Tim Maughan tours a fictional solar system

The Lowest Heaven
Anne Perry and Jared Shurin
Jurassic London, PPB £9.99

The Lowest Heaven is a new anthology of contemporary science fiction published to coincide with Visions of the Universe, a major exhibition of space imagery at the Royal Observatory Greenwich…Each story in The Lowest Heaven is themed around a body in the Solar System, from the Sun to Halley’s Comet

So much for the publisher’s blurb. What the editors Anne Perry and Jared Shurin have actually created, intentionally or not, feels in many ways like a perfect snapshot of the state of current science fiction in many of its dominant forms.

This, in itself, is something to be praised. If a similar collection of solar system-themed SF had been curated a decade or so ago, my guess is that it would have been full of posthuman “new space opera” - and there are actually a few examples of that here, signifying its continuing popularity. That genre’s trailblazer Alastair Reynolds provides a thoughtful, compelling and sharply written tale in “A Map of Mercury”, where colonies of artists heavily modified to survive conditions on the Sun’s closest child examine not just what it means - if anything - to be human, but what that also means for their artistic authenticity. Similarly, in “Enyo-Enyo”, Kameron Hurley explores the potential of advanced, galaxy spanning bio-tech to be dehumanising, dividing and just plain icky. And while not new space opera exactly, Lavie Tidhar’s “Only Human” describes the ritualistic networking of artificial and augmented intelligences on Titan. Reynolds’ and Hurley’s stories are both brutal in their portrayal of assisted human evolution, while Tidhar’s is fittingly poetic and abstract. All three are excellently written, and in differing ways reminiscent of perhaps the greatest solar system-spanning epic of them all, Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix.

But it’s not ten, twenty or thirty years ago, thankfully. As such there’s a good proportion of what can probably be loosely termed the “New Weird”, if anyone still knows what that means - a term that’s been flogged so hard by broadsheet commentators afraid to be associated with nerdy SF that its corpse is undoubtedly lying in a field somewhere, buzzing with flies, awaiting the arrival of the lorry from the glue factory. Not that any of that, on an individual story basis, matters - as proven by “Golden Apple” by Sophia McDougall, the anthology’s opener and arguably its strongest offering. Its protagonists are a couple so desperate to save their dying child that they break into a government research facility to steal solidified sunlight to feed her, with unprecedented results. The science might be kooky and glossed over, but that doesn’t matter - not because it’s the New Weird, but because McDougall’s writing is both beautifully efficient and heart-wrenching.

I will unashamedly announce to anyone that Adam Roberts is my favourite author writing in the genre at the moment, which is why it’s also impossible for me to hide my disappointment with his offering here - but let me be clear, it is a very personal disappointment. “An account of a voyage from World to World again, by way of the Moon, 1726” is exactly the kind of alternate-history Wells and Verne influenced science fiction that leaves me cold. It’s nicely paced, clearly well-written - in that old-timey language and everything - but these kind of nostalgic exercises always fail to connect with me, reminding instead of those hip, future-rejecting, middle-class escapists who are spreading across the surfaces of British inner cities like some insidious gentrifying virus. There’s one stood out in the street right now in fact, playing a tiny faux-antique guitar-thing smaller than its handlebar moustache. Excuse me while I urinate on it from my bedroom window.

Sadly it’s not the only time the past stares down the future through its rose-tinted spectacles here. If you want to encapsulate 2013 science fiction (even if that’s not the editors’ intention) then you need a heavy dose of nostalgia, and where better than to start than with nostalgia for SF itself. Both “The Jupiter Files” by Jon Courtenay Grimwood and “WWBD” by Simon Morden invoke dead sci-fi writers - the former more effectively and wittily than the rather awkward latter - while the lead of Esther Saxey’s “Uranus”, a young gay man fleeing persecution in 1890s London, takes to astral traveling to prove HG Wells’ theories of the planets wrong, although the story hints at a far more interesting, contemporary explanation for its events.

Elsewhere there are two examples of nostalgia for fading, small-town 80s Americana. Why? Maybe this is an emerging sub-movement in SF (or, hell, maybe it emerged ages ago and I’ve not noticed) as authors continue to get freaked out by the future and fall back on their childhoods. “The Comet’s Tale” by Matt Jones sets an utterly unsurprising tale of unrequited teenage obsession in a 1980s Heaven’s Gate-style suicide cult, while “Ashen Light” by Archie Black transposes a Lynchian road-story of misunderstood, outsider teenagers on a killing spree from white-trash America to white-trash terraformed Venus. Which is an interesting set up, but the dull ‘true crime’ writing style makes it a bore to read, despite some interesting ideas about how colonisation and the terraforming of other planets creates dull, shallow facsimiles of earth. Similar ideas are explored far more effectively in “Magnus Lucretius” by Mark Charan Newton, where Titan has been transformed into a tacky, Disneyfied Roman Empire heritage theme park; this story actually has something to say about the present.

