Foreigner, CJ Cherryh

Foreigner, CJ Cherryh (1994)
Review by Martin Wisse

Foreigner is the first novel in one of CJ Cherryh’s popular series, yet until now I had never read any of them. She is such a prolific writer that it’s easy to miss a series or two. She also has such a wide range, writing anything from fantasy to space opera, that not everything she writes appeals to every one of her fans. The number of people I’ve known who hated her breakthrough novel Downbelow Station for example…

Yet, once you’ve read a few of her novels, you discover that there is one narrative trick all her stories have in common, no matter what the setting or the plot is. What she likes to do is to take her protagonists out of their comfort zone, get them at their most vulnerable and then put the pressure on. Every one of her novels I’ve read has the same structure. The protagonist is a young man (rarely a young woman) put in a position of responsibility but without power. Usually he’s an outsider in an alien culture, cut off from his own people, in the middle of some sort of political crisis he barely understands let alone can influence. She then let’s this crisis heats up, makes sure her hero gets little to eat and less sleep and is as far removed from the centre of the crisis as possible, yet still has a vital role to play in resolving it, even if he not necessarily knows it. To make sure the reader is as much in the dark as the hero, she usually makes sure they’re only looking at the story through his eyes.

In Foreigner‘s case the eyes we’re looking through are Bren Cameron’s. Bren is the paidhi, the human interpretor appointed by treaty to the court of the aiji of the Western Association. The paidhi is the person the most responsible for keeping the peace between human and atevi ever since the war two hundred years earlier. It been an accident that had put humans on the atevi’s planet and many of the latter were still not happy about it, but at least they were now confined to only one island and forced to share their technological and scientific knowledge. It’s this that is the humans’ greatest advantage and it’s Bren’s job to share them in the most advantageous way possible, striking a balance between being useful to the atevi, not forcing their technological development too soon and keeping at least some bargaining chips off the table for as long as possible.

Not an easy job, but things get worse for Bren quick. His story starts with an assassin in his room and Bren driving him off with an illegal gun. In response Tabini-aiji order’s Bren’s bodyguards to bring him to his grandmother’s castle – the one who twice tried to be aiji instead of her son and grandson and who might have been involved in the tragic death of her own son, but who in any case doesn’t like humans very much.

Alone, isolated and confused, cut off from the modern world in a castle that was old when humans first went into space and only barely upgraded to include modern amenities like indoor plumbing and electricity, Bren is not happy. His existential dilemma is that his instinct is to trust and like those atevi like Jago and Banichi, his two bodyguards, he has known and worked with for years, yet these are human emotions not mirrored by the atevi. Their language can only think about “like” in the sense that you can like a breakfast fruit, but does have fourteen different words for betrayal. Instead atevi are ruled by man’chi, the sense of duty and obligation owned to an association or leader, which can get very complicated indeed. It’s the conflict between Bren’s instincts and feelings and his imperfect understanding of man’chi that drives most of the stress he’s under. Literally kept in the dark at times, he has no idea what’s going on, what his own role in it is or how to get out from the hole he is in.

Foreigner is one of those Cherryh novels that was difficult to read for me, because I could see the pain that was coming for Bren all the time and was wincing in advance. I’d figured out Cherryh’s trick it took me some effort to get back to the story. I also had some problems with the setting. The atevi with their sense of man’chi and lack of emotions and complex web of aristocratic power relations come across as “space Japanese”, with the human settlement standing in for the Dutch at Dejima during the Shogunate. It took some time for me to get over this.

What I also had problems with was the central conceit in the story, that it would be possible to trade scientific and technological information for two hundred years without the atevi catching up and surpassing humans. Cherryh does play some lip service to the idea that the atevi do innovate on their own as well, but it does seem humans are the main driver of scientific progress, which I just don’t buy. Science doesn’t work that way, you cannot just keep parcelling out little nuggets of information like that without sparking off a scientific revolution. Especially on a planet with a few million humans and a billion or more atevi.

Setting aside those objections, once I did immerse myself in the story, it was just as gripping as any other Cherryh one. This isn’t her best novel perhaps, but like most Cherryh novels it’s still very much worth reading.

This review originally appeared on Martin’s Booklog.

The Time Traders, Andre Norton

The Time Traders, Andre Norton (1958)
Review by Martin Wisse

If it wasn’t for Project Gutenberg I might’ve never read this novel. Though Andre Norton was one of the most prolific US science fiction writers, mostly writing what we’d now call young adult novels, she was never translated into Dutch much so was missing when I went through my personal Golden Age. It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve started to catch up with her, in no small part thanks to Gutenberg’s collection of her works. Because until roughly the seventies, American copyright was only valid for a limited time and had to be explicitly renewed, a lot of science fiction pulp and early paperback stories entered the public domain. In this case, the copyright on the original 1958 hardcover publication of The Time Traders was never renewed, making it fair game for Gutenberg.

