30/01/20: Neal Stephenson – Seveneves (2015)

“But this was how the mind worked. The mind couldn’t think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. Because it was through trivia that the mind was anchored in reality, as the largest oak tree was rooted, ultimately, in a system of rootlets no larger than the silver hairs on the president’s head.”

For reasons never fully explained, the Moon is destroyed. The shattered pieces of rock threaten to rain down on Earth, killing everyone. Humanity has approximately two years to build a “Cloud Ark” (a collection of spaceships able to group and swarm around the International Space Station) in order to save the species. But of course it’s not that simple...

Neal Stephenson explores this brilliant “what if?” scenario across a huge novel of 867 pages. The best passages deal with the creation of the new, improvised orbital world before – inevitably – politics begin to threaten the idealism of its social structure. The level of technical and procedural detail he packs in is fascinating and I found myself wanting this part of the book to be even longer than it was, because its encyclopaedic reach is so powerful.

He has fun with specialist terminology, jargon, acronyms and so on, such as:
• BFR = Bolide Fragmentation Rate
• CAC = Cloud Ark Constitution
• Flivver = Flexible Light Intracloud Vehicle
• HGA = Human Genetic Archive
• MIV = Modular Improvised Vehicle
• PSAPS = Periods of Simplified Administrative Procedures and Structures

It might annoy some readers but I really like the way he explains the science as he goes along.

The author is also good on the nature of power/authority and what social rules mean without Earth’s laws and structures to maintain them. The US President is a major character and significantly influences the way events unfold.

Stephenson wasn’t particularly strong on the emotional aspects of the story. In some ways this worked: astronauts building a brave new civilisation cannot be sentimental. But in another sense, the death of planet Earth and everything we have ever known or loved seems like it should’ve been a bigger deal than that experienced by the few survivors.

Either way, It’s an exciting read – not least because it seems so plausible. Stephenson explained in interviews that he didn’t want fictional get-out clauses (such as the hyperdrives of Star Wars or the teleports of Star Trek). Instead, pretty much everything in the book feels like it follows known scientific laws. This makes it a lot easier to relate to and a lot more believable.

Following an awkward cut-off scene (it seems that the author didn’t know how to resolve the story), the final third of the book is set 5,000 years later. This, inevitably, feels like a different novel entirely, even though the human society it depicts is very clearly derived from the survivors of the first two thirds. We are told that there are now 3 billion humans, so the “will they?”/“won’t they?” survival story of the earlier sections is completely deflated, replaced with an exploration of what survival was like and what happened next. This section is hardly edge-of-the-seat stuff and arguably didn’t need to be written. I would have far preferred a brief postscript set 300 or 500 years later letting you know how the handful of survivors were getting on.

Despite – or because of – the endless descriptions, I found it impossible to visualise the structures of the Eye, the Habitat Ring, the Great Chain and the Cradle. Sometimes, in this section of the book, the passages become dense and turgid as layer upon layer of detail is accumulated. This is ironic as it was precisely that obsessive detail that made the earlier sections so enjoyable. Here’s one example:

If you took a large number of Flynks – flying, autonomous chain links—and joined them together into a long chain, and connected its ends to make it into a continuous loop, and then got the whole loop moving through the air like a train composed of little airplanes, each using its stubby winglets to generate its share of the lift, then you had a thing known as an “aitrain,” pronounced the way a resident of Old New York would have said “A train.” The concept was old enough that its etymology had been obscured by time. It might have been “air train” with the first r elided, or a contraction of “Aitken train.” Sometimes, as here, it was a captive aitrain, passing continuously through a fixed installation on the ground and rising from there to a considerable altitude before reversing direction and plunging back down for another circuit. But aitrains could also fly freely in the air: a technology crazy enough that it had become associated with the Aidan big-brains known as Jinns, or Ghenis, and tended to be used only by Red.

There are other flaws with this final section. The notion that the human population divides neatly into seven distinct races descended from the original “seven Eves” is hard to believe. Even more improbable is the discovery that humans survived on Earth after all and that their leader was none other than Ralph McQuarie, father of the “Eve” named Dinah. Another survivor was the submarine-inhabiting fiancé of the Eve named Ivy. What are the chances? By this point I was ready to hurl the book across the room. Also, the potentially interesting notion of “epigenic” shifts amounts to nothing when Kath Two transitions into Kath Three (Kathree), with no bearing on the plot at all. And the end just fizzles out completely.

It’s simply not convincing, which is a real shame and also infuriating because there are dazzling passages in the earlier stages of the novel as compelling as any sci-fi I have read.

20/07/18: Anna Kavan – Ice (1967)

From the blurb on the back: “No one knows why the ice has come, and no one can stop it.”