Luckily, the collection isn’t without a liberal sprinkling of humour - most notably in S.L. Grey’s “We’ll Always Be Here” - a dark but hilarious tale of two sisters stranded in a creepy space orphanage after the nuns that run it have all died off. Descriptions of them playing America’s Next Top Model with a gang of girls left brain-damaged when their cryogenic suspension failed - had me sniggering queasily into my Kindle. “From This Day Forward” by David Bryher has the best opening line of the book (“Ted had always preferred his own company, but this was ridiculous”) although you don’t get it until a few paragraphs in and you realise it’s a relationship comedy about clones. As a comedy sketch it’s highly effective if very predictable, but as science fiction it asks too many questions it doesn’t explain.

Put simply, The Lowest Heaven is a mixed bag - something that’s true for all anthologies, by their very definition. And as with all themed anthologies the actual theme is a bit of a red herring. There’s a lot to relish here, a lot to enjoy, and nothing that doesn’t display both thought and talent. But it’s also a gentle reminder that perhaps science fiction needs to stop staring wistfully at the sky, go back indoors, and put the news on. It has unfinished business back here on earth.

Tim Maughan’s story Limited Edition appears in Arc 1.3: Afterparty Overdrive, out now for Kindles, tablets, phones and screens.

Also on the blog: Tim Maughan topples down the rabbit hole into a parallel Bristol.

Nan Craig hobnobs with the global cosmopolitan elite.

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis
Leo Hollis
Bloomsbury, HB £16.99

The central premises of Leo Hollis’s Cities Are Good For You are that cities are complex, and that the fabric of a city is primarily social rather than physical or architectural. Hollis, a literary editor by day, urbanist by night, makes much of the work of 1960s activist and urban theorist Jane Jacobs, and champions the ideas of complexity theorist Geoffrey West.

A physicist and mathematician, West wanted to discover the recipe for cities; now he claims that, having measured as many variables as possible about as many cities as possible, he can tell you all about a city based on, for instance, its population. The thematic chapters that follow use the idea of complexity and Jacobs’s ideas around “the ballet of the street” to talk about a wide range of aspects of cities, including their politics, economics, culture, trust, urban planning and technology. The discussion shifts glancingly from New York to Mumbai, London, Beijing and Bogota. Most of the cities he discusses are already well-known case studies - even people with no interest in cities have probably heard about Detroit’s empty centre and Mumbai’s slums - which makes the book feel like a collection or an overview. Indeed, as an overview it works quite well.

Out of the various city stories comes the lesson that in fact we don’t know what will or won’t work. The complexity of cities means that interventions and schemes either succeed spectacularly or fail spectacularly, which is perhaps why large-scale interventions tend to be less effective for the price than small, grass-roots initiatives. As we already know from other fields, the best way for coming up with effective innovation is often to try out a bunch of ideas, quickly prototyping and scrapping projects that don’t work, and expanding the ones that do. It doesn’t come as a huge surprise that this might be the best way to deal with complex systems, where we often can’t predict effects (especially unintended consequences). Hollis’s chapter on culture in cities looks at the use of iconic buildings to spearhead regeneration, and contrasts the Guggenheim in Bilbao with the National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield. The fact that you probably haven’t heard of the latter - it’s now been converted into the student’s union building for Sheffield Hallam - is proof that using big architectural projects to regenerate an area is a hit-and-miss enterprise. But we knew that, didn’t we?

The perspective of the Cities Are Good For You is often that of the global cosmopolitan elite, those people who can shift from city to city to find work that suits them. Indeed, one of the more jarring sections comes in the section on how globalisation increases specialisation among cities. Hollis says that “This inequality among cities gives people more choice about where they want to live”. From the perspective of Hollis’s ‘young Indian entrepreneurs’ and tech workers, that might be true (though even then the logic seems off; if all thejobs in the industry you work in are centred in, say, Bangalore or California, then in what sense do you have more choice about where to live?) But for everyone else, Hollis has rather overestimated the extent to which we have free movement of labour across the world. Similarly, when Hollis starts off a section about ‘community’ by discussing a famous Parisian supper club, I couldn’t help rolling my eyes slightly. As much as supper clubs sound like fun, is a party full of friendly strangers really a good example of community within cities?

I kept thinking, as I read through Cities Are Good For You, “Yes. Okay, yes. Well, yes.” Except for the moments when I thought, “Really? Are you really going to say that?” So much of what it covers is uncontentious: city planning should be considerate of people, rather than trying to force them to fit the model; top-down regeneration occasionally works well, but often it doesn’t. On top of that, the writing is surprisingly personality-free, despite the obligatory anecdotes scattered throughout. The prose style is standard journalese, full of buzz-words and catchphrases. It feels like it ought to be easy to read but in large doses it has a deadening effect. If you can live with that, Hollis’s book certainly covers a lot of ground and is clearly well-intentioned. It’s hard to resist the image of the author skipping joyfully around Silicon roundabout, feeling plugged into the global zeitgeist. Now and again, his book makes you want to join him.

Read Nan Craig’s story Scrapmetal in Arc 1.3: Afterparty overdrive, out now for screens, tablets, phones and in a collectible print edition.

