF Masterworks series makes on this reader is that societies that are prepared to allow themselves to be dominated by forces intrinsically hostile to the collective good come to regard elements of their own genus as outsiders.

"You look shocked, actually sick, and yet what has the human race done except spread over this planet till it swarms the globe two billion strong? What have you done with this very continent but expand till you fill it?" (Loc. 2516-18) 

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Algis Budrys, Rogue Moon (1960)

Rogue Moon relates the attempts of a team of scientists to tame an alien artifact discovered on the moon in order that its secrets may be studied: an 'obsidian hulk, toppling perpetually, perpetually re-erecting itself, shifting in place, looming over the bunker[...] reflecting the light of the stars, now dead black and lusterless.' (Loc. 2319-20).

However, the artifact proves itself adept at killing those who enter it, and a strategy is therefore developed whereby facsimiles of explorers are beamed to the moon (leaving their original selves alive on Earth) in order that they may progress incrementally through its maze-like interior before the duplicate is killed. The physiological strain and psychological impact of the transmission has the unfortunate effect of sending the subject insane, and the search is on for 'a different kind of man to send. A man who won't go insane when he feels himself die' (loc. 114):

The matter transmitter analyzes the structure of whatever is presented to its scanners. It converts that analysis into a signal, which describes the exact atomic structure of the scanned object. The signal is transmitted to a receiver. And, at the receiver, the signal is fed into a resolving stage. There the scanned atomic structure is duplicated from a local supply of atoms -- half a ton of rock will do, and to spare. In other words, what the matter transmitter will do is to tear you down and then send a message to a receiver telling it how to put you together again. 

"The process is painless and, as far as your consciousness is concerned, instantaneous. It takes place at the speed of light, and neither the electrochemical impulses which transmit messages along your nerves and between your brain cells, nor the individual particles constituting your atoms, nor the atoms in their individual movements, travel at quite that rate. 

"Before you could possibly be conscious of pain or dissolution, and before your atomic structure could have time to drift out of alignment, it will seem to you as if you've stood still and the universe has moved. You'll suddenly be in the receiver, as though something omnipotent had moved its hand, and the electrical impulse that was a thought racing between your brain cells will complete its journey so smoothly that you will have real difficulty, for a moment, in realizing that you have moved at all. (Loc. 859-69).

That section of the work that takes place on the moon is both linguistically and conceptually among the finest work in science fiction that you're likely to encounter. However, the novel's denoument constitutes a scant ten percent of its extent, and much of the rest is taken up with tedious sub-soap opera theatricals concerning the triangular relationship between Dr. Edward Hawks, the research scientist leading the project, the explorer Al Barker, and the vampish artist Claire.

A brief and largely unsatisfactory entry to the SF Masterworks series.

You have to decide how much of yourself can be changed before you consider yourself dead. (Loc. 978-79)

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Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) FMW 49

I picked this off the virtual shelf (although I also have the print copy) after the recent death of Ray Bradbury as a way of honouring the passing of an influential and much-loved author whose works I am not as conversant with as I would like to be.

Something Wicked This Way Comes describes the encounter of adolescents Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade with the mysterious Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show, an eerie circus sideshow that arrives in the middle of the night by railroad.

On discovering the dark purposes of the troupe's visitation, Halloway and Nightshade do what they can to stave off its threat to their own persons as well others prior to embroiling Halloway's father Charles in events.

Stylistically, I found the work uneven. Bradbury seems to lurch between the most chokingly florid prose and undeniably majestic passages that are startling and arresting in equal measure.

Structurally, the novel is disappointing. For me, the plot lacks interest and development and Bradbury relies on careering from set piece to set piece in order to retain such engagement as the work is able to muster. Personally, I found this tedious in the extreme.

Thematically, the struggle between an under-defined evil and a less-than-convincing goodness lacks interest, the depiction of adolescence is strained, and the delineation of the father-child relationship too oblique.

Consequently, more than once I felt I was left 'holding a book but reading the empty spaces' (loc. 487-77). However, Something Wicked This Way Comes does deliver some wonderful passages between the breathless and underwhelming plot devices, and is an acceptable late entry in the numbered run of the Fantasy Masterworks series.

For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles - breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them. (loc. 2892-96)

Life in the end seemed a prank of such size you could only stand off at this end of the corridor to note its meaningless length and its quite unnecessary height, a mountain built to such ridiculous immensities you were dwarfed in its shadow and mocking of its pomp. (loc. 3436-38)

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Christopher Priest, The Prestige (1995)

'Already, without once writing a falsehood, I have started the deception that is my life. The lie is contained in these words, even in the very first of them. It is the fabric of everything that follows, yet nowhere will it be apparent.' (loc. 537-39)

Christopher Priest's brilliant 1995 novel contains a vertigo-inducing number of duplicities, doubles, and doubts. A dense yet eminently readable piece of literary science fiction, The Prestige is a satisfying and compelling novel which is told twice through the mouths of its duelling (in every sense of the word) protagonists within a narrative frame that connects the past and present of the work deftly.

In a tour de force of literary legerdemain, plot elements are revealed gradually from different sources to much the same effect as the physical acts of prestidigitation described in the book that facilitate the delivery of 'the prestige, [...] the product of magic' (loc. 990):

First, he said, the magical effect would be increased if the illusion could be viewed from all angles. Secondly, if it could not, and a small segment of the audience had to glimpse the secret, it did not matter! If five hundred people are baffled, he said, it was of no importance that five others should see the secret. (loc. 842-45)

The Prestige is an exceptional and highly recommended entry in the SF Masterworks series.

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Janet Russ, The Female Man (1975; 1970)

I approached Joanna Russ's The Female Man with some trepidation.

I had hoped that the reputation the work has earned as a cornerstone of feminist science fiction since its publication in 1975 (written 1970) would find expression in a subtlety of argument that transcended the bludgeon and bluster of the politics of gender of forty years ago.

Sadly, it does not.

Let's be clear about this. If we are asking 'does this work have an historic significance?' then the answer in my opinion is yes, it does. However, if we are asking 'does this novel have any merit as a work of science fiction, and is it still worth reading?' then I would have to answer 'a scant amount', and 'frankly, no' respectively.

Although incoherently presented, the four fictive worlds which overlap in The Female Man through the persons of Joanna, Jeannine, Janet and Jael invite productive reflection on the part of the reader with regard to their relation to the author, whom they may be interpreted as being facets of. Whilst such a reading effectively elevates Russ to the status of an Everywoman figure, which was doubtless not her intention, the trope allows for the consideration of possible futures and alternate histories of the female subject which are thoughtful and engaging.