I picked this out of the available Nortons for two reasons: it was the first book in a series and more importantly, it was a time travel story. It had been a while since I’d last read a good, old fashioned time travel story and this seemed to fit the bill perfectly. After all, it has time agents who have to travel undercover through prehistoric times to find the ancient civilisation from which the Soviets are getting sophisticated weaponry and technology they couldn’t have possibly produced themselves.

But that does point to the novel’s greatest problem: it was written in 1958, at the height of the first Cold War and it shows. It’s not just that this is a straight arms race between heroic, American time travellers and devious Soviet agents, it’s also that the protagonist, Ross Murdock, is an example of that other fifties bugbear, a juvenile delinquent, mollycoddled by society. He thinks he knows how the game is played until he finds himself being drafted in a top secret project, which we, even if the title hadn’t been a dead giveaway, know soon enough is a time travel project, but which costs him some time to find out. Though gifted with a bit of cunning and some inner strength, Ross at first is not the brightest bulb.

The Time Traders starts with Ross being drafted into the project, blind, as alternative to being sent to prison for unspecified crimes. He at first thinks to play along to bide his time until he has an opportunity to escape the polar base he’s sent to, but when his chance at escape would mean betraying the base to the Soviets, he can’t do it. This finally earns him some measure of trust as the goal of the time travel project is explained to him and he begins his training in earnest.

This second part of the book is dominated by I guess you can call it a love story, between Ross and his mentor, an older time agent called Gordon Ashe. Gordon is the father figure Ross never had and he does his utmost to win his respect. This comes to a head as they go on their first time travel journey together, back to Iron Age Britain, where the agents have established themselves as foreign traders and established a small base. Of course things go wrong and of course it turns to Ross to save the day.

If I’m honest, I would’ve liked to have seen more of Ross and Gordon’s adventures in prehistory, rather than it all devolving in spy games with Russian time agents. Though much of what Norton shows of Iron Age Britain may be obsolete or have always been nonsense, she does have a good eye for the small, telling detail to make a world come alive and I would’ve liked to spent more time there. The plot itself is of course dated, especially because it is supposed to be set sometime in the near future, but after a while it didn’t bother me. If it would you, there’s an updated version brought out by Baen Books, if I’m not mistaken, which has updated the Cold War plots. I’m not sure that was needed.

The Time Traders was popular enough to spawn three sequels, two of which (but not the second) are also available at Gutenberg, as well as three much later continuations by Norton plus a junior writer. Again, not having read them, I’d be wary to try these latter. Famous writers revisiting popular series with the help of less famous writers never work out.

This review originally appeared on Martin’s Booklog.

The Halfling and Other Stories, Leigh Brackett

The Halfling and Other Stories, Leigh Brackett (1973)
Review by Martin Wisse

The Halfling and Other Stories is the sixth book I’ve read in the Year of Reading Women challenge I set myself after I’d noticed last year how few female written science fiction books I read. I had chosen this because it was something I hadn’t read before and I always liked Brackett. Unfortunately it turned out this was one of her lesser collections. The stories don’t fit well together, there’s no real theme to the collection and some are decidedly on the weak side.

It doesn’t help that the first two stories are basically the same. In both there’s the hard-bitten protagonist falling for a mysterious beautiful alien girl who he knows is trouble yet can’t help himself but get involved with, who then turns out to be evil. Worse, in both stories this girl is shown to be representative of her race, their evil part of their biology. It’s a bit… uncomfortable… shall we say, but unfortunately these sort of assumptions are build into the kind of planetary romances Leigh Brackett wrote.

As a genre planetary romance has always been a bit dodgy, an evolutionary offshoot of the Africa adventure story, with a lot of the same racist and colonial assumptions built in. So you have cringing Gandymedian natives, mysterious jungles and alien drums, crazed halfbreeds and all those other tropes recycled from Tarzan. Just because the native races are now Martian or Venusian and coloured green or red instead of black or yellow doesn’t make the assumptions behind them any less racist. There’s still the idea that the various alien races encountered have existential qualities that each and every member of such a race shares. Leigh Brackett is usually better than this, with those tropes present in her stories but never this blatant as in these first two stories. Her writing style and sense of atmosphere are still present, but the execution is pedestrian, unlike the Eric John Stark story also present.

It isn’t all planetary romance in this collection. In fact most of the stories here are rather classic sf puzzle stories, something I don’t really associate with Brackett. These stories are okay, but nothing special. The same goes for the whole collection. There aren’t any bad stories in here, but apart from ‘Enchantress of Venus’, the lone Stark story, there’s nothing really outstanding here either. Something for the completists.