Terry Edge stands with his hands on his hips, cocks his head to one side, and raises his eyebrows.

Shift
Hugh Howey
Century, HB £12.99

Hugh Howey said that he wrote Wool, the first part of this series, in between what he thought were his real writing duties. So it not only by-passed the attention of those rather market-driven aims of traditional publishers but perhaps also Hugh’s own front-brain ambitions. Word-of-mouth approval saw Wool sell in bale-loads; film rights were bought by Ridley Scott; Century then published all five parts in a “proper” book version. Hugh put most of this down to “dumb luck”. All of which means the follow-up was always going to be tricky: now, he’d be writing under the weight of considerable expectation and anticipation.

Shift takes us right back to the beginning, to 2049, when powerful US Senators have decided to build vast underground silos to protect people against nano-weapon threats from Iran and North Korea. Or at least, that’s what the leaders of Silo 1 are told. In all the silos, for hundreds of years, people will live and die knowing nothing about the outside world except that it’s death to go there. But in Shift’s parallel time thread set in 2110, in one rebellious silo, things start to go horribly wrong.

Shift is a much better-written book than Wool, which was produced in instalments rather than from an overall plan. Shift flows well and the action is based nicely in cause and effect. Setting it before the first book takes place was a brave move but it works. You soon forget about the far future of Wool but not enough to spoil your fun, seeing if and how the two stories will finally meet up.

There are some technical niggles. The explanation we get in Shift for why silos only have staircases instead of lifts is not convincing and even makes you a little suspicious that one of Howey’s reasons for going back to the start was to try to fill in some logic holes.

A more serious weakness is, as with Wool, the poor characterisation. The main character in Shift is a Senator involved in a secret project that is going to change millions of lives; he comes across as not very bright, easily led and obsessed with not betraying his wife for no clear narrative reason. Other characters do far too much eyebrow-lifting, standing as they do with their hands on their hips, cocking their heads to one side. There is also a great deal of bleating and blubbing, especially from the males. This is crude emotional shorthand, an aspirational gesture, and it won’t wash.

If Howey can let his characters breathe more freely and let them lead the plot from time to time, instead of just sheepishly following it, I think he’ll soon be producing not just highly readable and well-knitted novels like Shift but true classics of the genre. In the meantime, we can look forward to the movie. A good actor can, after all, lend a character depths that might not be apparent in the script.

Read Terry Edge’s story Big Dave’s In Love in Arc 1.2: Post human conditions, out now for screens, tablets, phones and in a collectible print edition.

Madeline Ashby wishes the DJ wouldn’t keep changing the record

Let’s All Go to the Science Fiction Disco
Jonathan Wright
Adventure Rocketship! PPB £9.99

Let’s All Go to the Science Fiction Disco is the first collection of interviews, essays, and short fiction curated by the team at Adventure Rocketship! and edited by Jonathan Wright. Wright’s goal with this particular collection, he says, is “to give a sense of how music and speculative fiction have played off each other down the years”, and he starts the collection off with the 1960s. Wright is honest about his nostalgia for a lost future, specifically his “disappointment over the lack of silver suits, domestic robots and flying cars in late-20th-century Britain”. This same disappointment is echoed by writer, editor, and Deviants member Mick Farren, who is quoted as saying, “Just about everything we hoped for has failed. Kubrick said we’d be on Mars by now. The Jetsons told me I’d have a private plane. Dan Dare said nuclear weapons would be outlawed in 1965. But we didn’t get any of this shit!”

So it should come as no surprise that the collection’s focus on music begins roughly fifty years ago, when those visions of the future reached their cultural zenith. I had hoped for a bit more scope: mention of Stockhausen’s science fiction operas, or Philip Glass’s work with Doris Lessing, or even Howard Shore’s musical adaptation of The Fly. How can you write about science fiction and music and not mention Yoko Kanno? For that matter, how can you avoid writing about Macross? Or Phantom of the Paradise? Or Rocky Horror? Or Queen?

This isn’t a collection about music and science fiction, so much as it’s a collection about the way music and science fiction inspired each other to create utopian visions in the latter half of the twentieth century. If you feel that you’re owed a jetpack simply for living in the twenty-first century, you may have more sympathy for this perspective.

Although that perspective is somewhat narrow, there are some quite good pieces of criticism and analysis here. Minister Faust’s piece on George Clinton and the Nation of Islam is the most rigorous essay in the collection, and its unflinching tone mirrors its intellectual incisiveness: “Dreadlocks used to be the marker of devotion to Haile Selassie I, the incarnation of God who was soon to destroy the global White Empire, rather than the marker of white hipsterism, marijuana ‘non-addiction’, bad hygiene, and total absence of African friends they are today.” Similarly, N.K. Jemesin’s essay on Janelle Monae cuts right to the heart of all that nostalgia: “I’m watching The Jetsons, and it’s creeping me right the fuck out.” If Faust’s piece is the most rigorous, Jemisin’s is surely the most compelling, the most honest, the most authentic. Jemisin is a writer in full control of her voice and her message. Her piece is one of the few that actually forms a coherent critique of the nostalgia that frames the collection.