However, it is easy for the reader to be sympathetic to the novel's concepts when considering them outside of the textual contexts within which they are presented. The Female Man wavers stylistically between the hectoring, the overwrought, the juvenile, and the unreadable. When the narrator observes 'This is the lecture. If you don't like it, you can skip to the next chapter' (loc. 466) I suspect that I could not have been the only reader to have concluded that not just the chapter in question but rather the entire novel reads like a testy diatribe against The Evil That Men Do and were left 'numb, numb with boredom' (loc. 2610-11) while struggling through it.

The Female Man is a curio you may wish to dip into for any number of reasons, but it really isn't something you need to take the time to read or study, and is a dubious addition to the SF Masterworks series.

Do not get glum when you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. Do not reach up from readers' laps and punch the readers' noses. Rejoice, little book! For on that day, we will be free. (Lo. 3154-56)

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Frederik Pohl, Jem (1979) SFMW 41

Frederik Pohl's Hugo and Nebula nominee Jem (1979) is a rich, complex and conflicted novel that considers what a future of planetary exploration may look like through the lens of the late Cold War politics of the eighth decade of the twentieth century.

The Earth Pohl envisages is organised around fuel ('Greasies'), food ('Fats') and people ('Peeps')-producing blocs rather than geographical land masses, which makes for some unusual alliances. A restructuring of social and economic arrangements has putatively been undertaken in order to preserve world peace:

No nation could afford to fight any other nation in the whole world anymore. Food, Fuel, and People each owned enough muscle to smash both the others flat, and all of them knew it. (Loc. 2651-52)

Logic, however, has little to do with the nature of human relations, and it is Pohl's jaded but historically contingent perspective on humanity's seemingly irredeemable, atavistic and insuperable desire to compete and fight in perpetuity that drives the novel's plot: 'Remember Clausewitz: war is the logical extension of politics.' (Loc. 779)

Kung's Semistellar Object was not much larger than a planet itself. As stars went it was tiny, barely big enough to fuse nuclei and radiate heat, but it had a planet of its own that sounded like fun. Hot. Humid. Dense air, but about the right partial pressure of oxygen to be congenial to life—including the life of a human exploratory party, if anybody cared to spend the money to try it out. (Loc. 886-87)

The marginally habitbal planet Jem features three beautifully realised alien races:

At least three species seemed to possess some sort of social organization: a kind of arthropod [the 'crablike Krinpit', Loc. 1567]; a tunneling species, warm-blooded and soft-skinned; and an avian species—no, not avian, she corrected herself. They spent most of their time in the air, but without having developed wings. They were balloonists, not birds. (Loc. 303-6)

Pohl goes to some lengths to fashion separate historical, cultural and sociological matrices of understanding for two of the Jem's three races, and these passages form some of the work's most arresting, compelling sections. However, it is mankind's persistence in preying on itself throughout the work that the reader may find most bewildering, if all too plausible:

The world she had left was blowing itself up, and the world she had come to seemed determined to do the same. (Loc. 4025)

And so, at the last, what can one say of them? What is to be said of Marjorie Menninger and Danny Dalehouse and Ana Dimitrova—and of Charlie and Ahmed Dulla, or of Sharn-igon and Mother dr'Shee? They did what they could. More often than not, they did what they thought they should. And what can be said of them is what can be said of all persons, human and otherwise, at the end: they died. Some survived the fighting. Some survived the flare. But in the long run there are no survivors. There are only replacements. And time passes, and generations come and go. (Loc. 4787-91)

The novel's cataclysmic conclusion is followed by an afterword considering the intriguing proposition that humanity will only thrive subsequent to its genetic makeup having been tempered by other influences. Left to its own devices, Pohl implies that the history of humanity will continue to repeat the cycles of tragedy and farce Marx identifies in the 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte'.

Pohl imagines the implications of the final act that the Fats' commander Marge Menninger undertakes and the way in which the native species and the new arrivals intermingle in Jem's future, six generations hence:

Why fight Utopia? he thinks to himself. And so in that moment he completes the process of growing up. And begins the process of dying. Which is much the same thing. (Loc. 4915-16)

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Walter Tevis, Mockingbird (1980) SFMW 70

Robert Spofforth, 'mankind's most beautiful toy,' (p. 278) is 'the last of a hundred robots designated Make Nine, the strongest and most intelligent creatures ever made by man. He was also the only one programmed to stay alive despite his own wishes' (p. 4).
Spofforth's personality has been derived from 'a brilliant and melancholic engineer named Paisley['s] […] personality, his imagination, and his learning had all been recorded on tapes when he was forty-three, and afterwards the man was forgotten' (p. 4)

However, Spofforth 'did not really want to live. He had been cheated – horribly cheated – of a real, human life, something in him rebelled against living the life that had been thrust upon him' (p. 10)

It is difficult to review the work without disclosing its plot, namely [select text to read] Spofforth's program of social engineering to make man extinct as a species and thereby allow his machine protocols to finally let him destroy himself. Spofforth's ambitions are threatened when Mary Lou and Bentley stop taking the sedatives and drugs, which (although unknown to them at the time) also contain contraceptives, and therefore place his agenda in danger through their propagation.

Spofforth's solution is to separate the pair by jailing Bentley for the illegal act of cohabitation, and to experiment with his pseudo-humanity in the interim by taking Mary Lou away with him and installing her in his apartment as a surrogate wife, despite his sexlessness.

Paul Bentley is what passes for a university professor in the twenty-fifth century that Tevis envisages. Education has become a much-degraded and perfunctory affair in the novel as humanity has lost the ability to read. Bentley is extraordinary in that having discovered some books, rare but nevertheless unvalued artifacts, he has taught himself to read with them. Bentley now wishes to teach others to do the same, and presents himself to Spofforth, Dean of Faculties at New York University (but formerly Director of Population Control) at the beginning of the novel. However, Spofforth sets Bentley about the task of recording the dialogue in archival silent film instead.

Mary Lou Borne is an escapee from a public dormitory for children who grew up in the desert and has been on the margins of the society the novel depicts ever since.

A section towards the middle of the work narrated by Mary Lou offers some insight into her radicalisation by an old man called Simon whom she encountered and lived with for a time in the desert. Simon inculcates in her the idea, if not a full understanding of, the impact that 'the death of intellectual curiosity' has had upon humanity, and the fact that 'everybody's head is a cheap movie show' (p. 98). Spofforth in his turn also has some bitter things to say along the same lines later in the novel: 'The American Individualist, the Free Spirit. The Frontiersman. With a human face indistinguishable from that of a moron robot. And at his home or his motel he had television to keep the world away. And pills in his pocket. And the stereo. And the pictures in the magazines he looked at, with food and sex better and brighter than in life' (p. 174).