This short novel – £1 from the Octavia Foundation on High Street Kensington – really annoyed me. A chronicle of unexplained obsession set during an unspecified disaster, it frustrates on every page.

Ice is creeping across the world. A man pursues a woman. Beyond those basics, it quickly becomes evident that none of the events described can be assumed to have definitively taken place:

“Reality had become something of an unknown quantity to me,” says the narrator. And: “The drugs prescribed for me produced horrible dreams”. Because of the constant blurring between “objective” events (if there are any) and the narrator’s visions, you end up not believing in any of it. Indeed, the narrator’s unreliability is hammered home with tedious frequency. The nature of reality is an interesting theme that has been explored by countless authors in more engaging ways. 

“My ideas were confused. In a peculiar way, the unreality of the outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind.”

Yes, we get it! But two pages later he reports “an odd sort of fragmentation of my ideas”. But this goes on and on: “it dawned on me that this was the reality, and those other things the dream. All of a sudden the life I had been lately living appeared unreal: it simply was not credible any longer.”

“I fled from the room in utter confusion,” explains the narrator at one point, summing up the exasperating novel in a nutshell by adding that he “did not know what had happened, or if anything had”. 

“All this was real, it was really happening, but with a quality of the unreal; it was reality happening in quite a different way.”

The characters are vague and sketchy. What we do learn of them shows them to be too unpleasant to care about. The “plot” does gather pace towards the end and it finally becomes engaging. I tried to read this while waiting for a delayed flight and it was absolutely not the engrossing book I hoped it would be – or needed in that situation. There are curious typos, as well. In two places, the word “re-started” is printed as “re-tarted”. You can only assume that Penguin scanned an old copy of the book and failed to check the results.

09/02/17: Connie Willis – Doomsday Book (1992)

This was £1.99 from Barnardo's in Whetstone. The "SF Masterworks" series is usually reliable, so I tend to pick them up when I see them. The plot? Young historian Kivrin Engle is sent back in time as part of a university research project using the "net" time-travel technology of Oxford in the year 2054. This is sophisticated enough to prevent intervention in the past from changing the course of history – although quite how is never explained. Instead of "arriving" in 1320 as intended, Kivrin is accidentally dropped in 1348 during the Black Death pandemic. (This is given away on the back cover, but she doesn't learn it for herself until p.390.) Meanwhile, the Oxford research team is hit by a deadly virus and the two seem to be ominously linked...

While it's based on an intriguing premise, I found there was way too much rushing about, fussing around and breathless interchanges between too many characters – a lot of baggage for a fairly simple plot. It could have been tightened up considerably. It can be tedious and frustrating reading about characters' incomprehension of things you, the reader, have already grasped or had explained to you. These passages go on for way too long. A lot depends on certain characters being unable to ask or answer certain questions. Some paragraphs could have been cut altogether: "Mary flicked the light on and went over to the tea trolley. She shook the electric kettle and disappeared into the WC with it. He sat down. Someone had taken away the tray of blood-testing equipment and moved the end table back to its proper place, but Mary's shopping bag was still sitting in the middle of the floor. He leaned forward and moved it over next to the chairs. Mary reappeared with the kettle. She bent and plugged it in." I was expecting the bag or the kettle to reveal some importance in the plot, but these are just needless details. Likewise, parts of the 1348 sequences, while interesting, read like a historical soap opera.

Most problematic is that 2054 doesn’t feel futuristic at all. Phones have live video, but are constantly engaged and failing. Oxford still has a Debenhams and Blackwells, and there are still newspapers and a struggling NHS. More importantly, in terms of the way people speak and think, there is little attempt to reflect the ways life has changed.

In these Brexit days, it’s interesting that the book has a side story about protests urging Britain to exit Europe, so the author predicted this correctly – albeit several decades after it actually happened.

Despite the above reservations, I trudged on and – surprisingly – slowly found myself becoming engrossed. You want Kivrin to make it home and you want the ill people to get well, so you keep reading. By the last 200 pages I was totally hooked. Is it science fiction? Just about (because of the time travel theme). Is it a "masterwork"? No.

06/01/17: Frank Herbert – Dune (1965)

Dune was on my shelf a long time before I finally started reading it this week. I'm rather fond of this book, even though parts of it seem not especially well written. In places, it's philosophical and almost psychedelic. But it's expansive, too, ambitiously creating an entire world – and a universe beyond. I also have a slight attachment to it because my Dad read the entire series of six books during the 1980s (with different jacket designs). This old paperback is from 1968 and when I opened it the spine immediately cracked in several places. One other curious thing about this novel is that the exact same image was later used for Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, despite the picture clearly illustrating aspects of the Dune story (such as the blue eyes of the Fremen on Arrakis). Was there really such a shortage of sci-fi art at this time?