The short fictions are only a tad longer than the essays, which make most of them very short indeed. Curiously, only two or three out of the six have any real dialogue between the characters. The rest are recollections of past encounters in a confessional or journalistic style, the ultimate in telling and not showing. My guess is that the required word counts were kept strategically low, which granted the characters granted little room to breathe. Some stories, notably Lavie Tidhar’s, manage to work within the limits of brevity, and Tim Maughan’s manages to pack in an impressive laundry list of futuristic elements that are by now signature to his work, and his dearth of dialogue could be interpreted as a comment on the limits of memoir.

But really, I’d like to see longer pieces next time. Longer stories, and longer essays, with actual footnotes. What Wright is attempting with Adventure Rocketship! is quite exciting, sitting somewhere between a periodical and an anthology, and featuring voices we’re less likely to hear from. It’s also an ideal use of the standard spinner-rack paperback format, and the cover art is refreshingly contemporary, if rather disconnected from the subject matter. It’s promising. What it needs is some editorial focus, some breathing space, and a putting aside of the compulsion to feature everyone the editor knows in one volume.

Madeline Ashby loses her identity in INNER SPACE: Escape from LA. Read her in Arc 1.4: Forever alone drone, out now for screens, tablets, phones and in a collectible print edition.

Paul McAuley collects plot coupons.

World War Z
Marc Forster (dir)

We’ve had shambling zombies; we’ve had racing, rage-filled feral zombies. Now the blockbuster film World War Z, based on the novel by Max Brooks, presents flash-mob zombies laying waste to vast swathes of the planet. In this ambitious, big-budget attempt to combine zombie horror-flick tropes with a Contagion‑style race‑against‑time search for the cure to a global plague, the undead aren’t after the brains and flesh of the living. Their sole purpose is to spread the disease that’s transformed them, using superhuman speed and strength to chase down and infect new victims.

Unlike Contagion’s portrayal of global disaster through slick juxtaposition of multiple viewpoints, World War Z’s story sticks close to its hero, UN troubleshooter Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt). When zombies sweep across the world, Lane manages to get his family to a safe berth on a fleet of ships anchored far from land, but in return must help a young scientist search for the source of the disease. The first half hour, with its focus on survival in a city where zombies and panicking citizens are running amok, and infection spreads in visible waves, is rather terrific, but after that Pitt treks from place to place, brow furrowed, dutifully collecting plot coupons. There’s a great cameo from David Morse as a renegade CIA agent caged in an overrun airbase, and for a moment I hoped he’d partner up with Pitt and inject a little drama and oddball to‑and‑fro into the exposition, but no, he’s left behind as Pitt sets off after another coupon - this time to Jerusalem. And then to a WHO health facility in Cardiff, of all places, where Pitt works out a solution to the plague by the usual science-in-blockbuster method of forehead-slapping revelation and dodgy analogy. The story’s energy dissipates in a bunch of running-around-corridors scenes and close-up zombie-fu that appears to have been bolted on from a different film with a much lower budget, and it abruptly ends with the kind of voice-overed montage imposed by studio heads trying to impose some kind of conventional closure.

Director Marc Forster marshals some impressive action scenes - notably zombies swarming army-ant style over a city’s defences and a neat zombies‑loose‑on‑a‑plane bit - but these are interspersed between a great deal of solemn exposition, the global scope of the disaster being conveyed mainly by glimpses of news feeds and a single nuclear explosion. We’re never really made to care about the fate of the hero’s wife and kids (who are mostly written out of the second half of the film), and the PG‑13 rating means that there’s none of the traditional mayhem and spatter. Apart from some shoot‑em‑up stuff, most of the action, like a post‑Hayes code film, is above the waist, which leads to a risible moment as Pitt struggles to tug the business end of a crowbar from a downed zombie like a golfer lining up a difficult putt. World War Z is by no means the disaster that some are claiming, and there are hints that it was originally much more ambitious. In the end, though, its hybrid story fails to cohere.

Read Paul McAuley’s story The Man in Arc 1.2: Post human conditions, out now for screens, tablets, phones and in a collectible print edition.

Adam Roberts discovers that a little learning is a dangerous thing.

How to Make a Zombie
Frank Swain
Oneworld, PPB £11.99

Let’s start with the Trades Descriptions Act angle. The one thing Swain’s book does not do is tell its reader how to make a zombie. There’s a good reason for this (you can’t make a zombie), and a good commercial case for not admitting it straight off—the two words YOU CAN’T won’t fill 250 pages, no matter how large a font is used. Instead we get a preface ‘Recipe for a Zombie’ that notes the cultural ubiquity of the zombie-trope followed by seven chapters that tour, in leisurely but absorbing manner, around the topic. Chapter 1 looks at Haiti, from where the word ‘zombie’ comes. Swain traces the history of the concept and airs a few possible explanations for the phenomenon without plumping for one: maybe Haitian zombies have been poisoned to turn them into pliable sub-human slaves; maybe ‘zombie’ is how Haitian culture describes the severely learning-disabled; maybe it’s all superstition. Chapter 2 looks at the various attempts scientists have made over the centuries to revivify animal and human corpses. Some of these were barking up the wrong experimental-dog alley (passing hundreds of thousands of volts through a cadaver will tend to cook it, not reanimate it). Others showed some success in euthanizing and then resuscitating dogs. But the problem is that deprive a human brain of oxygen for 90 seconds and it starts irreversibly to necrose.