Mary Lou offers some jarring reflections on her relationships with Bentley and Spofforth, which invite the reader to consider her inner life as a character more intently than the narrative to this point has suggested that they may need to:

'Paul was pathetically serious. It's comical just to remember how his face looked when I threw the rock at the glass on the python cage, or how gravely he went about teaching me how to read. And he used to read over the first parts of this journal, when we were living at the library, and purse his lips, and frown – even at the bits I thought were funny.

Bob was hardly better. It would be silly to expect a robot to have a sense of humour, but it is still hard to take his gravity and his sensitivity. Especially when he tells me about that dream he keeps having and that he has had all of his long life. At first I was interested, but eventually I became bored with it.

I suppose that dream has much to do with my living here in this three-bedroom apartment with him. It was almost certainly the beginning of his desire to live and act like an ordinary human being of a long time ago, to try to live a life like the life of the dream's original dreamer.' (pp. 98-99)

I miss Paul. I think I loved Paul in some small way. But when I get right down to it, I don't really mind this life, this being the companion of a brown-skinned robot. What the hell, I used to live at the zoo, for Christ's sake. I'll make out.' (p. 99)

Education's aim in the novel is to shame, pacify and alienate, expressed through parroted maxims such as “when in doubt, forget it.”' (p. 22); 'quick sex is best' (p. 10), and 'alone is best.' (p. 28)

This deadening of affect and interpersonal relations is completed by the tranquilisers (sopors), joints and drugged food that are routinely ingested by the citizenry. Self-immolations by combustion are described frequently within the novel, their agents depicted as being unable to either iterate or comprehend the stunted nature of their lives, but seemingly driven by deeper urges to end their existences rather than endure the mockery of being that Spofforth's plan has imposed upon them.

A good deal of the book is narrated by Bentley in the first person in the form of a journal that Spofforth instructs him to keep during his studies. Bentey's auto-didactic program brings him to self-consciousness, and prompts him to question every aspect of the rigid social structures his world is governed by: 'I discovered the word “memorize.” And this was the definition given:”To learn by heart,” and how strange that was – heart, to learn by heart. I could not understand it all. And yet the word “heart” somehow seems right, for I know that my heart has always beaten. Always.' (p. 35). Readers also share, and are thereby invited to reflect upon the implications of, several epiphanic moments in Bentley's self-education, including his coming to understand the purpose and function of dictionaries (pp. 69-72).

During his incessant search for printed matter, Bentley encounters a text published at that point in the novel's prehistory where reading died, which is interesting to encounter in our own historic moment as digital books supersede their printed antecedents:

'I have a copy of the last book ever published by Random House, once a place of business that cause books to be printed and sold by the millions. The book is called Heavy Rape, it was published in 2189. On the flyleaf is a statement that begins: “With this novel, fifth in a series, Random House closes its editorial doors. The abolition of reading programs in the schools in the past twenty years has helped bring this about. It is with regret...” and so on.' (p. 114)

Bentley also encounters a book by Alfred Fain called The Last Autobiography wherein the author opines 'A friend of mine who works part time as the head of a publishing house says the average book finds about eighty readers. I've asked him why they don't stop publishing altogether. He says he frankly doesn't know, but that his publishing company is such a tiny division of the recreation corporation that owns it that they have probably forgotten about its existence. He doesn't know how to read himself, but he respects books because his mother had been a kind of recluse who read almost constantly, and he loved her dearly.' (pp. 117-18).

The work also envisages the impact of a future peak oil crisis within the novel's fictional world from Tevis's 1980s viewpoint 'before the Death of Oil and long before the Nuclear Battery Age […] when gasoline had become more expensive than whiskey, and most people stayed home.' (p. 173)

Subsequent to his escape from prison, Bentley takes shelter briefly in a defective factory, a 'mindless parody of productivity' (p. 168) which stands as a metaphor for the banal nature of the endless consumption of manufactured needs in a world of finite resources: 'The factory was a closed system. Nothing came in and nothing went out. It could have been making and unmaking defective toasters for centuries, for all I knew.' (p. 167)

Mockingbird begins and ends in Manhattan. This paradigmatic urban environment, read backwards from the twenty-fifth century Tevis imagines to the historical present of the work's composition around 1980, holds a totemic fascination for the author as an archetype of everything that has gone awry with human endeavour: Manhattan, where 'white men had focused their fretful intensity of power and money and yearning, pushing up buildings in hubris, in mad cockiness, filling streets with taxis and anxious people, and, finally, dying into drugs and inwardness.' (p. 277) The SF Masterworks edition's cover echoes this sentiment, with the Empire State Building which features in the work situated between the shattered remnants of two other skyscrapers, the outlines of which it is impossible not to view post-911 as representing the former World Trade Center.

Tevis lambasts organised religion through its representation as an historical curio as described by Bentley:

'I am not certain whether Holy Bible is a book of history or maintenance or poetry. It names many strange people who do not seem real […] As well as I understand it, Jesus claimed to be the son of God, the one who was supposed to have made heaven and earth. That perplexes me and makes me feel that Jesus was unreliable. Still, he seems to have known things that others did not know and was not a silly person, like those in Gone With The Wind, nor a murderously ambitious one, like the American presidents.

Whatever Jesus was, he was this thing called a 'great man'. I am not certain I like the idea of 'great men'; it makes me uncomfortable. 'Great men' often have had very bloody plans for mankind.' (pp. 140, 141-42).

The prostration of the intellect before the tyranny of monotheism is considered at greater length during Bentley's residence within the neo-fundamentalist community of Baleen he encounters towards the end of the novel, but which I will not address at length here.

Mockingbird plays with layers of symbolism in a deft and satisfying manner, for example the tableau that Mary Lou forms in the artificial python's cage at the zoo: 'she had to stand tiptoed and reach as far up as she could reach, just to catch the bottom of the fruit with her fingertips...”Why did you pick it?” I said.”I don't know,” she said. “”It seemed to be the thing to do.”' (pp. 41, 47) The scene amusingly parodies the Biblical Eve and the serpent retrospectively in the context of the narrative arc that follows and the fate the awaits Bentley prior to the text's resolution.

Tevis seems to disclose his own fondness for Kentucky's most famous export in ensuring that his protagonist is well-provided with what you would have thought to have been a near-impossible commodity, to acquire namely bourbon: 'I have a half bottle of whiskey – J.T.S. Brown Bourbon – and a pitcher of water and a glass on the table.' (p. 250)

Despite the consolations of mellowed alcohol, the melancholy air that pervades the work is encapsulated in the titular quote that reoccurs frequently in Bentley's mind after his initial exposure to it during his film studies left an enduring impression:

'Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods,' spoken by an old man to a young girl.' (p. 20)

The quote's lilting yet downbeat cast seems to colour much of Bentley's world-view, and he reaches for it frequently when unable to express himself in any other manner. 'It was my intention in beginning this to summarize what I have learned about human history and how that history appears to be coming to an end. But the prospect of trying actually to do it, after thinking about it for so long, is more than I am up to facing.' (p. 230).

