Four British debut SF novels

[peteryoung]

Tony Ballantyne, Recursion 2004
My first encounter with Recursion was at cover artist Dominic Harman's exhibition stand at Eastercon months before its publication: his superb cover illustration immediately grabbed me and made me want to read the book with barely so much as a glance at the back cover blurb. What the pages of the book itself provide is something rather curious and somehow less satisfying: Recursion is perhaps less dark and sophisticated than its cover may imply, and is also far more oblique in its telling than the back cover's words might indicate.

There are three threads to Recursion, all being explorations of several connected and multi-layered psyches at various points in the future. First there is Herb Kirkham, a 23rd century man whose self-replicating Von Neumann Machines have devoured an entire planet. He thinks he's escaped the clutches of the all-powerful Environment Agency until a dapper man by the name of Robert Johnston enters his life, and his spacecraft, and enlists him to clean up a much bigger mess out in space called the Enemy Domain. Then there is Eva Rye, a solitary 21st century woman living in Wales who hears the voice of the Watcher in her head and eventually tries to kill herself. She fails, of course, but why is the Watcher talking to her? Lastly we have Constantine, a mysterious 22nd century employee of the nano-tech company DIANA. He also hears voices but that's because he spends a great deal of time in the Australian virtual reality city of Stonebreak, so much so that he becomes increasingly unsure if he is not a virtual reality construct himself. He learns there are far reaching consequences to his job that not only lead to the emergence and proliferation of a sentient nano-technology, but consequences that also reach back in time to a young and disturbed 21st century woman.

Cutting back and forth in time from nearer to further future, this is a clever Singularity story about before, during and after the event itself though I noticed that Ballantyne, strangely, never once uses the word 'singularity' in the entire tale. I wonder about the reason for this, and other factors such as Eva's over-long scenes set amongst other young maladjusted people in a care home and their subsequent escapade, lead me to speculate that is more identifiably a young adult novel but one curiously aimed at grown-ups. Recursion also has something of an identity crisis, a kind of multiple personality that finds recursive echoes in the story itself: disembodied voices, hidden identities, a confusion of worlds both real and virtual. The three threads all appear so markedly and deliberately different in voice and style that they seem barely related other than by the over-arching plot that connects them, though each thread's effect on the other two threads does cleverly give us the 'recursion' of the book's title. Ballantyne has made a quirky, though not brilliant, debut; there may be things lacking here that further books, if this is the first of a series, will hopefully provide.



Gary Gibson, Angel Stations 2004
Another of Tor UK's crop of new British SF authors, Gary Gibson has hit the ground running with Angel Stations, a confident space opera with a hint of Fred Pohl's 'Heechee' saga about it. In the near future, a host of artefacts from a disappeared alien race, given the name Angels, are discovered in the Oort cloud at the edge of the solar system, and among these are devices found to possess an unknown technology that connects to other Angel stations across the galaxy by means of instantaneous matter transference. One of these stations is in the solar system of a planet known as Kasper on which survives the only living alien intelligence yet discovered, and is being observed from afar by humans occupying the abandoned Angel station. Into this setting come a variety of well-drawn characters, alien and human: the Kaspians are a wolf-like, pre-industrial society, cynically manipulated by a cargo-cult use of the Angel artefacts into believing they have a direct line to their god. The architect of this deception is Ernst Vaughn, one of four genetically-altered humans given powers of either precognition or increased longevity by our experimentation with the Angel's genetic technology. Other more normal humans, notably the female space pilot Kim, find themselves drawn into a conflict between these four as Vaughn is about to attempt the takeover of Kasper with an army of devout followers. Meanwhile as Earth falls under a virulent plague known as the Blight and a deadly radiation burst from the centre of the galaxy threatens to wipe out all life on Kasper, is the Angel's all-encompassing technology some kind of key to the way much of all this can be resolved?

There is a lot going on here, and Gibson delineates the bones of his story adequately and with the barest minimum of infodumps. One of the philosophical thrusts of the book, though possibly too well hidden behind the action, is questioning the existence of free will or, instead, if our lives follow a pre-ordained route into the future. This is quite well illustrated by the central female character, Kim, who has her head illegally wired with Angel technology so she can experience episodes from the life of her late lover Susan by a technology known as 'books', in which all sensory experience is recorded as opposed to just sounds or pictures; Kim can experiences Susan's life precisely as it happened, with no option or choice in what she 'experiences'. In the real world her own life seems to be dictated by choices forced upon her, which in turn she has no way of realising will have a bearing on the outcome a larger scenario, one she is probably ill-equipped to survive. A good point Gibson makes is that if true precognition is achieved by just one person this surely removes free will for the rest of the species; conversely this is what would make precognitives something other than human, and it also hints at the reason the Angels might no longer to be found in the universe.

I was occasionally left wondering quite how all the assorted Angel technology connects up, particularly their self-replicating and voracious silver bugs, and the resolution, probably too easy, hinges on just this kind of absence of knowledge by retaining its technological mystery at a point when perhaps a more precise explanation was needed. These small matters aside, Gibson's debut novel is notably well-rounded, its many merits marking the arrival of a confident new voice.



Martin Sketchley, The Affinity Trap 2004
This review first appeared at Diverse Books, and a shorter version was included in Zoo Nation #5.
Martin Sketchley’s first novel is worth taking a look at to catch a promising new writer getting some stuff out of his system. By that I simply mean the setting is occasionally too familiar (militarised space, tyrannical humans and dignified aliens) or clichéd (dystopic, divided, ruined planet, people living either in towering habitats or scavenging in the wastelands between). That’s not to say that everything in The Affinity Trap has been done before, but what Sketchley could be doing is amply demonstrated in the rich seams that he uncovers but somehow lacks the confidence to mine – or, hopefully, he is saving for later when he tackles the sexual subtext of attraction and repulsion that drives this story.