Chapter 3 takes the topic in a new direction: not the risen-from-the-grave aspect of zombies, but the lack of human affect they exhibit. Swain shows that there are various ways—toxins, narcotics hypnotism—by which people could have their will-power reduced to shambling, grunting, zombified levels. Chapter 4 goes further along this line, starting with the story of Texas Tower Shooter Charles Whitman, a model student whose murderously erratic behaviour may have been provoked by the large tumour wrapped around his hypothalamus and amygdala. We get a brief history of the lobotomy, and speculation about electronic implants in the brain to control moods (‘this may sound like a plot element from a sci-fi thriller, but …’ Swain rather irritatingly says). Chapter 5 continues the Overmastered-Volition theme by looking at various, and variously horrible, examples of insects, fungi and parasites that lay eggs inside, inject poison into the brain and otherwise treat other beasties very nastily indeed. This chapter ramps up the ick factor quite nicely, although I couldn’t shake the feeling that, by this point, we’d strayed far from the initial brief. Zombies in popular culture aren’t being controlled by some nefarious third party, after all. It is not that they lack volition; it is that they lack human mentition and empathy. As far as volition goes, they are as we all know strongly motivated to eat braaaains, which goal they pursue with a single-mindedness that borders on the wilful.

Chapter 6 begins (‘So you want to create your own zombie army’) as if directing the thesis back on track. But in fact it makes a knight’s-move into even more tenuously connected territory—rabies and Toxoplasma gondii—via the rather creaky justification that a zombie army needs ‘a distributed network, a plague of the shambling dead that can sustain itself, even organize itself, without your direct involvement.’ Can such a thing be achieved, Swain asks himself, without some kind of intellect to oversee it? Yes it can, he answers himself, thereby putting in question the rationale for including chapters 3–5 in the book at all. Chapter 7, finally, brings us back to human cadavers, from ancient burial rituals to organ transplant and blood transfusion, concluding with a too-brief 2-page summary of the history of cannibalism.

How To Make A Zombie is full of interesting and engaging things, but it is centripetally diffuse and only very loosely organised towards an overarching argument. Swain concludes that ‘death is a fuzzy principle’, which is true at the borderline although not (as Swain himself showed in his earlier chapters) more broadly—Napoleon is dead in a very definite, non-fuzzy way, after all; and Lady Gaga is as emphatically alive. His final address to the reader (‘You are an undead zombie, and you always have been’) feels unearned, and has more rhetorical than factual merit. Whole tranches of the zombie phenomenon aren’t covered at all. Swain nowhere addresses the grounds of the cultural appeal of zombies: why we find them so fascinating, how they differ from other cultural metaphors of death and drive—vampires, mummies—and what that tells us about contemporary life. Swain is not interested in the metaphor, I suspect. He is interested in the science.

The success of books designed to popularise science (‘Main Title Namechecking Famous Scientific Thingummy: Subtitle Framed As A Question?’) is a contemporary cultural phenomenon of great interest. Hundreds of titles have been published, and a good number have gone on to become bestsellers. This has brought a degree of understanding of science and nature to a wide audience, and that can only be a good thing. The question, I suppose, is whether such books fall foul of Pope’s Law (a little learning being a dangerous thing). Another way of putting this might be to see all such books, up to and including Swain’s, as examples of the QI-ification of contemporary knowledge. It feels heavy-handed of me to explain my reference, but for the benefit of those who don’t know: QI is a popular BBC2 TV panel show, hosted by Stephen Fry, where contestants strive to answer alphabet-themed questions in a manner that is quite interesting. The show, in other words, trades on a general appetite for trivia, leaning heavily on the patrician, schoolmasterish charm of its host. But a love of nuggets of trivia is not the same thing as a love of learning more generally conceived. A single datum of trivia—a trivium—gives its possessor the satisfaction of knowing specialised, non-obvious things without requiring her to invest the labour and time in actual learning. It can be traded, in a cultural context: at a dinner party, say, or down the pub with friends, a trivium can be swapped for a small increase in the esteem of one’s companions and a lightening of the collective mood. In this respect, a trivium is akin to a joke, or a piece of gossip. And that’s fine and dandy—I like jokes, and value gossip. But trivia, gossip and anecdotes do not add up to Knowledge, because Knowledge requires the effort of systematic and engaged effort. Knowing a whole bunch of anecdotal trivia will tend to make us feel cleverer, or at least better informed, than we really are. The problem with a general QI-ification of contemporary knowledge is that it dissipates knowledge as such, and corrodes the more effortful disciplines of science. Humans are grievously prone to generalise dangerously on the basis of anecdotes and decontextualized trivia; adding more decontextualized trivia isn’t the way to address this.