The novel proposes that whilst a machine intelligence coming to consciousness may regret the fact of its own existence, humanity, although prey to the same exigencies of fate, appears better equipped to deal with its vagaries. The following exchange between Spofforth and Bentley occurs close to the end of the work, where the former's life is close to its cessation, and the latters is about to bloom fully:

'I am sick of life. I never wanted it.'
I stared at him. 'That's the name of the game. I never asked to be born either.' (p. 237)

That is not to say that Tevis, through the mouth of his protagonist, does not rue the fact that our species-being is not perhaps a little better equipped to deal with the tests to our patience that human interactions can present. In conversation with a sentient bus that he adapts for his own use, Bentley asks:

'Why are you so... so pleasant?' I said.
'We all are,' the bus said. 'All thought buses are pleasant. We were all programmed with Kind Feelings, and we like our work.'
'That's better programming than people get,' I thought, with some vehemence.
'Yes,' the bus said. 'Yes it is.' (p. 252)

It becomes evident during the course of the work that Bentley is the titular mockingbird, his solitary intelligence the song, and the edge of the woods the precipitous twilight of humanity:

'Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods,' the bus said.'
It was startling to hear that. 'You took those words from my mind?' I said.
'Yes. They are often in your mind.'
'What do they mean?'
'I don't know,' the bus said. 'But they make you feel something strongly.'
'Something sad?'
'Yes. Sad. But it is a sadness that is good for you to feel' (p. 258).

Mockingbird is beautifully structured, perfectly paced, artfully composed, and compelling in its subject matter. It is a most satisfying entry to the SF Masterworks series, and is to be commended to new readers without reservation.

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Philip K. Dick, Ubik (1969) SFMW 26

'Runciter took a good long look at the fifty-cent pieces. He saw at once what the attendant meant; very definitely, the coins were not as they should be. Whose profile is this? he asked himself. Who’s this on all three coins? Not the right person at all.

And yet he’s familiar. I know him. And then he recognized the profile. I wonder what this means, he asked himself. Strangest thing I’ve ever seen. Most things in life eventually can be explained. But — Joe Chip on a fifty-cent piece?

It was the first Joe Chip money he had ever seen. He had an intuition, chillingly, that if he searched his pockets, and his billfold, he would find more.

This was just the beginning.'

Glen Runciter's 'prudence organisation' offers the services of psychically gifted anti-telepaths and 'pre-cogs' who foresee future events and intervene in order to influence the outcomes they have envisioned to counter the effects of telepaths employed by other businesses.

Runciter, and/or Runciter's team is/are killed having been lured off-world to Luna by business rival Ray Hollis. The novel subsequently recounts the quest of Runciter's technical lead, Joe Chip, to try to determine what has happened as the world around him appears to begin to revert to the early decades of the twentieth century.

It is impossible to determine whether the text is unfolding from the reported point of view of Runciter, or Chip, or whether they are both dead on the basis that all three positions are presented and vie for the reader's acceptance and belief. In this way, the text colludes with the indeterminate nature of the author's intentionality in disorientating the reader: "We haven’t gone anywhere. We’re where we’ve always been. But for some reason — for one of several possible reasons — reality has receded; it’s lost its underlying support and it’s ebbed back to previous forms" (Loc. 2348-50). For example, after a continuous section of chapters constituting more than half of the novel's length, the narrative shifts from Chip to Runciter's point of view with no visual signifiers such as asterisks or a section break to signify the same (Loc. 2899).

Matters are complicated by the fact that Dick wrote Ubik at the height of his addiction to prescribed amphetamines, dispensed as a treatment for depression and anxiety. Dick's world-view appears to imbue amphetamines with health-giving properties, and it makes perfect sense to him that they should be available to Glen Runciter from a vending machine (Loc. 2096-7) at the Beloved Brethren Moratorium where the book begins and ends, and where much of its reported actions may be taking place in the minds of the deceased, suspended in half-life in a cryogenic 'cold pac'.

A further layer of befuddlement is added to the novel's already complex perceptual structure in the person of Jory, a half-life teenage inhabitant of the Beloved Brethren Moratorium whose over-developed psychic abilities may be allowing him to rampage through the intelligence of other residents, influencing and possibly even consuming their minds.

Finally, there is the titular artifact Ubik itself. Each of the work's chapters begins with an advert for Ubik repackaged as some sort of consumer good, be it a foodstuff, a cosmetic or a medication. This alone invites a meta-textual reading of Ubik as a critique of the disorientating, alienating, all-pervasive nature of late capitalism. However, within the context of the narrative, Ubik is presented as something offering a (fake?) redemption, a substance that, if only Joe Chip could lay his hands on a spray can of it, Glen Runciter's messages inform him would stop further temporal regression. For the majority of the work's extent, however, Ubik remains tantalisingly out of reach for Chip, reverting from its spray form to an unusable powder or balm leaving him to 'wonder how much difference Ubik — dangled toward [him] again and again in countless different ways but always out of reach—would have made' (Loc. 2554-55).

Ubik is described in both scientific and religiose ways.

On the one hand, in a description larded with jargon seemingly for comic purposes, a spray can of Ubik is described as 'a portable negative ionizer, with a self-contained, high-voltage, low-amp unit powered by a peak-gain helium battery of 25kv. The negative ions are given a counter-clockwise spin by a radically biased acceleration chamber, which creates a centripetal tendency to them so that they cohere rather than dissipate. A negative ion field diminishes the velocity of antiprotophasons normally present in the atmosphere; as soon as their velocity falls they cease to be anti-protophasons and, under the principle of parity, no longer can unite with protophasons radiated from persons frozen in cold-pac; that is, those in half-life. The end result is that the proportion of protophasons not canceled by anti-protophasons increases, which means—for a specific time, anyhow—an increment in the net put-forth field of protophasonic activity…which the affected half-lifer experiences as greater vitality plus a lowering of the experience of low cold-pac temperatures' (Loc. 3242-48).

On the other, Ubik appears as some sort of self-aware life-force with supernatural abilities:

I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be. (Loc. 3267-69)

In summary, Ubik is a work of exceptional interest and an outstanding entry into the SF Masterworks series, offering both a rewarding reading and re-reading experience, and an archetypal example of Philip K. Dick's unique and dislocating craft.