‘The Halfling’ (1943). A beautiful alien dancer joins John Greene’s circus. And then the murders start…

‘The Dancing Girl of Ganymede’ (1950). A Terran adventurer down on his luck rescues a strange dancing girl from her would be assassins; his native helper does not like this. Only when he meets her brothers does he realises what a mistake he made…

‘The Citadel of Lost Ages’ (1950). A twentieth-century New Yorker is resurrected in the far future, once the Earth has stopped revolving around its axis and the mutated people from the nightside reign over the Earth…

‘All the Colors of the Rainbow’ (1957). One of the better stories in the collection, this tale of two funny-coloured alien visitors lost in an unreconstructed Southern town is not very subtle, but it is interesting to see a science fiction story of this vintage openly treating racism.

‘The Shadows’ (1952). A small expedition lands on a newly discovered planet and finds the ruins of the once dominant intelligent species that lived there, but who killed them? And what does their disappearance have to do with the strange shadows that start to hang around the expedition?

‘Enchantress of Venus’ (1949). An Eric John Stark story and the best in the anthology, as Stark comes to a half legendary city on the edge of the Venusian ocean in search of revenge. Leigh Brackett’ s pulpish stylings are always at their best when she’s doing a Stark story and this holds up with the best of them.

‘The Lake of the Gone Forever’ (1949). His father came back half mad from the planet Iskar, now Rand Conway is back to see the terrible secret his father left behind – and get rich exploiting it.

‘The Truants’ (1950). When Hugh Sherwin’s daughter and other children start skipping school to play with the “angels” and their “spaceship” in the forest on Sherwin’s land, he’s determined to get to the bottom of this. What he finds surprises him, though perhaps not the reader.

This review originally appeared on Martin’s Booklog.

Shards of Honour, Lois McMaster Bujold

Shards of Honour, Lois McMaster Bujold (1986)
Review by Martin Wisse

Chronologically Shards of Honor the earliest story in the Vorkosigan series, with the exception of Falling Free. It is also the earliest published novel in the series and was based on an idea Bujold had for a Star Trek story. In the original story, the roles of Aral and Cordelia would’ve been played by a Klingon warrior and a Vulcan scientist; you can still sort of see the traces of this in the published book.

Cordelia Naismith is the captain of a Betan Planetary Survey Mission investigating a newly discovered planet, when her expedition is attacked by a Barrayaran force. She’s stunned and when she comes to she’s alone with the leader of that force, Aral Vorkosigan, left behind for death by his own internal enemies. They negotiate an uneasy truce to try and survive on a hostile planet to reach a survival cache left behind by the Barrayarans. After a long and ardous trek they reach the cache, but something unexpected has happened in the meantime: they’ve fallen in love.

Their problems are only starting at that point, as Aral has to deal with the mutiny amongst his crew, which is led by his political officer, while Cordelia has to make sure the rescue attempt by her own ship’s crew actually succeeds, without handing over Aral to the mutineers again. Cordelia manages to solve both problems at once, both knocking the renewed mutiny on its head and escaping with all her people from Aral’s ship, the first of Bujold’s Competent Women.

Cordelia gets away, Aral gets his ship back and both think they will never see each other again. Two months later Cordelia finds herself commanding a slow freighter on a supply run to Escobar – an ally of Beta Colony – which has been invaded by the Barrayarans, from the very system Cordelia had been exploring. Her ship is a decoy, meant to draw the Barrayaran guards away from the wormhole and the real supply ships. Unfortunately, Cordelia and her crew get captured in the process, which should not have been too bad, POW treaties existing in the future too, had she not fallen into the hands of the psychopath commander of the invasion fleet, Admiral Vorrutyer, right-hand to Prince Serg. Vorruyter’s plan is to torture her by letting one of his soldiers rape her, something he has forced this particular soldier to do regularly. Things do not quite go according to plan as the would be rapist is Sergeant Bothari, Aral Vorkosigan’s old batman, who instead kills Vorruyter and helps Cordelia escape to Aral.

