Non-stop by Brian Aldiss

Wow. The first novel of Brian Aldiss, one of the grand old men of British science fiction and it is superb. An accident on board a generation starship cripples the infrastructure and resets the society inside so that they forget where they are and their morals and religion are altered. The book is all about the quest of a few of the inhabitants to find out what the nature of their universe is.

There are two really impressive things about this piece. The first is how Aldiss unfolds the story. We know all along that we are inside a starship but Aldiss keeps the plot exciting and provides a good drip-drip of suspense and revelations. The ending also provides a nice surprise and a good resolution. The second impressive thing is that this is a page turner. Some SF provides enjoyment by allowing us to bathe in the details. Not here. We want to find out what happens.

The atmosphere and the characters instantly print upon the mind and the feel of the ship as the characters make their winding trek through the decks filled ponics (overgrown hydroponic plants) is perfect. One fault means I can't give a perfect score. One of the main groups of enemies are rats. This is perfectly acceptable as a plot device (it drives the tribe of Gregg into teaming up with forwards and allows the laser and the diary to be passed on) but did the rats really have to be telepathic?! Did they really have to be able to wield objects and subjugate other animals like rabbits and moths?! Rats on earth have not evolved such abilities. Another fault is that Complain never gets to meet up with his old tribe. We never get a moment where they see how he was right to question the nature of things.

All in all I think this work will stay in my mind for a good long time.

8/10

Review of Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds

I reviewed my attempt to read this some time ago and how I just gave up. Well, something kept nagging away at me and I tried again. Again I got bored by three separate character threads, long winded exposition and disparate timelines.

And then about 100 pages in it all came together. It turned into a thriller. There are some beautiful set pieces and I like the characters because he doesn't bother trying to color them in. We have people, we know what they look like and we know their motives. End of.

This is a fantastic hard SF novel with some very memorable passages and many many interesting ideas. So apologies to Mr. Reynolds for my earlier lazy review. This cold tale has made me want to continue the series and check out some of his other work.

Review of 'The Man In The High Castle' by Philip K. Dick

Not the first alternative history novel but the one that defines the genre. President Truman was assassinated and the Allies lost WWII. We are in the Western half of the USA which is controlled by Japan. The Nazis, who have exterminated the whole of Africa, are exploring the solar system (but are decades behind in the develpoment of TV) and plotting to nuke the Japanese. They control the Western USA. There are many plot threads. One is about moderate groups in Germany trying to get a warning to the Japanese. The main thread has an author (living in a fortified hideout called the high castle) who has written a mirror image novel of the one we are reading; 'what if the allies had won' from the perspective of his reality. This is very different to our reality.

What I liked about the book was how Dick was not afraid to deal with the issues of racism. I like how he has the Japanese as quite moderate people (much nicer than the nazis). I like how he deals with colonialism by having some US people adopting Japanese mannerisms and speech and thought patterns and how the Japanese will buy any old forged historical relics that they think are authentic pieces of US history.

What I don't like is how he doesn't seem to address the question as to whether it is the German leaders who are evil or whether he considers there to be any redeeming qualities in the German people. The nazis just seem like cartoon nasties. The other problem with the story is that is doesn't go anywhere. Society is not changed by the man in the high castle. The ending has a big revelation which is interesting and deals with parallel universes (and alternate histories) but this is derived from the I-Ching. And this is the BIG problem with the story; PKD worked out the plot by consulting the I-Ching (the book of changes). This must have been very trendy at the time (it reminds me of the use of tarot cards in Slaughterhouse 5) but it doesn't make for a good plot. I also found it a bit boring during the story when the characters consulted the I-Ching to decide their next course of action. The bit where Julia realises that the man in the high castle used the I-Ching to write his book was also a bit self indulgent.

Overall a good book, well written but apart from some interesting ideas it doesn't go anywhere. I enjoyed some passages and found others to be a chore. It's a good sci-fi book but not in my top five.

6/10.

Review of 'Revelation Space' by Alistair Reynold

I tried, I really did. This novel came recommended to me. I was warned it was a bit slow. But I give up. It is advertised as a gonzo, cyberpunk space opera and it won some awards (but not the Hugo or the Nebula). I have a doctorate in physics so big concepts don't scare me but I just can't get into it. The plot is glacial and it jumps around in time. The characters are one dimensional and I have no empathy with them. The editors didn't do their job here. It's just indulgent crap. I just don't care what happens at the end so I'll be selling this book on amazon. If I want to read a novel like this I'll go for Iain M. Banks or even try Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss. In the meantime I'll be getting on with reading The Man In The High Castle by Philip K Dick. And I'll post a review of The Complete Short Stories Vol. 1 by J. G. Ballard.

Revision of Review of Slaghterhouse 5 and wardsback time

Like a lazy journalist I didn't check my sources. Initial reports of the death toll at Dresden and Hiroshima, reported by Vonnegut were 135'000 and 71'000. In later years the estimates have been corrected to 30'000 and 135'000 respectively.