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Gregory Benford, Timescape (1980) SFMW 27

Gregory Benford's 1980 Nebula award-winning novel imagines what scientists of the late 1990s would do if they wished to send a message back in time to the early 1960s to warn their historic peers of the catastrophic effect that long-chain molecule pesticides have had upon the environment, and to thereby change the course of history.

Expressed in so reductive a manner, the text sounds preposterous and juvenile, but is in fact both nuanced, sophisticated and at time hugely enjoyable if the reader is prepared to suspend judgement on the absolute truth-value of the physics it contains. Benford's novel has often been praised for its hard science and plausible explanations of how tachyons could theoretically travel faster than light and, if aimed at the correct coordinates at the right time could theoretically send messages backwards or forwards in time.

Benford's work contains a number of dramatic set pieces: the discovery of the note in the bank vault proving that messages have been received; Greg Markham's fevered dream state as he perishes in an air crash in the original timeline whilst resolving crucial equations; the fact that Kennedy survives the assassination attempt which killed him in our reality as a consequence of a student interrupting Oswald whilst fetching a journal featuring an article by Gordon Bernstein discussing his discovery of the 'spontaneous resonance effects' - Markham's transmissions from the future - and the inevitable meeting of the two protagonists in an alternate future that they have both been instrumental in constructing.

The latter conceit is that which precipitates the final sequence of occurrences depicted in the gripping last 30 pages of the novel and elevates the work above the status of being merely 'interesting but worthy'. It is as clever a re-imagining of such a hackneyed historic event as a reader is ever likely to encounter.

The novel does have its weaknesses. Beyond Bernstein in the 1960s and Markham in the 1990s, Benford and his sister-in-law Hilary Foister Benford, whom the author credits as having 'contributed significantly to the manuscript' in a special acknowledgment, have a tendency to indulge themselves in some broad but generally unconvincing characterisations in the persons of their extensive ensemble cast. The bit-part characters' contributions to the plot are slight and their antics can give the work something of a 'soap opera' feel at times. The novel could easily have lost at least a quarter of its 400 pages without impacting on its thematic development in any way. For example, whilst it's nice to meet Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse (p. 173), and read a peon of praise in honour of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (p. 213) you have to wonder what they are doing in the book.

Overall, Timescape nevertheless ranks as one of the most enjoyable entries in the SF Masterworks series, and despite the Benfords' tendency towards the linguistically gaudy (some of the laboured puns the characters are forced to opine can grate, for example) the work contains some thought-provoking, powerfully conveyed ideas:

'Behind the equations were immensities of space and dust, dead but furious matter bending to the geometric will of gravity, stars like match heads exploding in a vast night, orange sparks that lit only a thin ring of child planets. The mathematics was what made it all; the pictures that men carried inside their heads were useful but clumsy, cartoons of a world that was as subtle as silk, infinitely smooth and varied. After you had seen that, really seen it, the fact that worlds could exist within worlds, that universes could thrive within our own, was not so huge a riddle. The mathematics buoyed you' (p. 176).

'He had a sudden sense that time was here, not a relation between events, but a thing. What a specifically human comfort it was to see that time as immutable, a weight you could not escape. Believing that, a man could give up swimming against this river-run of seconds and simply drift, cease battering himself on time's flat face like an insect flapping against a blossom of light' (p. 410).

'No matter how the days moved through them, there always remained the pulse of things coming, the sense that even now there was yet still time' (p. 412).

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Orion launches SF Gatweway

Congratulations to Gollancz's Darren Nash on the launch of the highly promising SF Gateway. I was taken with this proposition as soon as I read the following press release:

Imagine your perfect specialist bookshop; it stocks not just the highlights from your favourite authors’ careers, but every book they ever wrote and the people who run the shop have an encyclopaedic knowledge of SF. The future of Science Fiction and Fantasy e-book publishing is here. We invite you to join us.

Suddenly, owning a Kindle seems very important. I say more about why I feel such initiatives as SF Gateway are significant to the future of publishing here.

Much as purchasing another electronic device doesn't fill me with glee, I have to concede that the limitations of the battery on my current HTC phone means that reading SF Gateway titles on my Kindle Android app is not a viable option. I will therefore be adding an SF Gateway review section as soon as I've purchased a dedicated e-reader, and have read my first title from the launch list.

As long-time readers of this blog know, nothing happens quickly around here, so such developments are unlikely to take place before the end of 2011. Of course, by that time I may have decided to get an Android tablet instead - or perhaps a spare battery for my phone.
In other news that is bound to cheer readers of this blog, Gollancz have used the SF Gateway forum to announce the welcome return of the Fantasy Masterworks list. I've put in a plea that the numerical sequence and ormer fcover design are retained. If you feel the same way, please add a comment to this thread.

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Lucius Shepard, Life During Wartime (1987) SFMW 66

Lucius Shepard's Life During Wartime (1987) conjoins the standard Apocalypse Now reading of Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness with the author's own experience of living in Latin America and use of hard drugs, whilst Scarface plays on a constant loop in the novel's background.

The story arc is an unholy mess, emerging unconvincingly from the first section ('R and R') which was originally published as 'a Nebula award-winning short story' in its own right.

One can only assume it must have been a slow year for the short form of genre fiction.

The Wikipedia entry for the novel currently provides more detail about this dreary, preening work than I am prepared to waste further time rehearsing here. Suffice to say the idea that the titular war, not to mention the totality of the global economic and political structure, are being manipulated as part of a psychically-conducted vendetta between two ancient Panamanian families is preposterous in the extreme.

In the interests of fair balance, it should be noted that when the fit takes him Shepard is capable of writing beautifully, and has the keen eye of a miniaturist: 'her blue skirt swayed like a rung bell' (p. 64); 'over the bumpy hill road in the hotel's Land Rover[...] they seemed to be pulling the night along with them' (p. 116). However, the author's ambitions appear to have exceeded his abilities over the duration of the 418 pages of this work. Perhaps Shepard's aspiration did not extend beyond writing a novel of some weight, if not of any substance. If so, he achieved his target only at the expense of some uneven characterization, a meandering, repetitive, and parchment-thin plot, and occasionally lurid prose.

If Life During Wartime must remain in your slush pile, be sure to put it at the bottom. Not only is that where it deserves to be, but the heft of this weak addition to the SF Masterworks series will provide a solid base for the books above it to rest upon.