From this point on the Escobar invasion goes from bad to worse for the Barrayarans, as during the invasion of the planet the flagship is hit and destroyed, killing Prince Serg and the rest of the command staff, save for Aral, who was charged with planning for a possible withdrawal in case things went wrong. It’s only after Aral puts into motion the withdrawal once he has gained command that Cordelia understands that the invasion had always been meant to fail, in order to discredit Barrayar’s militarists and assassinate Prince Serg, in a plan cooked up by Aral and his emperor, to put all the bad eggs in one basket and then drop the basket…

The end of their second meeting once again finds Cordelia and Aral going their separate ways, Aral back to Barrayar to resign his commission, Cordelia back home to a hero’s welcome she feels undeserved. The details of Barrayaran treatment of prisoners, especially female prisoners has become public knowledge and Cordelia has become a symbol of resistance for having killed one Barrayaran monster, Vorruyter, and having been in the power of another, Vorkosigan. She can’t convince anybody, not even her own family of the real truth, nor is able to expose the secrets behind the failed invasion as that would lead to civil war on Barrayar. In the end, her unwillingness to play the role of hero expected of her makes her suspect and she has to flee Beta Colony to avoid being put into psychiatric care. She of course goes to Barrayar and Aral, gets him out of his funk and marries him, but with the death of the old emperor they now have to accept their biggest challenge: take on the regency for the emperor’s grandson and Prince Serg’s son, Gregor, only five years old.

Shards of Honor, as its title indicates revolves around honour: both Aral’s more straightforward notion of his duty to country and emperor and Cordelia’s personal honour. Time and again she could have withdrawn from Barrayar’s and Aral’s internal problems and just done her duty to her own country, yet she choose the harder road each time. Honour will be a dominant theme throughout the Vorkosigan series, together with family, here slightly less prominent. Yet there are hints of how important Bujold finds family here already, in Aral and Cordelia’s loyalty to sergeant Bothari, which goes beyond what they own him for him saving Cordelia from torture, but also with Lieutenant Koudelka, wounded during the Escobar invasion and threatened with retirement on a world not kind to anybody with a physical disability, genetic or otherwise, who Aral takes on as his personal secretary. For Bujold family is important and naturally extends not just to people you share blood with, but those that are bound to you through other ties. Bothari and Koudelka have made sacrifices for Aral and Cordelia and those make them not just friends, but part of their family.

One other theme also has a presence here, but would be more important in later books: the influence of galactic technology on Barrayar. As said, the Barrayarans, not just the sadists like Prince Serg or Vorruyter had been raping female prisoners of war. At the end of the book they get the bill in the form of seventeen uterine replicators containing the offspring of Barrayaran rapes, saddling them with their care rather than their victim mothers. This sort of thing is why I call Lois McMaster Bujold a hard science fiction writer, because she thinks about the impact MagicTech would have on real life, rather than use it solely as props in an adventure story.

This review originally appeared on Martin’s Booklog.

Voodoo Planet, Andre Norton

Voodoo Planet, Andre Norton (1959)
Review by Martin Wisse

Genre science fiction got its start in the pulp magazines of the twenties and thirties and many of its early writers were just pulp authors writing the same old stories they’d always written, just with some sf flavourings. So instead of the brave sheriff depending on his horse and trusty six-gun to fight off the bandits out in the Oklahoma badlands, you got the brave space marshal depending on his trusty rocket and raygun to take out the bandits hiding out in the Martian badlands. It’s this that fans meant when they talked about space opera, before that got co-opted for something more respectable, crappy fake science fiction stories that might just as well have been westerns. As the field matured and new writers moved in actually interested in science fiction as a genre, these stories quickly disappeared.

Even so, they never completely went away and every now and then you run across a story whose pulp roots are clearly visible, even with a writer like Andre Norton. Voodoo Planet, as you may have guessed, is one example. The sequel to Plague Ship, this is another adventure of the crew of the Solar Queen, who have been invited to a big game hunt on Khatka, a planet settled by African colonists, where they run straight into a trap set by the resident witch doctor.

Which is just as pulpy as it sounds. Khatka is a planet that’s like the Africa out of pulp magazines, mostly untamed wilderness full of dangerous animals, while the natives are somewhat more sophisticated than in the pre-war pulps. Norton is at pains to emphasise that Khatka is just as civilised a planet as any other, they just prefer the primitive life of their terran ancestors. It’s all a bit separate but equal, not very progressive even for the fifties.

The plot doesn’t help, pitting the rational crew of the Solar Queen against one of the hoariest of pulp clichés, the evil medicine man who uses superstition to oppress the hapless natives. Even though the various black characters are just as well rounded as the Solar Queen’s men, ie, solidly two-dimensional, that kind of plot still taps into all sorts of racist, colonial imagery. Again, Norton does seem to do her best to avoid this, but the shape of the story works against her. It remains too obviously a pulp African adventure transplanted to a science fiction setting. Not her best story.

This review originally appeared on Martin’s Booklog.

Barryar, Lois McMaster Bujold

Barryar, Lois McMaster Bujold (1991)
Review by Martin Wisse

Barrayar was actually the first ever Bujold story I ever read and I hated it. That’s because it was the last part of its serialisation in Analog that I read and I had no idea of what was going. Coming back to it now, after having read all the Miles Vorkosigan books at least once, I enjoyed it much more. Like any prequel Barrayar depends for some of its impact on the reader’s knowledge of the main series. If you don’t know who Miles Vorkosigan is and why he is the incredibly determined little mutant runt that he is when we first met him in The Warrior’s Apprentice, the details of how he got to be that way won’t matter all that much.