A couple of assumptions underpin the writing of Swain’s book, assumptions he (or his publishers) share with the producers of most Pop-Sci books. One is that There Must Be No Equations. Equations scare the regular reader; the regular reader is a raging Equationophobe. Two is that Facts Are Bland, and Must Be Spiced-Up. This up-spicing may be accomplished variously, for instance by adding dramatic descriptive prose:

The bodies of tens of thousands killed by the plague in England, France, Spain and Belgium law damp and rotting in mass graves, and above ground mildewed crops collapsed in boggy fields …starving villagers built pyres to burn those responsible [witches, that is], and bitter winds carried the smoke from them over a rancid land. To turn a phrase, death was in the air. [39]

These phrases haven’t been particularly vividly turned, it seems to me, but I don’t mean to snipe. Broadly, Swain chooses his interesting examples and writes clear, communicative prose; although occasionally he is slapdash (he calls Charles I ‘vainglorious’ when he means ‘celebrated’ [189], uses ‘precipitously’ when he means—I think—‘accordingly’ [137], and he describes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as ‘infamous’ [xi] which rather implies he doesn’t know what that word means). But my beef is less with him specifically, and more with the School of QI, and its assumption that e=mc² is dull but It was a dark and stormy night when the wild-haired scientist suddenly saw that e=mc² is not.

Another way of spicing up the data is humour—in How To Make A Zombie mostly confined to the occasional Pratchettian footnote about lambchops and the like. Another again is hyperbole: of American author and traveller William Seabrook, Swain says ‘Lusty, restless, red-haired, Seabrook was an inimitable character whose incredible life was reflected in the incredible stories he wired home’ [7]. Incredible! The problem with this latter is that cheques get written by the prose that the content of the book cannot cash. ‘How To Make A Zombie is filled with true tales that will keep you awake at night’, Swain declares at the beginning, an assertion that proves, to employ the idiom of science, falsifiable.

I’m not suggesting that Swain dumbs down his material. In fact he doesn’t. Indeed, there are many places in How To Make A Zombie where the author’s scientific idiom wins the battle against his populist one (‘T gondii causes excessive dopamine production, responds to anti-psychotics and is known to infect humans … a correlation between toxoplasmosis and schizophrenia had been noted as far back as the 1950s’, [180]). I found no errors of fact, and only a few errors of emphasis (it would be one thing to call John Donne an ‘English divine’; it looks weird calling Aleister Crowley one). But the sense of reading the whole book in one go is of a great number of anecdotoids only loosely constellated into an overarching whole; and it is this, I think, that expresses the underlying cultural logic of QI-ified Popular Science Writing. Like the zombies it never quite gets around to blueprinting for us, Swain’s book is assembled from orts and scraps and animated by a not-wholly-vivid force into shuddering life. There are lots and lots of popular science books like this, and I can certainly see this one doing well. It never BRRAAAIINS! but it pours.

Can the future be predicted? In his new book Time Reborn, physicist Lee Smolin sets out to show that the world is an unpredictable place, and that common-sense, Newtonian habits of thought prove seriously mistaken when applied to the great unbounded problems of our age, from economics to climate change.

Time Reborn: From the Crisis of Physics to the Future of the Universe
Lee Smolin
Allen Lane, HB £20 / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, HB $28

In the first part of our interview, Lee Smolin explains why Newtonian physics cannot be applied to the world as a whole, and why the work of Newton’s great rival, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, may hold the key to a new model of the universe.

In part two, Smolin explores the human implications of a world where time is real and true novelty in nature is possible.

Murdo MacLeod’s photo, snatched from a 2007 Guardian

Iain “Menzies” Banks (1954-2013)

Simon Ings writes

I first met Iain at Lumb Bank, a writing centre near Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire. The area has since become the hairdressing and financial services capital of the western world, but back then you could still find the odd lock-in. Banksie (always and forever Banksie: the other one is a parvenu) was teaching a course in writing science fiction. Mike Harrison was his guest reader, a prickly sod who’d just finished a story called Small Heirlooms, for my money one of the great short stories of his career. I didn’t get how Banks and Harrison were such mates — the one bristling with psychic armour, the other ebullient, friendly, and without any apparent side to him at all.

The next day, in my youthful suburban folly, I started channelling JG Ballard in a workshop. Banksie came down on me like a ton of bricks. There was, he said, no such thing as cultural anonymity. Ballard be damned, that sort of thing was a cheap out. “Everybody comes from somewhere,” he said. “Where you come from is your material. Where you are is your material.”