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Walter M. Miller Jr, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) SFMW V

'Over each city a sun appeared and was brighter than the sun of heaven, and immediately that city withered and melted as wax under the torch, and the people thereof did stop in the streets and their skins smoked and they became as fagots thrown on the coals. And when the fury of the sun had faded, the city was in flames; and a great thunder came out of the sky, like the great battering ram PIK-A-DON, to crush it utterly. Poisonous fumes fell over all the land, and the land was aglow by night with the afterfire which caused a scurf on the skin and made the hair to fall and the blood to die in the veins' (p. 198)

'From the confusion of tongues, the intermingling of the remnants of many nations, from fear, the hate was born. And the hate said: Let us stone and disembowel and burn the ones who did this thing. Let us make a holocaust of those who wrought this crime, together with their hirelings and their wise men; burning, let them perish, and all their works, their names, and even their memories. Let us destroy them all, and teach our children that the world is new, that they may know nothing of the deeds that went before. Let us make a great simplification, and then the world shall begin again.' (p. 72)

A cornerstone of the post-apocalyptic SF sub-genre, 1961 Hugo winner A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) was the only novel Walter M. Miller Jr published in his lifetime. The work emerged from short stories that Miller published separately, rewritten as the three parts of the final text: Fiat Homo ('Let there be man'), Fiax Lux ('Let there be light'), and Fiat Voluntas Tua ('Let thy will be done').

Fiat Homo is set in the 26th century some centuries after a cataclysmic nuclear war referred to as the 'Flame Deluge' subsequent to which humanity has reverted to a neo-medievalism.

Fiat Lux takes place some six centuries later in 3174 as the Earth emerges from the new Dark Ages into which it has descended and begins to experience 'a revival of learning in a dark world' (p. 174)

Fiat Voluntas Tua occurs a further six centuries in the future in 3781. Technologies have been rediscovered, and humanity teeters on the brink of self-extermination once again.

The novel is set largely within a monastic world of 'bookleggers' and memorizers, custodians of an intellectual history that the 'simpleton' survivors of the Flame Deluge sought to destroy having deemed knowledge to have been the cause of humanity's near-destruction:

'To escape the fury of the simpleton packs, such learned people as still survived fled to the sanctuary that offered itself. When Holy Church received them, she vested them in monks' robes and tried to hide them in such monasteries and convents as had survived.' (p. 73)

The titular character, a scientist before the cataclysmic events that reorient the narrative's history, seeks refuge with the Cistercians:

'Isaac Edward Leibowitz, after a fruitless search for his wife, had fled to the Cistercians[...] Father Isaac Edward Leibowitz had won permission from the Holy See to found a new community of religious[...] Its task, unannounced, and at first only vaguely defined, was to preserve human history for the great-great-great-grandchildren of the children of the simpletons who wanted it destroyed.' (p. 74)

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a brilliant but melancholy work, the relentlessly maudlin nature of which gives some insight into the depressive nature of its author, who took his own life in 1996. It is characterised by its protagonists' lengthy reflections on humanity's seeming inability to cast aside its own predilections towards self-harm, and its inability to break out of its orbiting of disaster and set a heading down a route of progressive, linear development.

'Can you believe that that brute is the lineal descendent of men who supposedly invented machines that flew, who traveled to the moon, harnessed the forces of Nature, built machines that could talk and seemed to think? Can you belive that there were such men?[...] I can't accept it. How can a great and wise civilization have destroyed itself so completely? (p.139).

Man as an 'imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection' (p. 155) of the design of the Creator that he was personally burdened with believing in echoes the title of Miller's famous 'Dark Reflection' short story and gestures towards the dejected world-view of A Canticle for Leibowitz, tempered by fleeting hope: 'Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection' (p. 156).

However, it is a burden that Miller, a convert to Catholicism after the Second World War, seems to have been both ill-equipped to bear and unwilling to reconcile himself with. For example, whilst it is ostensibly the character of Abbot Zerchi who enunciates the following passage in the novel, but they seem rather to be being mouthed by the conflicted author himself in the historical context of the late 1950s, with war behind it, war within it, and war ahead of it:

'The world's been in a habitual state of crisis for fifty years. Fifty? What am I saying? It's been in a habitual state of crisis since the beginning – but for half a century now, almost unbearable And why, for the love of God?What is the fundamental irritant, the essence of the tension? Political philosophies? Economics? Population pressure? Disparity of culture and creed? Ask a dozen experts, get a dozen answers. Now Lucifer again. Is the species congenitally insane, Brother? If we're born mad, where's the hope of Heaven? Through Faith alone? Or isn't there any? God forgive me, I don't mean that.' (p. 275)

'Are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall?[...] Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing?' (pp. 280-81).

'They had not yet seen the madness and the murder and the blotting out of reason. Then they did it, and then they saw it'. (p. 292)

Abandoning the earth in the novel's final sequence, the last monk to board to the spaceship bearing humanity away from the planet it has been such a poor steward of murmurs Sic transit mundus: 'thus passes the world' (p.338) in much the same way as Kurt Vonnegut shrugged 'so it goes' whenever his authorial eye happened to linger momentarily over the ineluctable stupidity of our species-being.

In A Canticle for Leibowitz, mankind's imbecility and incapacity to learn from the mistakes of its past as it wheels around to embrace future catastophes of its own making is personified in the figure of the omnipresent wanderer or pilgrim. A mythical figure of extraordinary age whose longevity is put down to his partaking of the milk of a mutant goat, the wanderer resembles both an Old Testament prophet, and the person of Leibowitz himself:

'And now this Francis, he meets a pilgrim – wearing what?- wearing for a kit the very burlap cloth they hooded Blessed Leibowitz with before they hanged him. And with what for a belt? A rope. What rope? Ahh, the very same -[...] By tonight, the whole novitiate is buzzing with the sweet little story that Francis met the Beatus himself out there, and that Beatus escorted our boy over to where that stuff was and told him he'd find his vocation' (pp. 52-53)

Published in the stand-alone 10 volume SF Masterworks hardback series, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a superb addition to the SF Masterworks list. It is a haunting, lyric, obsessive, and more than slightly depressing meditation - in many senses of the word - on the ways in which our lives are is lived 'in a dark sea of centuries wherein nothing seem[s] to flow' and within which 'a lifetime [is] only a brief eddy, even for the man who live[s] it.' (pp. 92-93).

'[Change] will come to pass by violence and upheaval, by flame and fury, for no changes comes calmly over the world. It will be so. We do not will it so.[...] Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power.[...] They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry. But that is how I see it.' (p. 228)

'We bury your dead and their reputations. We bury you. We are the centuries' (p. 259)

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Walter M. Miller Jr, Dark Benediction (1951-57) SFMW 69

Best known for his Hugo Award-winning A Canticle For Leibowitz (1959), Walter M. Miller Jr also authored dozens of stunning short stories in the 1950s, 14 of which are gathered together in this highly attractive entry into the SF Masterworks series.