I also forgot to mention my favourite passage in the book where Billy sees a bombing raid in a movie whilst his time is running backwards;

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the rack and shipped back to the United States, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous content into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anyone ever again.

Red Dwarf did a whole episode where the crew visit a place and time where time is running backwards. A famous contemporary novel would be Time's Arrow, a 1991 Martin Amis novel . Reference [3] on this page from martinamis.com also tells us that

Other antecedents include Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carrol; Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, where the White Queen claims that she lives backwards in time; An Age by Brian Aldiss; Counter-Clock World by Philip K. Dick; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, in which a man is born at the age of 70 and proceeds backward to a state of infancy; and "Mr. F is Mr. F" by J.G. Ballard. In his Afterword to Time's Arrow, Amis refers obliquely to the Dresden fire-bombing description in Slaughterhouse Five while discussing influences on his own novel.

Review of 'Slaughterhouse 5' by Kurt Vonnegut

LISTEN: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

This book centres around the firebombing of Dresden in WWII as witnessed by the author, a US POW at the time who survived by being locked in the Slaughterhouse 5 of the title. The attack on Dresden killed 135'000 people, almost all of which were innocent civilians; by contrast the attack on Hiroshima killed 71'000. However, Vonnegut takes a different path than just explaining what he witnessed. The really innovative thing about this novel is that woven into the facts is a science fiction story told from the perspective of the lead character Billy Pilgrim. Billy does not experience time in a linear fashion. His life jumps forward and back, from future to the past. The cynic would say that Vonnegut did this to pad out the story (he almost admits as much in the intro, although this is most probably his modest attempt at admitting he couldn't remember too many details from Dresden) but it makes for an excellent way to fit the war experiences into the context of the mans life and the juxtapositions of various events in the life of Billy Pilgrim are very funny. We also learn why Vonnegut got into science fiction; 'Billy had seen the biggest massacre in European history, which was the fire bombing of Dresden... they we trying to reinvent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help. ...everything there was to know about life was in the Brother Karamazov, by Dostoevsky. But that isn't enough any more.'

It also enables Vonnegut to bring in some of his worldviews. Billy Pilgrim is abducted by aliens who take him to live in a zoo on their home planet where he has to have sex with a fellow abductee, a famous movie star. The aliens experience time all at once with no past or future and their perspective helps Billy overcome his own being unstuck in time. 'when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it's very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed always will exist' ... 'the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.' We also get 'it is a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor' .. 'their [the American poor] most destructive untruth is that it is easy for an American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.' Vonnegut was a good friend of socialist historian Howard Zinn.

His second main philosophy is that there is no free will. People aren't evil or bad, just tied to events. This makes for a very even handed, non judgmental anti war story; he isn't blaming anyone he just reports the absurd surreal situations he finds himself in (using soap made from human fat [see Fight Club] and emerging from his bombing refuge to find the streets still hot and what seem like little logs lying around that turn out to be the people caught in the firestorm)
. This book is bitter, moving, warm, easy to read and very, very funny. Kurt Vonnegut died very recently and it then became apparent how influential he had been upon many (notably filmaker Michael Moore). So it goes.

'God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and wisdom always to tell the difference.'

9/10

Review of 'Dune' by Frank Herbert

Just finished reading Dune by Frank Hebert and I must say it has been very enjoyable. I was always put off reading it by the bad reviews the film always gets and it just didn't seem like my cup of tea. But I was sucked in by the good quality of the prose and the way the story is elegantly unfolded. Frank Herbert has a way of using the lightest of touches to describe an awful lot of content.

All the way through the book I was expecting a huge battle between the Fremen army and the Imperial forces as a grand finale. In fact the ending does involve a battle and even a final duel between Paul and Feud Rautha and all the loose ends are tied up but this occupies very few pages.

Now I have finished it I have realised what the story is really about; how a people must coexist with an environment of they are to tame it. The other big aspect of the story is personal development and awareness of and sensitivity to the motives of others. It has made me think more and more about being subtle in my dealings with people and holding things back until I'm certain it's to my advantage to reveal them openly.

The main character is very likeable. He's a scrawny kid who gradually accumulates powerful but subtle abilities over a number of years of personal growth as he becomes the Kwisatch Haderach. Not a super hero who one day acquires magical powers. Paul is aware of himself and able to identify his strengths and his limitations, a skill that all of us need to become balanced adults.

Endings

I just finished the final Harry Potter book. I won't spoil the ending but the book is a great read, the ending is well executed and I'm very happy with the way Rowling has finished off my decade of reading.

I have also got round to reading the final book in the Hitchikers guide to the galaxy series of five books. I enjoyed the book but it is a very dour way to end the series and a lot of the characters from the first four books do not feature and are brushed aside. Douglas Adams admitted that he wrote the book during a bad year for him and it shows. If he hadn't died suddenly I'm sure he would have rounded his story off a bit better with another volume.