INTERZONE 253 JUL-AUG 2014 (15 page)

EXTREME PLANETS

edited by David Conyers, David Kernot & Jeff Harris

Chaosium Inc ebook, 356pp, $18.95

reviewed by Ian Sales

The second decade of the twenty-first century has seen an increasing blurring of genre boundaries – to such an extent, perhaps, that pure science fiction short stories are no longer as popular as they once were. This is no more than literary evolution in action, but it does mean that science fictions which reject this trend will look more and more dated. Which is not to say it is impossible to put a modern spin on pure science fiction, but writers harken back to those old patterns at their peril. They cannot turn back the tide. And reading
Extreme Planets
a reader can’t help thinking this is no bad thing.

The anthology opens with an excerpt from
The Heart of the Comet
by David Brin and Gregory Benford, a 1986 novel. A more cynical reader might think it was included in order to get two marquee names on the cover. It’s a vignette from a longer work and reads like one. Yet, among the original stories that follow, it does not feel all that out of place. Despite being nearly thirty years old, it fits in well. For a current anthology, that’s a somewhat embarrassing state of affairs. True, Stephen Gaskell’s story, which immediately follows the Brin and Benford, is a more modern tale – but even that feels like it’s riffing on Bruce Sterling’s Mechanist stories from the early 1980s.

Some of the contents are “puzzle stories”, a form of short fiction which has somehow become emblematic of hard SF, though examples of it can usually only be found within the pages of
Analog
. In these, the protagonists find themselves in a difficult and potentially fatal situation, and must use their scientific and/or technological ingenuity to escape. G. David Nordley, an
Analog
veteran, has his protagonists marooned by mutineers on a dwarf planet beyond the orbit of Neptune, and they must use what limited resources they have to return to civilisation. Peter Watts’ protagonists, on the other hand, are journeying to the end of time aboard an asteroid starship, and must figure out how to survive an unplanned trip through a red giant’s chromosphere. And Patty Jansen’s prisoner in a work-farm on Io must find a way to send a message to the outside world in order to protest his innocence, by making use of the very facilities he is forced to work upon.

Other stories follow other patterns, but not always successfully. The two murder-mysteries feel like they were written in the 1950s: Jay Caselberg’s requires the investigators to visit a university to find out what the word “sheep” means; and Robert J. Mendenhall’s has humanity in a Cold War with a mysterious alien threat and features two female characters who are defined by their relationship to the protagonist.

Slightly more modern takes include a story by Kevin Ikenberry which references Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Maelstrom II’ but takes its title literally, as a man dives Baumgartner-like from orbit into the eye of an exoplanet superstorm. Meryl Ferguson’s tale of sabotage at a research station on a waterworld makes a better fist of its science than it does its politics, even if the latter does drive the plot.

Two of the editors include a collaborative story of their own – a practice dubious at best – which is deeply marred by a female protagonist who is repeatedly characterised as stupid and patronised by the male characters. Another story with two authors, David N. Smith and Violet Addison, reads like a slightly-updated version of a 1970s tale, in which a scientist has her mind implanted in the body of a flying alien creature.

There are aliens in Jeff Hecht’s contribution too, living deep in a world-ocean beneath hundreds of kilometres of ice…who stumble across contact from a human spaceprobe. Geoff Nelder’s story describes a crash-landing on a world with an unusually viscous ocean, but the title explains the solution to the protagonists’ predicament – although they fail to work it out for themselves. Guy Immega’s lengthy story is one-half Robinsonade and one-half info-dump/history lesson, and feels far longer than it is.

The anthology ends with another marquee name, Brian Stableford, although he at least provides an original story. It’s a polished piece, and characteristically dry in tone. Having said that, it doesn’t seem to actually feature an “extreme planet”…

The contents are reasonably faithful to the theme, but that shouldn’t produce a collection which reads like it could have published twenty to fifty years ago. Pure science fiction is not dead yet, but it’s going to take better than this to keep it alive in the twenty-first century.