Chronologically, Barrayar takes place almost immediately after Shards of Honor and is the second and so far last novel to star Cordelia Vorkosigan/Ransom. Cordelia and Aral are settling in to newly married live on Barrayar, with Cordelia pregnant with Miles. Then the old emperor dies and Aral becomes regent to his young grandson and he and Cordelia are soon plunged into the dangerous, still very medieval politics of the Barrayaran court and nobility. How dangerous Cordelia only realises when they’re the victims of an assassination attempt, with poison gas grenades thrown into their house.

They survive, but the antidote Cordelia has to take to counteract the poison gas has a very bad side effect, acting as a teratogenic agent on the fetus she is carrying, posing a real risk to its bone development. Normally there would be nothing for it but to abort the fetus or risk a stillbirth, but Cordelia is not the type of woman to just give up. On a more civilised planet, where medical science was more advanced, there would be chance for the baby, as it could be put into an uterine replicator and treated outside the womb. But Barrayar doesn’t have any of them, or does it?

There are after all still the uterine replicators which housed the children born of the rape of female prisoners of war taken in Barrayar’s last war, which had been forgotten about after they served their purposes. Cordelia manages to track them down, get Miles installed in one and get a bone strengthening programme going on. It takes all her strength but she gets her way and everything looks to be on the up and then the civil war breaks out.

And Miles is behind enemy lines, in the capital, trapped with the rebels. So Cordelia decides to go and get him to safety. Which is sort of where I came in the first time I read this, in the last third of the story. No wonder I was confused.

In retrospect, Barrayar is a turning point in the Vorkosigan series. The novels before it had been cleverly written, more intelligent than they needed to be, light science fiction adventure stories. With Barrayar the series took a leap in quality and became more serious and slightly darker, setting the tone for later entries like Mirror Dance and Memory.

Barrayar is also another reminder of how subtle Bujold can be in showing the effects of her science fictional technology. There isn’t any of the technogeekery or infodumping of some authors I could mention, but at the same time the plot is very much driven by a classic piece of science fiction kit, the artificial womb or uterine replicator. Here it is more of a macguffin of course, something for the protagonist to chase, but over the course of the series we slowly see the impact the introduction of uterine replicators has on Barrayaran society. And here is where it started.

Barrayar is not the best of the Vorkosigan series, but it is the best of the early part of the series. Don’t read it if you haven’t read the earlier published novels yet.

This review originally appeared on Martin’s Booklog.

The Best of CL Moore, CL Moore

The Best of CL Moore, CL Moore (1975)
Review by Martin Wisse

In the mid seventies Ballantine Books, just before it renamed itself into Del Rey, launched a “Best of” series of short story collections by classic science fiction and fantasy authors which I personally think is perhaps the best such series ever produced. Just at a time when science fiction was switching from being a short story, magazine orientated genre to one in which the novel is supreme, here were collections by all the old masters who had made their name in the pulp magazines of the thirties, forties and fifties. The series offered a sense of history to the genre just when science fiction was in danger of losing touch with its roots. It offered both a reminder to old fans of what had attracted them to the genre in the first place and to new fans a sampling of authors they may have thought old-fashioned or perhaps never had the chance to read in the first place.

One of such authors must have been CL Moore, who had made her reputation writing science fantasy stories for Weird Tales in the 1930s. In the 1940s, after she met and married Henry Kuttner she almost completely stopped writing on her own, instead collaborating with him (often under the Lewis Padgett pseudonym) on a series of classic sf stories, then moving on to writing crime stories and for television, both of which unfortunately paid better, in the late 1950s. By the time The Best of CL Moore was published it had been the better part of two decades that she had written much new science fiction. Now that more than twice as much time has passed, this collection is still a great introduction to what CL Moore had to offer when not collaborating with her husband.

The story that first introduced me to CL Moore, ‘Vintage Season’, was however originally published under both her and Kuttner’s names. I first read it in a Dutch anthology of crime and detective stories written by women, which sort of made sense as it can be read as a detective puzzle story. For years that was the extent of my CL Moore reading, until I read this collection. It was enough to realise how great a writer she was.

The Best of CL Moore is a well balanced collection, with most of the stories from before she met and married Henry Kuttner. Both of her best known heroes, Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry are represented but do not dominate. In general the stories here vary from outright fantasy to pure science fiction, but what they have all in common is the human touch. Her characters are fully human, three dimensional in a way that was rare for pulp science fiction. She builds her stories around the characters of her protagonists, even in the science fantasy of her Northwest Smith and Jirel stories. There are no clunkers whatsoever in here, as we’ll see.

