Books update 2: Witches and heretics

Kim Stanley Robinson's Galileo's Dream is a a historical novel about Galileo Galilei, with SF interludes where time-travellers take him to visit the civilisation of human colonists living on the Galilean moons of Jupiter in 3020 AD.

This, at least, is true on the face of it (it's how Guardian reviewer Adam Roberts describes it, for instance). However, the history (though it is indeed meticulously researched) is continually inflected by Galileo's response to his revelations of the future, and in particular his efforts to escape the fate he has -- in these people's history but not in ours -- of being burned at the stake. While this certainly contributes much to an excellent novel of character and ideas, it renders it fairly dubious as a narrative based in historical events. (In this connection, the intervention of time-travelling agents using anachronistic technology at a crucial point in his heresy trial doesn't help.)

Galileo is richly and vividly imagined -- a brilliant, arrogant, insatiably inquiring character. We're spared neither the details of his various progressive illnesses nor his moral blindness, although the Jovians are there to comment and to challenge him on the latter (his conventional, monstrous treatment of his daughters, for instance) from what might just as well be the reader's 21st-century perspective. The novel's full of fascinating historical detail -- I hadn't known that the elderly Galileo met the young Milton, and Robinson makes a mordant play of their respective attitudes to blindness.

Philosophically, the novel deals with predestination and free will, understanding and ignorance, experimentation and revelation, in ways which are complex, subtle and never simplistic, involving some intricate inversions as the plot unfolds in the two timeframes. Just as in several other works of Robinson's (to which this is tied by a few links of continuity), future history becomes a vehicle for visionary writing. My main quibble is the same as Roberts' -- that (in a much lower wordcount than that of the painfully overlong Mars trilogy), the future society seen here isn't, by Robinson's usual standards, terrifically detailed or convincing.

It is, however, a bloody good read. Over this kind of length Robinson's style usually becomes dry, but that never happens here.

* * *

For ages I refused to read Terry Pratchett's Discworld subseries for young adults, the Tiffany Aching books. This was partly because I was annoyed by what I saw as a prevalent trend of packaging fantasy for children instead of adults (the same reason I've still not got round to China Miéville's Un Lun Dun), but mostly because I'd found the first book's titular characters too bloody annoying for words in Pratchett's earlier Carpe Jugulum.

This was silly of me, as I recently discovered after caving in and reading the first two: The Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky. They're excellent novels about the lived experience of childhood, and tiny smurfish scots-speaking fairies play a relatively minor role in both. Carpe Jugulum was a poor novel which fails to live up to the promise of its "Witches vs Vampires" premise, whereas the two Tiffany books are excellent character studies of a young witch, which endeavour to deconstruct the fantasy clichés of certain other magical coming-of-age sagas I could mention.

Tiffany's experiences are both universal and highly individual. Her relationship with the Nac Mac Feegle (who, to be fair, are often very funny here) is subsidiary to the story of her origins and training as a witch, and her developing relationship with Granny Weatherwax, possibly Pratchett's finest continuing character since Equal Rites, who -- on the showing of these first two novels -- might end up as either her mentor or her archnemesis. At the same time, Tiffany's growth into a place in the adult world, her recognition of the various darknesses inside her and her learning to embrace and transcend them, are archetypal aspects of a child's journey into adulthood.

So yes, I was wrong. And I need to read Wintersmith and I Shall Wear Midnight as soon as possible. Happy now?

Books Update: Mars to Magrs

Lord, I'm being useless at the moment. Keeping the twittering classes entertained with daily microfiction isn't helping me keep up, either with the personal writing projects I'm working on or with this blog. Speaking of which...

Here lies Billy Joel Underton (1984-2011, 1947-1981) with his beloved wife Deborah (1925-2010). This monument erected by his son and father.

This one may be slightly more obscure than I intended (Was Billy Joel named after the popular entertainer or after his "grandfather"? Was there an original Mr Underton whom he replaced?), but I like it anyway.

Still. I've wittered enough recently about the fiction I've written -- it's time to give other people's work a turn. Here's a roundup of what I can remember reading over the past -- blimey, about three months now.

Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes, I said I'd come back to this one. I've blogged quite a bit about the experience of ploughing through the trilogy over the course of more than half a year, and I haven't really the heart to give the experience the dissection it deserves now. Suffice it to say that this colossal triptych defines and delineates Mars as a human society, with plausible political, social and religious movements -- and original developments in philosophy, morality and even physics -- which initially are merely transplanted to, but later respond to and eventually arise from the planet's stunningly evoked landscape, the whole amounting to a complex, monolithic yet realistically textured history of a kind which SF has rarely, if ever, managed to convey. It's a towering achievement.

And yet... it could have been done, quite honestly, in half the length or less. It's true that the sheer time it takes to read assists in giving a sense of the characters' own epic struggle with history, culminating finally in the long-sought Martian utopia of their dreams. But sheer length isn't the only technique that could have achieved that, and frankly there are others that would have been kinder to the reader. Robinson states upfront that he's put 17 years of research into these books, and he's keen to give us the benefit of his prior thinking in every area from geomorphology, astrophysics, mathematics, etymology, ecology, cerealogy, economics, social history, politics, anthropology, comparative religion, nuclear fusion, psychoanalysis, hydrology, alchemy, soil biology, oceanography, metallurgy, chemistry and botany, to sailing and kite design. It's utterly exhausting.