KINDRED

Octavia Butler

Headline pb, 304pp, £8.99

reviewed by Paul Graham Raven

Kindred
, the most successful (and least overtly science fictional) novel by the late Octavia Butler, has a simple plot. In 1976, Dana, a black woman and writer, moves into her new Los Angeles home with her white husband. Before they settle in, however, Dana is transported through time and space to a Maryland riverbank in 1815, where she rescues a young boy from drowning. The boy, Rufus, is the son of a minor plantation owner who turns out to be one of Dana’s distant ancestors, and her fate is entangled with his; whenever Rufus’s life is in danger, she is pulled from her “home” time and into his milieu, where she ends up saving him – usually from himself.

Rufus’s milieu is that of antebellum slavery in the southern states, and through Dana’s repeated timeslips we are shown not only the more immediate cruelties of slavery but also its more subtle mechanics, the chains and hobbles of tradition, thought and language which, embedded in the deep structures of the social, are even harder to escape than physical bonds. Dana’s experience of another world – a better but by no means perfect world – opens up the antebellum context for a modern reader in a way that, perhaps, the more traditional slave narrative form might not; in sharing Dana’s sense of dislocation, the reader is obliged to see the past anew, just as Dana is forced to face the ugly realities beneath the whitewashing of history.

I will not attempt a critique of
Kindred
. For one thing, the world has no need of the thoughts of a middle-class English white man on what is deservedly a canonical novel of both the antebellum slavery and feminist canons. But the question of
Kindred
’s genre is perhaps worth another look. Everyone’s favourite online encyclopedia cites various scholars arguing for
Kindred
’s status as a (neo-)slave narrative, an initiation novel, an anthropological historical fiction, a science fiction, and a “grim fantasy”, as Butler herself labelled it in an interview. While I’m sure these arguments were all made in the spirit of seeking useful and illuminating readings of the text, one can’t help but be reminded of more recent (and fervid) discussions around genre and canonicity, and the factional divide between those who would constrain “science fiction” – whatever that might be – and those who would open it up.

Kindred
’s use of the time-slip plot device provides a strong argument for it belonging to the domain of
speculative
fiction (or fantastika, if you’d rather not borrow terms from Uncle Bob) – but
science
fiction? There’s no technology involved, no chin-stroke wrestling with the Grandfather Paradox; never once do we discover
how
Dana time-slips, let alone why it is that she can take objects or other people along with her; Dana’s ability to time-slip simply
is
. To question the
how
is to miss the point…but questioning the how is one of those things that science fiction does, according to some definitions. So
Kindred
can’t
be science fiction…but what could be more science fictional than time travel? So maybe it’s a fantasy…but there’s no secondary world, no irruption of the uncanny.

The point is that
Kindred
– like most fiction of quality – bears multiple readings, even conflictual readings. It is the grim fantasy that Butler said it was; it is also a slave narrative, an initiation novel, a work of science fiction, a historical critique of American attitudes to slavery. It is all of them, and more.

There are two ways to define a genre: as a binary (ie you’re either in or out) or as a tendency (ie a given text may partake in the tropes or techniques of a given genre to some greater or lesser degree); if this reminds you of gender studies rhetoric, then consider that
genre
and
gender
share their etymological root, as well as their determinist legacy. This tension, I think, is at the root of science fiction’s civil war
du jour
: the question as to whether it should be a public space, or the private fiefdom of those who nurtured it through the years of drought and plenty. Should it include, or exclude?

Butler never shied from including herself in the genre; it is assumed that my own allegiance to inclusion is clear. And regardless of which genre you might choose to situate it in, I feel safe in suggesting that Butler herself would have wanted us to take away from
Kindred
at least one hard-won wisdom: that the first casualty of exclusion is empathy, which is the best and highest of what it is to be human.