The bookjacket’s blurb provides most of the back-story as to the dysfunctional state of the world and our unbalanced relationship with several alien races, and we join Alexander Delgado, a loyal military intelligence officer but past his prime, as he is recruited to complete a special mission to bring the alien Seriatt female, Lycern, back into the arms of the Structure’s despotic leader, William Myson. Needless to say, things don’t go according to plan, largely because of Delgado’s own erratic (and erotic) impulses and the trail he leaves behind that ultimately brings the Structure military in hot pursuit.

The Affinity Trap has a promising start, and Sketchley certainly has some imagination when it comes to sex with aliens. Pit this against a backdrop of a far-right, arms-dealing Structure and you get the conflicting drives of creation and destruction all messing with the head of Delgado who is on a rather crazy jag in his pursuit of the elusive Lycern, with his extremes of behaviour towards her in turns romantic and hostile. When resorting to his baser instincts Delgado occasionally compares favourably to Alfred Bester’s Gully Foyle from The Stars My Destination, and like Foyle he is often a difficult man to pin down psychologically. One is never sure if the twists and turns that Delgado takes are his own doing or done under the influence of Lycern’s grip on him at a pheromonal level – he is clearly a man simultaneously both whipped and horrified by his attraction to her. Sketchley only tentatively teases out the psychology of this dichotomy, possibly leaving a fuller exploration until a later installment, all of which makes The Affinity Trap the kind of book which, to my mind, can’t quite decide what it wants to be. After developing some good ideas Sketchley hints at a number of other promising directions the book could take, but half way through goes instead for a lower denominator, resorting to rather violent, action-driven set pieces all in the familiar dystopic setting. I wanted Sketchley to aim higher, and if he can flesh out the more aspirant and, lets be frank, sexier sides to the story then this will make for an interesting series.



Karen Traviss, City of Pearl 2004
City of Pearl is the first title in karentraviss's very promising trilogy (the later installments are Crossing the Line and The World Before), and it's a pleasure to have been so impressed by a debut novel from someone who is so prolific that she has issued two further novels in the US (one a Star Wars tie-in) this year alone.

Underpinning the entire story arc is the near-symbiotic arrangement of two species from neighbouring worlds in a distant solar system: the marine, squid-like bezeri of Bezer'ej, who need the protection of the ecologically minded and formidable wess'har, from Wess'ej, who are predisposed to providing it and will obliterate any dangers or ecological threats to the world, even if that threat may take the form of a small human colony. The starting point of the story itself begins with Environmental Hazard officer Shan Frankland, up for retirement at last but who is, against her will, drafted to lead a mission to Bezer'ej to urgently re-establish contact with the previously established colony. The reasons behind her mission are initially concealed from her, only revealed when certain stimuli she encounters releases the information to her conscious mind from a mentally-suppressed briefing. Arriving on Bezer'ej, Frankland learns that the colony has only been allowed to stay by the wess'har because of the benign principles they live by. For hundreds of years the planet's designated wess'har guardian, Aras, has accepted and lived alongside these colonists, whose tenure on Bezer'ej is always under constant review from Aras's matriarchal leaders: a third alien race from the same system, the isenj, has already been erased from Bezer'ej by Aras himself when their territorial claim to Bezer'ej began upsetting the planet's ecological balance; the isenj therefore have a major score to settle with Aras dating back hundreds of years. Aras also has a blood secret that he cannot afford to let fall into the hands of any alien race, humans included. Just what kind of minefield are Frankland, her scientists and crew walking into to complete her unknown mission, and what will it take before the humans on Bezer'ej suffer the same fate as the isenj?

It becomes immediately apparent that Traviss is very comfortable working with words. They flow easily, and City of Pearl is certainly a stronger and more fluid debut novel than any SF fan could reasonably ask for. Also a graduate of the Clarion workshop who has in her time worked as a defence correspondent, copywriter and press officer, there are absolutely no 'first novel' nerves on display and she gives us a convincing and insightful story that asks hard questions and often has genuinely useful things to say. The storytelling is refreshingly straightforward with very little inclination towards to the trappings of abstraction or artistic overindulgence – there may be echoes of Le Guin, but not overly so. She knows her subjects well and they are treated with the minimum of sentimentality: the environmental, colonial and animal rights subtexts could easily be overworked in a less well-informed writer's hands.

I would have liked more background on the wess'ej obsession with ecological balance which, when it does reoccur in the narrative, occasionally reads as little more than an aesthetic desire rather than a valid enough reason to commit genocide. But Traviss clearly knows how to smooth over the complexities of plot, of which there are several, as well as dovetail certain topical themes into an established story that do, over time, take on central relevance to the story itself. She crafts familiar tropes to her own ends rather than grafting them on in the familar shape we usually find them; it's very hard to see the join because all aspects of the story – the plot and its resolution, the characters (especially the flawed protagonist duo of Frankland and Aras), the conflicting politics, even the world of Bezer'ej itself – are genuinely interesting and also have relevance to the here and now. I also suspect the territorial situation described is loosely modelled on the Falklands conflict, an event which inspired the book's dedication. This is a notably strong start to a full-time writing career and she deserves to receive a UK book deal to add to her US success, something that will bring her more into the fold of better known, identifiably British writers.

[ cross-posted with instant_fanzine ]
[ cross-posted with sf_with_bite ]

Comments

[dyfferent.livejournal.com]

Ooo thanks! I've got the first two but not the last two.