My other quarrel with the trilogy is that many of the original protagonists survive well into their 230s, simply so that we can have a consistent viewpoint on the progressive development of Martian history. The "longevity treatment" is a separate novum that has nothing directly to do with colonising Mars, it adds a spurious extra malthusian pressure which the future doesn't honestly need, and -- given that some of the political clashes are intergenerational -- it absurdly obliges us to accept characters in their 80s or 100s as bold young rebels. It also limits the organic development of new points of view which would have helped keep the whole thing fresh: as it was, my favourite section of Blue Mars wasn't even set on the planet, being the section where the Martian great-granddaughter of the first astronaut on Mars visits Mercury, Earth and Miranda.

Werewolves in Their Youth by Michael Chabon: Chabon's a brilliant writer, but I didn't feel his imagination had the room to unfurl itself in these short stories. Though told from various points of view and with some clever variants, these are all essentially portraits of middle-class American marriages in collapse. They're well-written and fun -- except when Chabon strays into the area of US sports, making no concessions to the ignorant reader and becoming completely impenetrable -- but basically inconsequential. The one exception is the final story, "In the Black Mill", an exuberant and loving Lovecraft parody attributed to the nonexistent pulp author August Van Zorn, which nonetheless manages -- if I'm reading it correctly -- to implicate the unthinking antisemitism of Lovecraft and some of his pulp-writing peers in the attitudes which led to the Holocaust.

The Casebook of Carnacki - Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson: I could, if I had the space and time, say almost as much about these nine brief vignettes as about Robinson's Mars books. Stories of an Edwardian ghost-hunter whose scientific approach means he explains away as many supernatural phenomena as he endorses, these always leave you guessing as to exactly where they're going, and are at times genuinely very creepy. There's a weird cinematic feel to them, as if Hodgson was writing with a medium in mind which scarcely existed -- I'd love to see a Carnacki feature film combining elements of, say, "The Haunted Jarvee", "The Horse of the Invisible" and "The Hog". These stories are relatively neglected -- certainly compared with Lovecraft's -- but well worth seeking out.

Top Ten: Beyond the Farthest Precinct by Paul Di Filippo and Jerry Ordway: Hmm. Alan Moore's original Top Ten series, together with its 1940s prequel The Forty-Niners, are scintillatingly-plotted, clever, entertaining police procedurals set in a city where everybody's a superhero. Having apparently lost interest in the series Moore has farmed it out to others, in this first instance SF writer Di Filippo.

Sadly, despite a few clever jokes, he has none of Moore's deftness of touch, and it's painful to watch his diminution of the characters. The cybernetic-American Joe Pi, who in Moore's comics deliberately talks like a cliched sci-fi robot largely in order to freak people out, now apparently just talks like that; while the religious police characters, whose respective christianity and satanism were formerly just single facets of rounded believable personalities, now rant about "infidels" and "blasphemy" exactly like every other religious character written by a lazy atheist. There's even an utterly gratuitous appearance by Jesus in a Superman costume, which makes no sense on any level except pointing and laughing at what a crap god Jesus is.

These points are especially galling since Di Filippo's idea of continuing Moore's eclectic aesthetic is to steal his villain wholesale from Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, a novel deeply informed by Dick's sincere, if highly eccentric, interest in christianity. (Di Filippo makes no effort to disguise his source here, even referring to his steel-eyed demiurge as "the Hell Ditch Pilgrim".) This follow-up is a disappointment; I'm hoping other writers will do better with the property.

Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross: I spoiled myself, I think, by making the inventive Accelerando my introduction to Stross's work. This, an earlier novel, is certainly better than Singularity Sky which it sequels, but still nothing more special than a generic post-cyberpunk space opera. Stross inhabits the safe genre-SF niche like a jigsaw piece, with no apparent wish to stretch his pseudopodia a micrometre beyond its confines. I'm not sure I'll bother with any more Stross, except perhaps Accelerando's sequel Glasshouse.

The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod: Another police procedural with religious characters, but this time written with a conviction and sympathy that's rare in an author who doesn't share their beliefs. This is a fascinating counterpoint to MacLeod's earlier near-future thriller The Execution Channel, whose tagline read: "The war on terror is over. Terror won." In this second future, terror lost, and the major world powers have enacted strict laws enforcing secularism in public life, defining religion as a private matter which official bodies are forbidden even to recognise. MacLeod doesn't shy away from the repression which was entailed in creating the resultant secular utopia, but as presented it's one I'd cheerfully live in. Of course there are religious individuals who disagree, and it's their attempts to bring others round to their way of thinking that drive the plot.

The Night Sessions is several very clever things, including a philosophical meditation on the relationship between faith and power, and a convincing portrayal of nuts-and-bolts police work in an information-rich post-cyberpunk future. (It also steers refreshingly clear, for MacLeod, of the topic of the inevitability of the revolution of the proletariat.) It doesn't entirely satisfy as a story, something that's true of a number of MacLeod's novels, but it's well worth reading for the world it portrays.

Conjugal Rites by Paul Magrs: The third in Magrs's "Brenda and Effie" sequence, about the Bride of Frankenstein trying to keep her Whitby B&B running smoothly whilst getting embroiled in various multitextual crossover adventures, reads as usual like the bastard love-child of Buffy Summers and Alan Bennett. For important plot reasons this one's told in the third person, and I missed being addressed by Brenda's voice, but it's still an awful lot of fun. This one sees Brenda the Bride, Effie the witch and former girlfriend of the sinister Count Alucard, and ageing child-bride Shiela Manchu meeting up with their various departed loved ones during a day trip to Hell. It's fab.