This is my abiding memory of Banks and it rubs oddly against his deserved reputation for generosity, kindness and good cheer. He was fierce. He was tough. There are different kinds of toughness in writing, and though by some measures Banks was as soft as set custard (“any chance of a second draft, Iain?!!”) there were, and are, few who could match him in his effort to realise his books. His places have a psychic economy about them. They are peopled by minds that are fully embodied, who eat and sleep and fuck and trip over their own feet. Who have friends, for heaven’s sake. Awkward relatives. Ambiguous desires. Who make mistakes. Who goof off. They are inconsistent. They are worlds. They come from somewhere and they are somewhere.

This is where Banksie’s imagination burned hottest. Imagination is not about realising a ten mile-long spaceship (though God knows he could turn out any number of them). It is about describing how a woman pours a glass of water from a kitchen tap, in a way that makes her and the water and, damn it, even the kitchen sink matter.

Banksie didn’t need psychic protection. He did not mine his talent, and so there was nothing, no anxiety, no wall of self-expectation to cave in on him. He did not mine: he surfed.

Years have passed. Anonymity stalks the comfortable places of the earth. Hebden Bridge has long since forgotten what it was. In Bloomsbury, meanwhile, where I work, the Virginia Woolf Cafe offers a selection of burgers and grills. An entire literary generation has embraced irony just to deal with this crap. They’ve been more or less successful. But Banksie was never one of them.

Nearby is the pub where I last saw him. It was just a couple of weeks ago. I’d heard he’d bought a BMW to burn up a little of all the carbon he’d been conscientiously saving and sequestering — he figured the world owed him that much. “If I can get it to 155, I’ll be happy,” he said. “After that the EU limiters kick in, but on Scottish roads that’s just as well.” He had pictures on his phone: a frictionless black lozenge hangs at an odd angle against mist-shrouded hills. The satanic bugger had not only asked his lover to be his widow; he was spending his dying days driving his own coffin.

What’s shocking about this is its sheer lack of irony. Banks lived life on its own terms and greeted death the same. That someone so well-adjusted to his own skin should want to sit alone in a room at home and write is the only real mystery left. The rest is an open book. He was, quite simply, brave.

Drink to him.

Adam Roberts celebrates the life of Jack Vance, “the Severed Phung-Head of 20th-century Literature”.

http://jackvance.com

John Holbrook Vance
28 August 1916 – 26 May 2013

1

The four novels that make up the Planet of Adventure series - City of the Chasch (1968), Servants of the Wankh (1969), The Dirdir (1969) and The Pnume (1970) - tell the story of Adam Reith, the sole (human) survivor of a crashed spaceship who must travel across the planet of Tschai, populated by various strange and alarming alien species. ‘Against a backdrop,’ says the blurb on the back-cover of my Tom Doherty one-volume compendium edition, ‘of baroque cities and haunted wastelands, sumptuous palaces and riotous inns, Reith will encounter deadly wastrels and murderous aliens, dastardly villains and conniving scoundrels. And always the random beauty in need of rescue!’ It’s not that this summary is inaccurate, as far as it goes, although it makes the work sound both less original and rather cheesier than it is. But by relating Reith’s adventures (on the level of content) to the traditions of romance plotting, it misses what is crucially estranging and beautiful about the novels.

I’ll give one example, from many; this one chosen because of the whumphing impact it had on my own juvenile sensibility when I first read it. Early in the (to British ears) infelicitously titled Servants of the Wankh, Reith is travelling by raft across a wasteland with a varied group of travellers when they see an approaching alien army.

’The Green Chasch,’ said Traz. ‘They know we’re here.’
The Green Chasch on their leap-horses were visible now to the naked eye: dark motes hopping and bounding in bone-jarring leaps.
Ylin-Ylan drew her breath. ‘Are they coming for us?’
‘I imagine so.’
‘Can we fight them off? What of our weapons?’
‘We have sandblasts on the raft. If they climbed the cliffs after dark they might do some damage. During daylight we don’t need to worry.’
Reith thought that they showed no great zest for the business of scaling the wall. Setting up camp, they tethered their leap-horses, thrust chunks of a dark sticky substance into the pale maws. They built three fires, over which they boiled chunks of the same substance they had fed the leap-horses, and at last hulking down into toad-shaped mounds, joylessly devoured the contents of their cauldrons. The sun dimmed behind the western haze and disappeared. Umber twilight fell over the steppe. Anacho came away from the raft and peered down at the Green Chasch. ‘Lesser Zants,’ he pronounced. ‘Notice the protuberances to each side of the head? They are thus distinguished from the Great Zants and other hordes. These are of no great consequence.’
‘They look consequential enough to me,’ said Reith.

So far, so planetary-romantic. But it’s at this point in the story that Vance introduces us to a Phung.