THE VERY BEST OF TAD WILLIAMS

Tad Williams

Tachyon pb, 432pp, £13.50

reviewed by Ian Hunter

Tad Williams might be better known as the author of the meaty fantasy novels that comprise the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn quartet or the Shadowmarch series, the quintet that makes up the Otherland books, or even standalone fare like
Tailchaser’s Song
which is finally being made into an animated movie. More recently, he has given us some celestial noir with the Bobby Dollar books, but here we have shorter offerings – sixteen stories and a hundred-and-twenty page screenplay called
Sunshine
. Only one story – ‘Omnitron, What Ho!’ – is original to this collection with the others first appearing in anthologies edited by the likes of Chris Golden, Jack Dann, Gardener Dozois, Peter S. Beagle, George R.R. Martin, and even David Copperfield.

The very first tale gets us into a light-hearted groove as ‘The Old Scale Game’ tells the story of a knight and dragon who are getting a bit old in the tooth and fang and come up with a scheme that benefits them both, much to the envy of other mythical creatures who are being hunted to extinction. Similar scaly shenanigans are evident in ‘A Stark and Wormy Knight’ where an exasperated dragon mum has to recount the bedtime story of how Grand-Greatpap (there is some wonderfully intentional misuse of language throughout this story) managed to overcome the dogged Sir Libogan the Undeflectable. In ‘Omnitron, What Ho!’, society waster Werner Von Booster Secondstage recounts how he first met his faithful robot servant in a story that is a cross between P.G. Woodhouse and Oscar Wilde. A lighter tone also pervades the story of a down-on-his-luck magician in ‘The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of’ which starts with a familiar hardboiled introduction but in this case our hero is admiring his new client from the vantage point of the carpet where he is lying in a drunken stupor.

The good humour isn’t maintained in all of the stories though. In ‘Not With A Whimper, Either’ online chat room banter turns into something more sinister that just might spell the end of the world, and in ‘The Stranger’s Hands’ two foreigners are discovered in the forest – one of them has the power to make dreams come true, but possibly not exactly in a way the wisher intended, and such power inevitably attracts the attention of the greatest wizards in the land.

On the darker side of the tracks are the ‘Black Sunshine’ screenplay and the stories ‘The Storm Door’, ‘Z is for’, and ‘And Ministers of Grace’. In ‘Black Sunshine’ events take place in the past and the present when Eric returns home and remembers the night everything changed for him and his friends after one of them had managed to get hold of an experimental drug called Black Sunshine. We are in Stephen King territory here with the dual timescale and the close-knit group, but surely that can’t be a bad thing? What is bad are the events that unfold in ‘The Storm Door’; it reads like an old pulp hero tale smashing right up against a very modern horror trope given a very original spin. And in ‘Z is for’, Harold wakes up at a party trying to piece together who he is and what he is doing there, and why can’t he get the idea of zebras out of his head? Clearly some of his fellow partygoers don’t like all this zebra talk. Back in the day, this would have been a cracking
Twilight Zone
episode. ‘And Ministers of Grace’ is totally different from everything else in the collection, being the gritty SF tale of one Lamentation Kane – a Guardian of Covenant, a Soldier of God, and often an Angel of Death in his role as a holy assassin – who is sent undercover to the planet of Archimedes to kill their prime minister. Again, this is a story just crying out to be made into a film.

Apart from the sublime ‘Child of An Ancient City’, where a group of lost travellers must entertain a vampyr with their stories each night to survive, top honours have to go to ‘Every Fuzzy Beast of the Earth, Every Pink Fowl of the Air’ where God is having a day off, leaving angels Gabriel and Metatron to add the finishing touches to the Creation until God’s daughter, Sophia, turns up and starts making her own changes. It’s been my painful experience that in matters of interior design it’s best to leave things to the ladies – as our two angels soon find out in a highly inventive, hilarious tale.

Throughout this collection Williams ably demonstrates that he is a jack of all trades – and their master as well. Damn him.