Since that lot, I've started on The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall. It's entertaining enough, but I'm waiting for the bit where it stops being a knowingly postmodern rewrite of Michael Marshall Smith, and starts justifying the critical hype that's splattered all over the cover.

And that's all the literature.

Lack of Brain Error

I feel completely zonked. Every time I try to do something (update this blog with anything of substance, for example) I end up sitting and staring into space and / or my screen, and vibrating gently from side to side. It's a good thing we're about to go on holiday for four days, really.

Well, it would be if I could summon the energy to pack.

I have now -- finally, eventually and at both length and last -- reached the end of Blue Mars, and thus Kim Stanley Robinson's United Colours of Mars trilogy, which I've been reading on and off for nearly nine months since I starting it at Greenbelt last year.

It's... long. God, it's long. Hopefully I'll have the mental capacity to supplement that with some qualitative discussion sometime soon.

This isn't the sole reason for my mental incapacity, of course -- that seems to be primarily down to tiredness and overwork. Never mind, I'm sure everything will calm down once the baby arrives...

Greeks, Spooks, Terrorists and Supermen

In my general remissness recently, I've omitted to mention any books not written by me or my friends since... well, it looks like October, which is actually more recently than I thought, but the time before that was August. I clearly have been slacking.

At present I'm still immured in Kim Stanley Robinson's One Mars Two Mars Red Mars Blue Mars trilogy. (Incidentally, I've discovered since that October post that the TV adaptation I mentioned of Red Mars is being co-developed by someone whose screenwriting credits include Armageddon, Die Hard with a Vengeance and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. So I take back everything I said about it being potentially a complex, serious political drama and therefore a good idea.)

I'm now some 70 pages into the final book -- no, sorry, the final novel -- in the sequence. It's taking me a long time, admittedly, but I submit that this is only partly my fault. Parallel with this I'm reading Tom Holland's Millennium: the End of the World and the Forging of Christendom. More on both when I finish them (which, in Blue Mars's case, is looking like sometime around the date of Robinson's first Mars landings in 2020).

Meanwhile, here are brief (Note to self: yes, brief, because I haven't got all day here) mini-reviews of some of the other stuff I've managed to get read during the past few months.

The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod: I read this so long ago now that it's difficult to remember what I thought about it, except that I found it enjoyable and disturbing in equal measure. It's set in a divergent near-future where Al Gore won the 2000 US Presidential election was allowed to take office after winning the 2000 US Presidential election -- but the world's gone to hell in a handbasket anyway. It's quite a clever take on the near-future story, and produces an appropriately hideous and apocalyptic world of nuclear terrorism, rampant misinformation and state intervention in private affairs.

MacLeod makes the transition from "proper SF novel" to "proper SF novel pretending to be a thriller" with consummate ease, assisted no doubt by his obsessive interest in politics. Although the final twist where... er, very broadly "the good guys win", was an excessively silly one. I hope this new direction doesn't mean an end to his space-opera and further-future stories, because those are ace.

The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek: the man who discovered Britain by Barry Cunliffe: An impressive reconstruction of the exploratory voyages of a natural scientist from the Greek colony of Massalia (now Marseille) who have left the womb of the Mediterranean to visit not only southern Britain but apparently Lewis, Shetland, the Baltic coast and even Iceland, as early as the fourth century BCE (Equally astonishing is the throwaway detail of a clockwise circumnavigation of Africa by a Phoenician fleet under commission from Pharaoh Necho II a good couple of centuries earlier.)

Cunliffe's an archaeologist, meaning that his narrative takes in the architecture and technologies Pytheas might be expected to have encountered, as well as the few remaining fragments of Pytheas's own writings which exists (mostly as quotes from other writers insulting him). It's dry in places, but the story is utterly fascinating.

The Intruders by Michael Marshall: The books of crime writer Michael Marshall -- also known as SF writer Michael Marshall Smith -- are always highly entertaining to read, thanks to his urgent, chatty style and his brilliance at turning a phrase. ("It began to rain then, with sudden firmness, as if it had meant to start earlier but forgot.") Approximately every three books, he also comes up with a new story to tell, and this is one of those.

The nature of that story means that the book is very difficult to classify in one genre or another, but that's been true of all his books to date. (Those sold as SF are actually dark-fantasy stories set in cyberpunk futures, while the Straw Men trilogy, marketed as crime thrillers, involve Neanderthals surviving in the Pacific Northwest and an ancient brotherhood of serial killers who've been secretly running the world since prehistoric times.) My only quarrel with The Intruders arises to some extent from this genre ambiguity, in that the crime-novel protagonist is exasperatingly slow to understand, and then to believe in, the horror-fantasy plot he's living through. Otherwise it's an excellent read.

(I've recently picked up Smith's The Servants, a ghost story published -- in my edition, at least -- under the name M. M. Smith, so I'm looking forward to that one, too.)