The tales are not of uniform quality, but the work's best pieces rank among the very finest examples of the short form in the canon of speculative fiction. Miller's mastery of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre, his struggle to make sense of religious convictions, his attractive, sparse style and the manifestation within his work of the depression it is suggested that he lived with prior to his suicide in 1966 combine to produce a complex, satisfying corpus which merits frequent revisiting.

A child's frantic combing of the future for a cure which medical science has failed to provide for him in 'The Will' (1954) is compelling and mysterious, whilst 'Anybody Else Like Me' (1952) presents meditations on evolutionary telepathy presented in the disturbing contexts of rape.

Construction worker Manue Nanti struggles to come to terms with the atrophying of his lungs in 'Crucifixus Etiam' (1953) on a Mars without faith:

'Faith needed familiar surroundings, the props of culture. Here there were only swinging picks and rumbling machinery and sloshing concrete and the clatter of tools and the wheezing of troffies. Why? For five dollars an hour and keep?' (p. 57).

A 'machine' comes to a sacrificial self-awareness in 'I, Dreamer' (1953) as it learns the truth about its origins, while 'Dumb Waiter' (1952) presents a brilliantly conceived parable about humanity's limited capacity to perceive both its salvation and destruction in the self-regulating yet vulnerable technology it develops as an engineer struggles to save a civilization his peers are intent on destroying:

'Humanity has waited a hundred thousand years before deciding to build technological civilization. If he wrecked this one completely, he might never decide to build another [...] Some men thought that the a return to the soil was desirable. Some men tried to pin their guilt on the machines, to lay their own stupidity on the head of a mechanical scapegoat and absolve themselves with dynamite. But Mitch Laskell [...] liked the purr of a pint-sized nuclear engine much better than the braying of a harnessed jackass' (p. 88).

'Conditionally Human' (1952) is one of the anthology's highlights. The protagonist sets about righting the wrongs the state's strict control of the conditions of reproduction have wrought, 'knowing that it would never be all right [...] as long as the prohibiting, the creating, the killing, the mockery, the falsification of birth, death and life continued [...] He hoped Man could fit into it somehow' (pp. 235, 265).

'Dark Benediction' (1951) provides the volume's titular inspiration and forms its conceptual centre. The story offers a stirring, thematically multi-faceted study of our primitive responses to crises, fear of difference, and qualified contextualization of unexpected and societally transformative change. 'Dark Benediction' provides the reader with an opportunity to reflect upon the fact that destiny is not ours to control, and that unstoppable external forces could radically alter what it means to be human. Our curiosity, the story suggests, could be the death of us in the face of an implacable evolutionary process over which we have no influence; humanity, the story suggests, is not a Leibnizian monad, and we should perhaps be grateful for the universe's attention, whatever the outcome.

Regardless of other stories of lesser quality that it contains, 'Dark Benediction' is an excellent entry into the SF Masterworks catalogue. Miller's perspectives on his topics are usually engaging, often challenging, and occasionally macabre in the extreme; see 'Vengeance For Nikolai' (1957), with a plot as outlandish as anything Jacobean Tragedy has to offer.

'When the machine age cracks up, you crack up, too. Because you never made yourself its master; you just let yourself be mechanically pampered' (p. 105).

'If the universe lets you live, then you're doing all right' (p. 135)

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William Gibson & Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine (1990)

Alternate history, particularly in its Victorian 'steampunk' form, is a sub-genre of SF I favour only slightly ahead of post-apocalyptic settings. Contributing genre-defining novels to the canon is nothing new to either of the co-authors of 'The Difference Engine', with both Gibson and Sterling having shaped our understanding of 'cyberpunk'.

With authors of such pedigree, and a theme that would seem to be tailor-made to please me, why did I find The Difference Engine so unsatisfying?

It was not the authors' playful inversion of Victorian political mores. I very much enjoyed learning about the ramifications of the Time of Troubles within the work, the dissolution of 'the declining and decadent Tory blue-bloods, a class destined to be swept from power by the rising middle class and the savant meritocrats,' heralding 'the revolutionary tenor of the coming age of industry and science', sliding through 'strikes, manifestos and demonstration, to riots, martial law, massacres, open class warfare, and near total anarchy. Only the Industrial Radical Party, with their boldly rational vision of a comprehensive new order, had saved England from the abyss (pp. 140-41).

It did not reside within the language. Gibson and Sterling do a creditable job of daubing the text with splashes of cross-class Victorian patois. The strenuous efforts the authors go to in order to demonstrate their mastery of language in its re-imagined historic context are pleasurable, and plausible to both eye and ear in a way that, for example, Tim Powers' deployment of contemporary idioms within the sixteenth century Venetian setting of The Drawing of the Dark just are not, to the work's great detriment.

It was certainly not the unique steampunk flavour that the authors succeeded in imbuing the work with. The Difference Engine's steam gurneys, autocafés, National Credit plates, and nested loops of subversive code contained within the camphorated cellulose punch-card of the Modus Programme introduced into the Grand Napoleon engine, among other things, were all highly entertaining.

For me, the failings of The Difference Engine reside chiefly within its plotting. Structurally, I take no issue with the authors' roaming authorial eyes having fallen upon different characters to lead the reader through the narrative, disappearing and reappearing in turn, either in person or as ciphers. Rather, it is the novel's philosophical pay-off in the final section wherein the reader is hurriedly compelled to consider the work as a parable of the role of the 'clacking' (hacking) of derivatives of Babbage's Analytical Engine for the purposes of political intrigue and the deleterious effect the consequent development of machine intelligence has on the fate of humanity ('human faces that are borrowed masks, and lenses for a peering Eye', (p. 382)) that is so unsatisfactory.

Whilst the 75 pages that advance the plot of this intriguing SF Masterwork at the beginning and end of the novel would have made a gripping short story, the intervening 300 pages serve more as a broadly independent thriller with steampunk tendencies than they do as part of a larger, integrated whole. With the baton-changing protagonists having been pursuing Captain Swing throughout the pages of the work, the confrontation between Edward Mallory, his brothers, the secret policeman Ebenezer Fraser and the elusive agitator himself is particularly disappointing.

'Is it not strange that we mere mortals can talk about a subject – truth – that is infinitely complicated? And yet - is not a closed system the essence of the mechanical, the unthinking? And is not an open system the very definition of the organic, of life and thought? If we envision the entire System of Mathematics as a great Engine for providing theorems, then we must say, through the agency of the Modus, that such an engine lives, and could indeed prove its own life, should it develop the capacity to look upon itself The Lens for such a self-examination is of a nature not yet known to us; yet we know that it exists, for we ourselves possess it' (pp. 376-77).