‘Shambleau’ (1933). This is the story that introduced both Northwest Smith and Moore herself to Weird Tales, her first published story. It’s space fantasy of the kind Leigh Brackett also wrote, with some of the clichés of that genre, but already with the same craft and power brought to all the stories here. It starts with a mixed race mob – Martians, Venusians, Earthmen – chasing a slim nutberry brown beauty in a radiant scarlet cloak down the streets of a Martian town and Northwest Smith rescuing her. But she’s shambleau and Smith does not know what this is and only finds out — almost too late.

‘Black Thirst’ (1934). Another Northwest Smith story, about a Venusian castle where they breed beauty and its master who feast on it. Almost as good as the first story.

‘The Bright Illusion’ (1934). A man dying of thirst in the great Saharan desert is set on a quest on a strange world by an intelligence so powerful it can only be described as a god, to meet this god’s priestess and fall in love with her, no matter her innate alienness. This should be schmaltzy as hell, but Moore’s skill as a writer makes this work.

‘Black God’s Kiss’ (1934). The first Jirel of Joiry story, a Medieval French swordswoman whose kingdom is taken over through sorcery, who manages to escape her captor, then has to travel much farther than she could’ve ever imagined for her vengeance. As with the first Northwest Smith story this has an immediate impact: everything Jirel is, is here fully formed.

‘Tryst in Time’ (1936). Another love story, where a man who has grown bored with everything the modern world has to offer, who has tasted all adventure and sensation that’s in it, volunteers to be the guinea pig for his genius friend’s time machine. He gradually realises that in all the historic scenes he witnesses one girl remains constant and falls in love with her – but does she know him and could they ever be together?

‘Greater Than Gods’ (1939). On one man’s decision which of the two women he loved he wanted to marry rested the faith of the future. Hinging on this decision, Earth would become either a slowly dying, rural idyllic paradise, or it would rule the universe but at the cost of human happiness. Which alternative is better and is there truly no other option? As a story it does depend on a certain gender essentialism we’ve largely grown out of, but if you can swallow this, this is a clever, sentimental story.

‘Fruit of Knowledge’ (1940). According to Jewish legend, before Eve Adam had another wife, Lilith, who refused to be dominated by him and therefore was cast aside. Normally I don’t like this kind of Biblical fantasy, but Moore manages to make this story interesting by making Lilith a sympathetic character without quite making either Adam or Eve into the villains of the piece.

‘No Woman Born’ (1944). A woman, the greatest dancer of her generation, is caught in a horrible accident and given an experimental cyborg body, her brain in a metal shell. The male scientists and psychologists responsible for her transformation worry about her and whether or not she can remain human living like this. An interesting psychological story.

‘Daemon’ (1946). A simple-minded Brazilian boy is shanghaied on a Yankee clipper as a cabin boy, but he has a secret: he can see the soul or daemon every person but he himself carries with him. It keeps him alone in a world full of people, until on a small remote island he discovers others like him…

‘Vintage Season’ (1946). The best story in the collection, this bittersweet tale of how a group of strange foreigners hiring a house at the edge of an unnamed American city slowly are revealed to be time-travelling tourists with a penchant for the horrible and tragic. In this way Moore shows us the mirror image of how we ourselves treat historical horrors as entertainment, where whatever tragedy we’re witnessing can be dismissed as destiny, just as these tourist from the future dismiss what happens to the narrator and his city and world as something that happened long ago in their past…

This review originally appeared on Martin’s Booklog.

Slow River, Nicola Griffith

Slow River, Nicola Griffith (1995)
Review by Martin Wisse

Everybody knows about the Bechdel test now, don’t they? Introduced in Dykes to Watch out For, it’s a test to see if a given story meets a minimum feminist standard: a) does it have at least two women, who b) talk to each other about c) something else than a man? It’s a good way to think differently about the movies you see or the books you read, to see how common it is for a story to have only male characters, or only a token female character, sometimes as prize for the hero. Having a story with only male characters is normal, having one with all or majority female characters is the outlier, can get you shoved into a women only ghetto like romance or feminist literature.

This is true in science fiction as well as mainstream literature, which made reading Nicola Griffith’s Slow River so interesting. It’s her second novel, also the second of her’s I’ve read and like the first, the cast is almost exlusively female. But where that one was set on a planet where men had died off due to some handwaved plague, this one takes place in near-future English city that for once isn’t London. I’m not sure whether Nicola Griffith made this choice of cast deliberately, or it just happened naturally because of the story she wanted to tell, but it works.