The Dark Knight Strikes Again by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley: Politically disturbing sequel to 1986's mould-breaking graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns. This one has many more superheroes in it, which is always fun, but takes the earlier book's only mildly disconcerting view of Bruce Wayne as a Nietzschean superman to absurdly Mussolinian levels, with Batman defeating his enemies, and wresting control of the world from its corrupt leaders, just through being a helluva lot harder than anybody else. Especially the real Superman, whom Batman makes his bitch halfway through the novel.

Given that the character's shown himself by the end to be a bullying, abusive tyrant, it's a little difficult to cheer on his new world order. One to avoid, sadly.

Spook Country by William Gibson: Gibson's previous non-SF novel, Pattern Recognition, doesn't seem to have been particularly well received, but I adored it for the inventiveness of its real-world concepts (the protagonist's neurotic brand-sensitivity renders her "allergic" to specific trademarks, a concept which could be played for laughs but instead comes across as rather poignant) and its sparsely lyrical descriptions, particularly of n American visitor's view of London. B. gave me both it and Spook Country for my birthday back in November, and a reread confirmed me in my love for it.

This follow-up (and incidental sequel) is possibly rather better, although I was less immediately enamoured of it. What I thought was the main innovation -- the extensive descriptions of the highly cyberpunkish medium of locative art -- turns out to be an exaggeration of something that actually exists, while the Chinese-Cuban organised crime family who practice a highly disciplined blend of Soviet spycraft and Santeria were a little too weird to be really involving. The two non-Cuban viewpoint characters were both thoroughly engaging, though, and the way the plot slowly assembles itself in front of the reader who has access to all three narratives -- while never quite making sense to any of the protagonists -- is masterful. It's interesting to see Gibson's traditional thematic concerns modulating themselves to a more realistic world, though -- it must have been a fascinating discipline for him.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman: Very lovely in a number of ways, this episodic story of the adventures of a boy brought up in a graveyard by ghosts, werewolves and vampires, and his eventual confrontation with the secret society who killed his parents, feels a little like Gaiman by the numbers. This isn't to say that there's anything here that's directly familiar from his previous books (in the way that, say, Odd and the Frost Giants involved his third, slightly different portrayal of the Norse god-triad of Odin, Loki and Thor)... just that given the premise it's very much the kind of book I would, by now, expect Neil Gaiman to write. I'd like to see him try something really adventurous -- ideally an adult novel of the quality of American Gods, but in a different genre. I'd love to see him tackle some proper SF worldbuilding, for instance... but a realistic novel like Gibson's pair would be excellent too.

I'm sure I read more books than that during the second half of last year, so I'm fairly certain there are more that have been left off. (Well, there's Shining Darkness and The Eyeless for a start. I ought to get round to reviewing those at some point, but they don't fall into the category of "not written by friends of mine".)

If I remember any, I'll try to get round to adding reviews of them in future. Meanwhile, I probably also owe you some witterings about film and TV, but those are going to have to wait for a few days.

Axis All Areas

As Frank Muir apparently once said: "I've just spent six months in the south of France finishing my latest book. I'm a very slow reader...".

Well, having starting it on the train to Greenbelt, I have indeed now finished Red Mars, and immediately made a start on its viridian sibling. It was a worthy read and I could feel it doing me intellectual good throughout. I'd not recommend it for actual fun, though.

(M'learned friend Vigornian points out that they're making Red Mars into a TV series, which I can see working very well. It would definitely be a serious drama series, though -- barely even SF, as TV usually understands the genre. Depending on the choice of style, it could be pitched as something very like The West Wing, only with a big red desert instead of Washington. And much bouncier walking-down-corridors scenes.)

I've also finally finished The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong, which I found instructive and informative, but ultimately disappointing.

I've mentioned before that Armstrong's history of ideas within individual cultures is strong and coherent, tracing clear lines of evolution and influence through many generations of Chinese, Indian, Hebrew and Greek thought. I might have added, on the basis of her earlier A History of God and The Battle for God, that her view at its broadest is also a compelling one -- a philosophy of religion which sees faith as belonging to the intuitive and internalised form of truth known as mythos rather than the external, fact-based arena of logos; true faith as coming through mystic encounters with the divine rather than through the dogma of established religion; the practices of religions as valuable only to the extent to which they preserve or allow new access to this elusive (and often seemingly counterfactual) truth; and the vital and urgent importance in the modern age of celebrating the diversity of human faith for the different lights it shines on the divine reality, rather than viewing the world through the exclusive filters of our own traditions.

None of which, you'll be unsurprised to discover, is stuff I'm likely to argue with. The problem is that both Armstrong's overarching long-range vision and her aptitude for both close-up work tend to blur her mid-field vision, resulting in books which leap from the mundane to the transcendent with very little by way of coherent chains of thought linking them.

In particular, I'd been wondering while reading The Great Transformation how Armstrong would tie together all the developments in disparate and historically disconnected cultures which she identifies as signifiers of "the Axial Age" -- the development of the Jewish prophetic tradition, Greek philosophy and tragedy, the origins of Buddhism, Jainism and the other Indian apotheistic philosophies, and what basically amounts to the entire intellectual tradition of China for a thousand years. Unfortunately, she entirely fails to demonstrate that all of these amount to anything one could coherently consider as a step-change in human thinking regarding religion.

As this review by Diarmaid MacCulloch suggests, this is particularly clear in the vagueness with which Armstrong delimits this supposed "Axial Age", excluding a number of philosophers of her given era (the eighth to third centuries B.C.E.) on the grounds that they fail to live up to her ideal of "Axial spirituality", while going on talk about the first- and sixth-century C.E. figures of Jesus and Mohammed, in whom she has a special interest, not merely as individuals influenced by the insights of the Axial era but as "late flowerings" of it.