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Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962) SFMW 73

The wall falls back into the moat.
Use no army now.
Make your commands known within your own town.
Perseverance brings humiliation.

Undeterred by the unfavourable reading of the I Ching, Frank 'Goldfish' Frink muses 'I should take my tools[...] be working, creating in my own way right up to the end, living as best I can, as actively as possible, until the wall falls back into the moat for all of us, all mankind' (pp. 54-55)
Philip K. Dick's 1962 work The Man in the High Castle is an alternate history set in a fictional world within which the Axis powers were victorious in the Second World War and the political map of the world has been redrawn accordingly.

It is a book about chance, belief, the shaping of fate and the making of history in a figurative and literal sense. The interpretation and manipulation of history is the dominant theme of the work at both a personal and a societal level.

From the former perspective, the I Ching serves to influence the decisions of the work's protagonists, Frank and Juliana Frink, who although formerly married do not encounter oneanother in the novel's time line.

From the latter, the novel-within-the-novel entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy by Hawthorn Abendsen, who appears in the work towards its conclusion, posits an historical outcome to the Second World War which will be more familiar to the reader and which informs the work's thrilling conclusion.

'Now one appreciates Saint Paul's incisive word choice... seen through glass darkly not a metaphor, but astute reference to optical distortion. We really do see astigmatically, in fundamental sense: our space and our time creations of our own psyche, and when these momentarily falter - like acute disturbance of middle ear' (p. 225)

The Man in the High Castle is often introduced as Dick's greatest work, and its intricate world-building, ability to create a firm sense of place within the context of the societal alterity it crafts, and the prismatic, shifting perspectives of its inner textual histories provide ample support for this assertion.

The text reveals itself in a precise and satisfying manner, akin to unfolding the geometries of a piece of crisp origami:

'One by one Hawth made the choices. Thousands of them. By means of the lines. Historic period. Subject. Characters. Plot. It took years. Hawth even asked the oracle what sort of success it would be. It told him that it would be a very great success, the first one of his career. So you were right. You must use the oracle quite a lot yourself, to have known' (p. 245)

'I'm not sure of anything,' he said.
'Believe,' Juliana said. (p. 247)

'Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find. I'm lucky.' (p. 248)

Note: The Man in the High Castle was the third entry in the 2001 hardback SF Masterworks series (first cover image above), and the seventy third entry in the numbered SF Masterworks series (second cover image; 2009). A printing error saw the volume bear the number '72'.

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Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren (1974)

'Where is this city? Struck out of time! Where is it builded? On the brink of truth and lies' (p. 469)

Delany's Dhalgren is perhaps the literary nadir of the 1970s fashion for 'finding oneself' in a very public and self-indulgent manner. Right down to the protagonist's addiction to writing terrible, self-obsessed poetry, the myopic, preening pomposity of the work seems childish and such insights as it has to offer appear glaringly obvious to the contemporary reader 40 years after the fact. However, from a more charitable perspective the novel's preoccupations are also entirely understandable when considered within the context of its own historical moment.

Flawed though it may be, Dhalgren is also an hypnotic, transcendent meditation on the mysterious and elusive nature of what Martin Heidegger called dasein or 'Being-in-the-World'.

The urban environment within which the novel is set smoulders like a 1970s American inner city after a riot, and we discover that 'you've got to walk around in it, because there isn't anything else' (p. 225).

Upon entering the ruined, burning city of Bellona, the initially anonymous protagonist, who comes to be called Kidd before before discovering (possibly) his identity later in the work, is both anti-heroic and yet also an Everyman figure. Both 'good and bad at once' (p. 661), Kidd is paradox personified, and is described as having 'lost bits and pieces of [himself]' (p. 769). As the narrative in this experimental work shifts from the third to the first person, and even bifurcates to offer twin pathways through its final third, the reader is left to ponder the reason for his ruined hands (p. 440) and what his hallucinations signify (p. 385).

Bellona is both identical with and symbolic of the lives of the characters played out inside it. Within its confines we encounter a panoply of characters the scope and scale of which is Dickensian in aspiration, with headonists, aesthetes, thugs, scholars, prophets and those who are 'nice in a useless sort of way' (p. 260) wandering, wondering, loving and brawling through its pages. Much like its protagonist, the reader comes to understand that within this work 'if people are busy living out myths you don't like, leave them to it' (p. 24).

Delany quickly establishes the unlikely but nevertheless existing pre-conditions for the possibility of his characters to survive within this disintegrating space, with subsistence in the form of accommodation, food, and company appearing to be freely available although even the characters accept this to be an impossibility (p. 377). With the acquisition of money as a means of survival having been rendered unnecessary, the author affords his characters the liberty to focus on the rather more challenging question of what their lives mean: 'how else are we to retain the inflationary coinage and cheap paper money of sanity and solipsism? (p. 481).

Delany goes to some lengths to disorientate the reader as if to remind them that there are no truths to be found within the work, just as the lived experiences of its characters (and also its readers) are incapable of providing definitive answers to any of the questions that they may ask. Like the questing restlessness of the human spirit, Bellona is a journey rather than a destination. Wreathed in smoke and flame, its shattered urban geography morphs constantly, with distances altering, street signs changing, and time dilating (p. 327; pp. 363, 367, 414). Characters muse as to what has happened in the city (p. 371) which seems to have assumed the status of a place of pilgrimage. However, the majority of Bellona's population gives the impression of being transient, just as the protagonist himself is at the beginning of the work, and as those individuals are whom he meets when leaving the city at its conclusion in search of that which 'would be better than here' (p. 801).

Dhalgren is full of mysterious artefacts: knife-like weapons that encase the hand known as Orchids (p. 557), red eye caps (p. 555), lamps that project colourful holograms of animals and beasts of myth and legend around the person of their wearer, and the strange 'optical chains' (p. 553) worn around the body, the adorning of oneself with which seems to manifest in some way a willing enslavement to the urban environment.

One of the things that irritated me about Delany's Nova (1968) was the author's apparent inability to restrain himself from name-dropping philosophers and their tropes, seemingly for no reason other than to indicate to the reader that he had heard of the thinkers in question. Sadly, this is not a habit that the he appears to have been able to rid himself of in the intervening years, and Dhalgren too is blighted by Delany's embarrasing info-dumps (pp. 470, 531, 625 et al).

Despite its shortcomings, Dhalgren remains a rich and extraordinary addition to the SF Masterworks series. Its graphic content, looping, rambling structure and elusive nature may not be to every reader's taste, but for those who are willing to lose themselves within its bewildering topography, there is much pleasure to be found.

'Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes' (p. 745)

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