The story Griffiths wants to tell in Slow River is that of Lore, younger daughter of a wealthy Dutch family, who’ve made their fortune with building conservation and waste treatment plants. Lore has led a privileged and sheltered upbringing, up until the moment she’s kidnapped. That was three years ago, three years since Lore escaped from her kidnappers and found herself naked by the river that runs through the middle of the city and met the woman who called herself Spanner. Lore isn’t keen to go back to her family – why this is so is explained over the course of the story – and she moved in with Spanner, but now, three years after, she feels it’s time to stand on her own two feet and leave Spanner and her self destructive ways behind her.

Spanner you see is a small time criminal, somebody who steals information, can provide you with a trusthworthy fake identity and hacks reprogrammable slates in the best cyberpunk tradition, at the fringes of organised crime but a small fish in a big pound. She may have rescued Lore and Lore will always be grateful for that, but she herself isn’t a nice or particularly sane person and Lore could see that sooner or later it would catch up with her.

Lore herself is not quite healthy in her own skin either, otherwise she would’ve gone back to her family. But she neither wants to nor dares too, as too much has happened for her to go back. Instead she tries to build up a new life as a manual worker at a waste treatment plant in Hedon Road and gets involved with the day to day problems of being on the night shift of the conservation plant. The details of which, while the least dramatic, are also amongst the most interesting in the novel; Griffith has clearly done her homework and is good at dropping in convincing sounding details of the work.

The plant is also where we meet the third woman, Magyar in the “love” triangle between Lore, Spanner and Magyar. If it’s Spanner whose shadow Lore wants to get out under, than Magyar is who Lore wants to win the approval off. Tough, no-nonsense, she’s the shift leader at the waste treatment plant and almost from the start suspicious of Lore.

In between this main story, there are also the stories of Lore’s three years with Spanner, trading in the dependence on her family to a sort of independence, as well as the story of her youth up until the kidnap. What I only noticed about a quarter of the way in is that these three interwoven stories are actually written in three different viewpoints. There’s the first person point of view for the present, tight second person focus for the years with Spanner, while the chapters focusing on her family are in a much looser second person focus. The difference is that in the first form of second person focus we’re still inside Lore’s head most of the time, with the text refering her as “she”, while the second form, we see her from the outside, as “Lore”. It is of course symbolic for her growing up, maturing, going from what others see her as, to what she sees herself as. A coming of age story that is not nearly as obvious as most such are in science fiction.

In other words, Slow River is quite strange for a science fiction novel: a largely female cast with the plot driven by their individual concerns rather than outside concern driven, which is quite sophistically written with three different viewpoint styles and where the science on display is ecological, environment engineering. It’s no wonder it won a Nebula. A great, satisfying novel by a writer who should be much more well known than she is.

This review originally appeared on Martin’s Booklog.

Plague Ship, Andre Norton

Plague Ship, Andre Norton (1956)
Review by Martin Wisse

Hold on to your tail fins, space fans. This retro rocket boosted tale is sure to knock you out of your orbit. Oy, did this very fifties future slang get old fast in Plague Ship. This is another of Norton’s books at Project Gutenberg and mildly irritating as its language occasionally was, it was also the perfect kind of light adventure science fiction to be read in small snatches on my phone, while getting coffee at work.

Plague Ship is the second in Norton’s Solar Queen series, about the adventures of the crew of the ship the series is named after, free traders trying to eke out a living making the kind of trading deals the big companies can’t. The Solar Queen is literally a huge rocket ship, complete with humongous fifties tail fins to land on. Amongst its crew is Dane Thorson, Cargo-master-apprentice and our hero, prone to saying things like “rest easy on your fins” and “right up the rockets” and all other sorts of horrid expressions you have to read around.

Plague Ship starts with the Solar Queen visiting the planet Sargol, for which it now holds a trading license, due to the events of the previous novel. This planet is the source of a new sort of jewels which are very much in fashion back on Earth. Getting those jewels means dealing with the natives, which isn’t the easiest of tasks, as these have a very rigid concept of how negotiations should take place, which the Solar Queen’s crew has no choice but to adapt to. Worse, it turns out there are also representatives of one of the big trading firms present on Sargon, waiting to see if the Solar Queen slips up so they can take over their licence…

Luckily, through a series of misadventures, in which Dane plays a large role, they do manage to get the natives to trade as it turns out they’re very partial to catnip. However, as they blast off from Sargol their problems are only starting as most of the crew, save for Dane and three others fall ill to a mysterious sickness. It’s up to the four of them to get the Solar Queen back to Earth without being quarantined or giving the big trading company an excuse to take over.