This mid-range view becomes so blurry that it's almost impossible to derive anything clear from it. Certainly the book comes nowhere near answering those questions from the back cover blurb:

But why did Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jeremiah, Lao Tzu -- among others -- all emerge in this five-hundred-year span? And why did they have such similar ideas about humanity?

Indeed, Armstrong's conclusion when it finally arrives is predictable from the ouset: that what she sees as the key themes of the Axial philosophers -- ecstatic experience, the transcendence of the self, the outworking of faith in daily life, empathy, non-violence, the Golden Rule -- constitute genuine insights into human and divine nature, and a universal toolkit for human living.

Again, it's difficult to argue with this. That these ideas were (by presumption, although again see MacCulloch) unprecedented, and have been of great influence since, is unarguable -- but that being the case there's a strong sense that Armstrong has taken 400 pages to state, at immense length and in exhaustive detail, the obvious.

The Great Transformation is a fascinating work of parallel history, and a significant stage in the development of Armstrong's own religious thought. Expect it to educate and inform you, but don't expect to discover any great insights that you haven't already heard.

Transformation and Terraforming Update

I'm going to be reading The Great Transformation and Red Mars for a little while yet, I suspect.

As I said before, Karen Armstrong's thesis (not originally hers, but developed in great detail in The Great Transformation) is that the revolutionary spiritual philosophies she exemplifies with the figures of Confucius, Buddha, Socrates and Jeremiah, represent a paradigm shift in global (or at least Eurasian) thinking about religion, and thus in the consensus definition of what it means to be human. The main difficulty I have with this so far is the lack of connection she draws between the histories of China, India, Greece and Israel.

China's clearly the odd culture out here, as there are visible links between the remaining three: the first-millennium-B.C.E. Greeks and North Indian Aryans shared common (and relatively recent) Indo-European roots, while Israelite and Greek spiritual culture were strongly influenced by the common myth-systems of the pre-classical Mediterranean and Middle East. All three peoples later had common dealings with colonial Middle Eastern superpowers, most notably the Persian Empire and Alexander the Great.

However, as I understand it, contemporary China was a great deal more isolated, and isolationist. Although only rarely and sporadically unified, the people of the North China plain in the first millennium B.C.E. mostly dealt with one another, or at most with neighbouring peoples whom we'd also identify today as Chinese -- rarely travelling, under no threat from foreigners and warring only against one another. Aside from some trade with neighbours including India (the route by which Buddhism eventually arrived in the first century B.C.E.), ancient Chinese culture was monolithic and self-sufficient. Nor was the era of Chinese history which Armstrong takes as her starting-point -- the culture of the Shang Dynasty -- similar in any notable way to that pertaining in Mycenaean Greece, pre-Biblican Canaan or tribal Punjab.

Thus one might see Jeremiah, the Buddha and Socrates responding in the seventh, sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E. respectively to broadly similar (and distantly connected) social upheavals which led them to question contemporary belief-systems (Yahwism, the Vedic religion, Olympian polytheism) which in turn had originally been revisionist responses to yet more ancient polytheisms with a common ancestral background. The contemporary Chinese sages, however -- Confucius, Lao Tzu, Zhuang Zi et al -- weren't responding to anything that hadn't been Chinese for millennia.

I haven't read ahead, so it's possible that Armstrong's saving up her explanations for the last chapter. As far as I can see, though, if she really wants to justify these supposed simultaneous revolutions in thought (and let's not forget that Jeremiah and the Buddha, say, were roughly as contemporary with one another as Newton and Einstein) as anything more meaningful than coincidence, then her options are limited.

Unless she posits: a) a level of global travel and communication during this era that there's really no evidence for, or b) some kind of large-scale global influence (climatic or epidemic, perhaps, although she's shown little interest in those so far), she'll have to fall back on c) a load of mystical bollocks ("It was a quantum leap in human evolution", "God moves in mysterious ways", "It was Gaia achieving self-consciousness", etc). I can't really see her doing any of those... but if the conclusion's going to be "It was all a really big coincidence", then I can't altogether see the point of the book either. Oh, well.

Meanwhile, Red Mars is also exploring the gradual, large-scale tectonic changes which turn ordinary people adapting to a changing environment into an entirely new culture, and doing so at a very, very leisurely speed. At this rate I'm hoping I'll be finished with the trilogy by Christmas. Thank heavens for the lovely, brief short stories in Short Trips: Transmissions.

Incidentally, apropos of my tag for Robinson-related posts... when my fellow Bernice Summerfield authors Lance Parkin and Mark Clapham were writing their take on Martian history, the only mildly parodic Beige Planet Mars, their original suggestion for a back-page tagline -- veoted by Virgin -- was "Danger, Kim Stanley Robinson!". Which, in the absence of any humour in Red Mars, at least makes me smile wryly.

Yahweh, Ares, Ganesh et al

Heavens, I didn't realise I'd left it that long between updates again. I'm going to try not to do that sort of thing now I've finished the novella.

I've been mostly in post-Greenbelt, post-novella, post-generally-busy-summer recovery recently, so there hasn't been a great deal to report. (Catching up with the events of the summer, on the other hand, might take some time. There've been two weddings, for a start, one of them my little-sister-in-law's. But they're too sizeable to tackle today, so will have to wait.)

Now I'm evaluating current and future writing projects, trying to work out what I should be doing next. There's talk of a short story commission, the continuing saga of one particular ongoing project which I've mentioned here occasionally, and the small matter of still wanting to get some mainstream S.F. publishers interested in my idea about getting paid lots of money to write some novels. I might also be involved in next year's one of these.

I'm still reading The Great Transformation: The World in the Time of Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah by Karen Armstrong. Which is fascinating, but very, very long, and the prose is on the arid side. Admittedly an attempt to trace the development of spiritual and religious thought in Israel, Greece, India and China between 1500 and about 200 B.C.E. was always going to be a bit of a mammoth undertaking.

I'm over halfway through, but so far it's the early stuff which remains the most interesting, looking at the original belief-patterns (for instance an increasingly absent and abstract sky god replaced by various more local and dynamic warrior-gods), which underly faiths as diverse as the Hindu and Olympian pantheons, Judaeo-Christo-Islamic monotheism and the apotheistic[1] belief-systems of Buddhism and its relatives. I'd have been interested to know more about how (if at all) this related to the oldest complex religious system for which we have extensive evidence, Egyptian polytheism... but one of the book's weaknesses is that, while it's very strong on the individual histories of its four "Axial peoples", it does less work in placing them in their global context or even tracing lines of influence between them. Still a fascinating read, though.

As if this wasn't enough to be getting on with, I've also finally immersed myself in modern S.F.'s own A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Kim Stanley Robinson's Three Colours Mars trilogy. I'm two-ninths of the way in, and -- although as ever I enjoy Robinson's prose, his politics, and his sense of humans as creatures shaped by and shaping the environments they inhabit -- I'm finding both the volume and the detail exhausting.

It's an immense feat of worldbuilding, but I can't help suspecting that I've read the interesting bits of it already, in the portions of The Memory of Whiteness set on a terraformed Mars. If it had been me, I'd have written my equivalent of Blue Mars (or, knowing me, some kind of far-future Ultraviolet Mars) and left it at that, but Robinson is intent on showing us his working. The way he envisages Mars as a landscape is nothing short of visionary, but do we really need to see so much of the process whereby he gets there?

Perhaps we do. I gather Blue Mars has utopian aspirations, and I've talked before about how Robinson's previous utopia, Pacific Edge, works only because of the groundwork laid by its predecessors in the Orange County Trilogy -- the bleakly post-apocalyptic The Wild Shore and the seductively dystopian The Gold Coast. Presumably something similar is at work here.

But in the meantime, I find myself really yearning for a short book.

In other news, B. and I have a new favourite restaurant, happily within walking distance, which does fantastic Indian food that (the chef maintains) you might conceivably find actual Indians eating. There's an abundance of veggie stuff on the menu -- the chilli paneer is particularly marvellous, but the range of various creative breads is also wonderful. (If the elephant-god logo looks a little odd, it's because it's also spelling out the Sanskrit syllable "om". Which is cool.)

If you're ever in Bristol, it's well worth a visit. If you're not, envy us.

And finally -- goodness me, tomorrow is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. These things seem to come around again so fast, don't they?

[1] OK, so "apotheism" may not actually be a word. But its literal Greek meaning of "away from god[s]", and its combined connotations of "atheism", "apathy" and "apotheosis", seem to apply pretty well to Buddhism's insistence that the gods are irrelevant and that humanity's goal is union with an ultimate yet impersonal state. So I'll be using it. Cheers.

Me(me) Again

Wacky LiveJournalists notinventedhere and beckyc have been kind enough to "tag" me to fill in a book-related questionnaire. Just this once, I'm going to, but if it becomes a regular thing, then no.

Quick answers, as I really am supposed to be writing at the moment:

1. Total number of books owned?
Between the two of us, I believe it's somewhere in the region of 2,500. It obviously fluctuates, and B. and I did have a bit of a clear-out before the house move last autumn. I've been diligently building it back up since then, though.

2. The last book I bought?
Er... not entirely sure without checking. Either way, it was two at once. It could have been the Doctor Who books The Monsters Inside and Winner Takes All from Amazon. Alternatively, it might have been Ada or Ardor and Promethea Book Four from Borders here in Bristol.

3. The last book I read?
Oh, now look, you're not being fair. Given that you've asked me today, it was Doctor Who: The Clockwise Man, which I can't particularly recommend. If you'd asked me yesterday it would have been the very much more highbrow-sounding The Memory of Whiteness, and prior to that probably Promethea Book Four again... which, all right, is a comic, but it's one mostly about esoteric kabbalistic mysticism. And a certain amount of shagging. Er.

4. Five books that mean a lot to me?
Only five? Well, it's certainly not going to be an exhaustive list, then...

Assuming for the moment that we're talking about the books' intrinsic worth, and not about ones which mean a lot to me solely because I wrote them, we have:
i. The Pooh Perplex by Frederick C. Crews. The book that taught me to laugh at literary critics, which is a pretty vital skill when you are one.
ii. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. One of the most stylistically original, thematically convoluted and awesomely well-written books I've ever encountered. And Nabokov was writing in his second language, the bastard.
iii. The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany. One of those books that creeps up on you. The first time I read it, I thought: "Mm, yes, that was quite interesting." It's profoundly influenced everything I've written, and probably thought, since.
iv. The Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore. His only non-graphic novel, just because I'm feeling perverse. Weird psychotic psychogeographical tour of history. In Northampton.
v. Pacific Edge by Kim Stanley Robinson. I've talked before about the impact this one had on me. I'm still assimilating it.