I’m not sure if Plague Ship was originally published as a serial, but it sure reads like one. Dane is put from one dangerous situation into another, with no time to catch his breath. He and his friends not only have to deal with getting the Solar Queen back to Earth with all their fellow crew members helpless and sick, no, they also have to evade the space patrol and land on Earth without their knowledge. Then they have to find a way out of the radioactive zone they hid in, a remnant of World War III (another very fifties sf obsession) and get their plight known to the people of Earth, to get out of the fix they’re in. It all moves along quickly, too quickly at times, with no time to really dig deep into anything.

For me personally, I would’ve been happy had Norton kept the focus on the Solar Queen’s adventures on Sargol and skipped the rest of the plot. She had a knack for introducing small, telling details to sketch a world, (also on display in The Time Traders) and what she put in about the tribes of Sargol made me interested in reading more about them. Once the Solar Queen left the planet it all became a lot less interesting.

Nevertheless, if you can get used to the very fifties feel of Plague Ship and are not too bothered with how lowtech the Solar Queen and future Earth are, this is actually a perfectly adequate adventure science fiction story. It’s something you could read in half a day and ideally suited to read in short snatches on your mobile when bored.

This review originally appeared on Martin’s Booklog.

A Point of Honor, Dorothy J Heydt

A Point of Honor, Dorothy J Heydt (1998)
Review by Martin Wisse

I had read A Point of Honor when it was published back in 1998, after it had gotten some buzz on the old rec.arts.sf.written Usenet group, back in the day when that was still the number one science fiction hangout on the internet. The author herself was one of the group’s regulars, well respected and liked, one reason why I tried out her novel. This wasn’t the first nor the last time I did that: other writers I got to know through rec.arts.sf.written were Jo Walton, Brenda Clough and Matt Ruff, to name just three.

A Point of Honor is one of only two novels Dorothy Heydt wrote, the other being The Interior Life (1990), a fantasy novel she wrote under the pseudonym of Katherine Blake. Apart from that she has only written short stories, some two dozen in total, the last ones in 2004. None of her work is currently in print that I know off. A pity, but unfortunately an all too common fate for science fiction writers as their books for one reason or another fail to reach an audience. Which is another reason why I wanted to talk about this book, to bring some attention to an unfairly overlooked writer.

Sir Mary de Courcy’s troubles all began the day she defeated the mysterious Grey Knight of the Sea in jousting and he paid off his ransom by deeding her his manor of St. Chad’s-on-Wye. First the plane from where the VR tournament had taken place is hit by a light aircraft and almost crashes as somebody had fiddled with air traffic control, then on the way home from the airport her little electric car is driven off the road by a truck and to top it all off when she finally is home her security system wakes her up to alert her to an intruder in the house… Once is happenstance, two times a coincidence, three times is enemy action, but is somebody really trying to kill Mary Craven for what her VR personality had done? And if so, why?

Sure, as Sir Mary de Courcy she is the reigning champion of the Winchester lists, one of the best players of Chivalry, good enough to make a living from it, but nobody special. She certainly hasn’t made anybody angry enough in the game to try and kill her outside surely, yet the very next day, while she’s teaching some newbies the ropes of VR and Chivalry, somebody not only puts a heart medication patch on her arm that could’ve killed her had she not noticed it immediately, but also stalks and mutilates her VR persona…

Luckily at this point she gets help, in the form of Brother Gregory, who in his mundane guise of Greg Hampton is one of the original hackers who built the world of Chivalry. Talking it through, Mary and Gregory decide that the best thing to do is for Mary to stay with Gregory in his secure flat, while the two of them go on a quest in Chivalry to her new manor of St. Chad’s-on-Wye to see if they can find something wrong. And they do of course, as it turns out the world of Chivalry is much bigger than it’s supposed to be and has some …interesting… links to other VR worlds. There is some sort of conspiracy going on in VR and Mary has stumbled right over it: the only thing for it to get her life back is to unravel it and bring it to light.

A Point of Honor was published at a time when broadband internet was in its infancy, the web hadn’t become quite synonymous with the internet yet and porn was something you downloaded one fuzzy jpeg at a time. So it’s no wonder Heydt’s vision of what Virtual Reality would look like is a bit dated. People need surgical implants to engage with VR and data disks to keep their identities on. The way Chivalry is set up is quite different from how real life massive multiplayer games like World of Warcraft are run, much more elitist and explicitly structured on the Society for Creative Anachronism. For me at least this datedness brought on a bit of nostalgia for the nineties internet, a simpler time…

A Point of Honor is an enjoyable, light adventure science fiction story that sadly did not get the readership it deserved, despite the support of rec.arts.sf.written. There was the possibility of a sequel hinted at in the story, but this never happened. A good novel to look out for secondhand and somebody could do worse than to bring this out as an ebook.

This review originally appeared on Martin’s Booklog.