As I say, not an exhaustive list, and I've deliberately left out any author I wrote about in my thesis, because I go on about them far too much anyway. (Oh bugger, I think I did mention Delany. But only briefly.)

5. Tag some people and have them fill this out on their L.J.s:
Shan't. And the generic term is "weblogs" or "blogs", thank you very much.

Election Special

When I was first old enough to vote, back in the very late '80s and early '90s, I was a firm supporter of the Liberal Democrats -- largely thanks to the influence of my good friend Ben, a party stalwart, who campaigned incessantly for the local party during our late teens and later went on to be a parliamentary researcher.

I lived in West Worthing, the safest Tory seat in the known universe. The local Conservatives ruled the roost, to the extent that the incumbent M.P. once called round to my parents' house to tell me off because I'd written (at Ben's instigation, naturally) a critical letter about him to the local paper. I was out at my Saturday job at the time, and I never did find out how Terence (now Baron) Higgins got hold of my address. In Worthing in those days, the Lib Dem vote reached perhaps a few thousand each year, while the Labour candidates occasionally lost their deposit. In Worthing, a Lib Dem vote is an anti-establishment vote, albeit a very polite one.

I gave up voting Lib Dem as a student, when it became clear that I believed more strongly in the principles that Labour was supposed to stand for than in those the Lib Dems espoused. And I gave up voting Labour after the election of the first Blair government, when it became clear that I believed more strongly in the principles that Labour was supposed to stand for than in those the Labour party espoused.

Since then I've voted Green, partly because they are in some respects the only genuinely radical party left, partly out of a general approval for the underdog, and partly as an enormous "Fuck you" to all the major parties. (Not that I don't still have quite a bit of time for the Lib Dems, but I can see that changing if they were ever to form a government. If there's one thing the past two-and-a-half decades of political history would tend to suggest to me, it's that I don't like governments.)

This year, however, I'm feeling a renewed sense of motivation about my Green vote. I'm not for a moment saying that I want the Green party to form the government, nor even that I think they stand the slightest chance of attaining a Westminster seat. But I do think that only a massive show of support for the Green movements in all countries can end the currently universal political practice of turning a blind eye to the West's pollution and consumption, and confer anything like the moral authority we need to halt the far larger populations of countries like India and China following in our footsteps.

I'm feeling this way largely because of having recently discovered the political and environmentalist science fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson, which is among the best-written and most sophisticated S.F. I've ever read. Pacific Edge argues compellingly that a wholesale revolution in Western political thinking is indispensible if our world society is to be bearable a scant few generations from now, while The Gold Coast presents the hideousness to which our current attitudes will carry us if unchecked.

Pacific Edge's qualified utopia is one of localised government, heavily regulated industry and advanced ecological technologies. Its small communities share housing and essential labour in common, and are connected globally via the internet. The Gold Coast, on the other hand, shows an urbanised, industrialised, gas-guzzling West, comprehensively shafting the rest of the planet to the extent of fomenting wars purely in order to sell its own arms. Although I may have complained about the preponderance of team sports in Robinson's utopia, there's no doubt in my mind as to which of these potential futures is more likely to allow our descendants to survive and thrive, both spiritually and bodily.

So... this year I'll casting my Green vote with a renewed belief in what it stands for, which is that very comprehensive revolution in Western thought. As things stand, our governments pay lip service to environmental issues at home, while insisting that stricter controls are needed in the Third World. They compose treaties which are watery half-hearted versions of the most urgent recommendatinos of environmentalists, sign them with broad grins and enormous media attention, and then fail even to attain the minimal targets they've set themselves.

All the main parties of government and opposition in the U.K. and the U.S.A. collude in this, when they should be striving, with all the energy they can muster, to ensure that the whole of humanity has a planet it can live on half a century from now. And that is why I'm voting Green this time around.

You may feel that having read a really good S.F. book isn't such a very impressive validation of a voting intention I already had anyway, but it's a better reason than I had before.

Books

Well, I'm over a third of the way through Pacific Edge, and enjoying it enormously. It seems to be a feature of Kim Stanley Robinson's books that any concerns are small-scale and personal, and that his (always impressive) worldbuilding goes on in the gaps between people behaving like people. It's a lovely approach, and rare in SF.

Here, the people are all muscular and healthy, enjoy softball and cycling and hard physical labour, and use video phones instead of the internet. I've mentioned before that I was ambivalent about Robinson's supposed dystopian novel in the same trilogy, The Gold Coast, on the grounds that its urbanised future of ubiquitous car use and designer drugs didn't actually seem all that bad to me. Well, I can see his utopia is an awful lot more wholesome and happy and generally good for the world... but Christ, it would be a nightmare if you didn't like sport. Even the token character-who-doesn't-like-sport secretly does really.

This isn't a pure pastoral, back-to-basics future, though -- there's a lot of discreet technology, including space engineering going on behind the scenes, and the decisions made are shown to be reliant on the advanced state of the ecological sciences. It was a smart move opening the Orange County trilogy with a novel, The Wild Coast, which shows a thoroughly rural, low-tech future, in a post-apocalyptic setting, and demonstrates exactly how grim and unpleasant such a thing would be, because otherwise those would be exactly the accusations one would aim against this novel. In fact, the three volumes of the trilogy equate to "Now, I'm not saying this would be a good thing -- but surely we need to get away from this. Wouldn't this be better?

As this bald summary suggests, there's a lot of dialectic going on in the novels -- The Wild Shore and The Gold Coast operate as thesis and antithesis in a lot of ways (pastoral / urban, isolationist / imperialist etc), and Pacific Edge rather cleverly takes the less horrible elements of both and synthesises them into something very appealing (unless you don't like sport).

So far, there seem to be a lot of useful practical tips on how to run a utopia, but Robinson himself (in one character's diary entries dating back to the generation when the utopia was established) makes the point that any utopia divorced from the history-to-date of human civilisation is fundamentally useless.

Unfortunately, from what I've been able to gather so far (and of course I will know better when I've actually finished the book), the establishment of said utopia seems to rely on everybody suddenly coming to their senses sometime in the 2010s, and adopting the broadly socialist and environmentalist principles around which the new social structures are based. Those structures are extremely interesting (although there's rather a lot of material about the practicalities of water distribution), but the initial premise there seems currently unlikely. I'm sure these events will be fleshed out later in the novel, but Robinson has his work cut out to convince me that such a change of heart is at all likely.

What is worrying is that, of the three books in the trilogy, the utopia and the post-apocalyptic novel depend for their future history on specific anomalous events happening which cause the course of history to diverge from the predicted. The dystopia just relies on things carrying on the way they are. Perhaps this is just in the nature of dystopias, which Kingsley Amis once described as "an instrument of social diagnosis and warning". Still... brr.

Three Studies In Orange

I recently finished Kim Stanley Robinson's The Gold Coast, the second volume in his Orange County Trilogy (also known as Three Californias). The three novels describe alternative futures for Orange County, California, as seen from the vantage point of the mid-to-late 1980s. Broadly speaking, they fall into three different sub-genres of science fiction: post-apocalyptic, dystopia and utopia. I've not read very much Robinson -- The Wild Shore (which is the first of this trilogy) and the fantastic The Years of Rice and Salt being about it -- but I'm impressed by the emotional depth of his writing and his technical skill. I'd be the last to suggest that science fiction as a genre lacks literacy, but voices of Robinson's strength are rare in any genre. His prose occasionally skirts the edges of being portentous, but never passes over it, at least not in anything I've read so far.

Supposedly, The Gold Coast is the dystopia of the triptych, although to be honest I'd prefer to live there than in the frankly grim post-holocaust pastoral world of The Wild Shore. Then again, part of the dystopian message of TGC is that the US has it good at everybody else's expense (the reverse situation to that of TWS, where the UN has quarantined it for everyone else's sake). I've read that TGC is one of Robinson's weaker novels, but I found it excellent. Its present-tense and third-person narrative demonstrate immediacy and impersonality where TWS's first-person voice was reflective and subjective. It's interspersed with poetic fragments which (as they themselves keep reminding us) resemble shopping lists, with the refrain "You live here, too".

I had trouble experiencing TGC as a dystopia, although it has some of the classic hallmarks: its characters if anything seem to lead rather full lives, albeit ones subject to ennui. I am, of course, a big fan of urban settings in science fiction (perhaps why I react so badly to the post-apocalyptic subgenre), and the fact that this dystopia is over-urbanised, car-dependent (the first page refers to it as "autopia") and media-saturated fills me with considerably less horror than it would some. Interestingly this future has a lot in common with that of the cyberpunk novel, particularly of William Gibson's Neuromancer, published three years earlier: corporate businesses run the show, designer drugs are the norm, multi-media streaming has replaced traditional art forms and individuals have lost all sense of focus. Significantly, though, Robinson does not see humanity merging itself with technology, and at one point one of his characters insists forcibly: "Jim, no one gives a fuck about computers". What's more, continuity with the past, rather than disjointed history, is emphasised: Robinson wants us, after all, to believe that this is a possible future for a specific place in southern California.

I'm eagerly anticipating reading the third volume, Pacific Edge (a big thank you to the Bristol City Council Library Service, if they're reading, for tracking down all three novels for me). Given the links and resonances between the first two books -- night swims, excursions to Catalina and to the USSR, a medic dealing with the death of an intimate, betrayal by a supposedly honourable "resistance" -- the scope of Robinson's ambition in the trilogy is clearly wide, and I'm looking forward to appreciating its full range.

In the meantime, though, I'm left contemplating an America effectively run from the Pentagon, embroiled in unnecessary wars for propaganda's sake against opponents it has itself armed, enriching itself at the expense of the rest of the world while it precipitates ecological meltdown at home and abroad. Arguably only a political illiterate would claim that this is the world we're actually living in, sixteen years later -- but I'd like to think most of us would baulk at claiming there was nothing familiar about it.

Admittedly Robinson gets some details entirely wrong -- predictably, America's main adversary is the Soviet bloc, and the characters (who have carphones but no mobiles) still think CDs are a pretty neat idea. Still, given that The Wild Shore saw civilisation falling, not through open war, but from the effects of international terrorism, I'm becoming rather eager to discover how Pacific Edge envisages a utopia coming to pass.