Traz made a sudden motion, pointed. In one of the crevices, between two vanes of rock, stood a tall dark shadow. ‘Phung!’
Reith looked through the scanscope and saw the shadow to be a Phung indeed. From where it had come he could not guess.
It was over eight feet in height, in its soft black hat and black cloak, like a giant grasshopper in magisterial vestments.
Reith studied the face, watching the slow working of chitinous plates around the blunt lower section of the face. It watched the Green Chasch with brooding detachment, though they crouched over their pots not ten yards away.
‘A mad thing,’ whispered Traz, his eyes glittering. ‘Look, now it plays tricks!’
The Phung reached down its long thin arms, raised a small boulder which it heaved high into the air. The rock dropped among the Chasch, falling squarely upon a hulking back.
The Green Chasch sprang up, to glare toward the top of the butte. The Phung stood quietly, lost among the shadows. The Chasch which had been struck lay flat on its face, making convulsive swimming motions with arms and legs.
The Phung craftily lifted another great rock, once more heaved it high, but this time the Chasch saw the movement. Venting squeals of fury they seized their swords and flung themselves forward. The Phung took a stately step aside, then leaping in a great flutter of cloak snatched a sword, which it wielded as if it were a toothpick, hacking, dancing, whirling, cutting wildly, apparently without aim or direction. The Chasch scattered; some lay on the ground, and the Phung jumped here and there, slashing and slicing, without discrimination, the Green Chasch, the fire, the air, like a mechanical toy running out of control.
Crouching and shifting, the Green Chasch hulked forward. They chopped, cut; the Phung threw away the sword as if it were hot, and was hacked into pieces. The head spun off the torso, landed on the ground ten feet from one of the fires, with the soft black hat still in place. Reith watched it through the scanscope. The head seemed conscious, untroubled. The eyes watched the fire; the mouth parts worked slowly.
‘It will live for days, until it dries out,’ said Traz huskily. ‘Gradually it will go stiff.’
The Chasch paid the creature no further heed, but at once made ready their leap-horses. They loaded their gear and five minutes later had trooped off into the darkness. The head of the Phung mused upon the play of the flames.

I remember how powerfully this brief interlude in the larger narrative affected me when I first read it as a teenager. There is something that resists comprehension, without being merely random or surreal, about the Phung’s apparently capricious disregard for its own life. An eight-foot high grasshopper dressed like an eighteenth-century traveller; its decapitated head, slowly drying out, yet still philosophically observing the motion of the flames. Rarely does fantastic writing, or any kind of writing, generate an image of such power.

In the novel, Traz and Anacho start an argument regarding the nature of the Phung (‘Traz declared them to be products of unnatural union between Pnumekin and the corpses of Pnume…. “Sheer idiocy, lad!” said Anacho with easy condescension … [Traz] lowered his lip in a sneer. “No! They go singly, too mad to breed!” Anacho made a finger-fluttering gesture of fastidious didacticism.’) The fact of this disagreement, and its elegantly mannered expression, matters much more than the content of it. A mad thing! It plays tricks. But tricks are the point in Vance’s writing. ‘Consider the human mind!’ advises Apollon Zamo in Showboat World (1975). ‘It is capable of amazing feats when used properly. Conversely, without exercise it atrophies to a lump of gray-yellow fat.’ Vance’s writing shows us a human mind in proper motion. Even when severed and sitting on the ground, the Vancean head imagines things more elegantly (that black felt hat! The cloak!), more meditatively and with more antic marvel, than any other writer I know.

2

Vance died at the end of May, three and a half years shy of 100-years-old. His age means that his death cannot be considered a shock, exactly; but the news is grievous, nonetheless. A prolific writer of a unique, intensely atmospheric and beautifully mannered sort of science-fantasy, Vance influenced creative figures as diverse as Michael Moorcock, Gene Wolfe and Gary Gygax; but although I do not write fantasy, and have little (least of all their major reputation) in common with those three individuals, Vance has influenced me too, and profoundly. A love of Vance is so closely twined around my own creative imagination that it’s hard to separate it out, and look dispassionately at what Vance achieved.

Christopher Priest, in his Guardian obituary, recalls meeting Vance in 1981, when

he was guest of honour at a science fiction convention in Rotterdam. He was at that time the best-loved and highest-selling SF writer in the Netherlands. His fans were eager to meet him. A genial but private man, he appeared on the platform bearing a ukulele and a kazoo. He said he would answer one question only – from the floor someone asked if he ever used personal experience in his books. He replied “I am not an egotist!” and started strumming.

Disinclination to discuss his own artistic practice was characteristic of the man. ‘The master chef slaughters no chickens in the dining room,’ was how he put it, adding (it’s a subtly different point); ‘the doctor writes prescriptions in Latin; the magician hides his hinges, mirrors, and trapdoors with the utmost care.’ There must have been connections between Vance’s private life and his art, but it is not possible to say with certitude what they might be. In his youth he worked at many different low-paid jobs, and served for years in the merchant navy; and in later life he was fond of travelling to exotic places. This informs a body of novels, each of which (more often than not) takes a young, slightly morally-opaque young man on a series of peripatetic adventures through strange, usually dangerous, always marvellous locales. His villains often are, precisely, egotists; his heroes tend to demonstrate the Odyssean virtues of endurance, ingenuity and courage. One Homeric epithet in particular, ‘nimble-witted’, captures Vance’s book to a t.

It is often claimed that what is distinctive about Vance is his style. A half-truth, though with enough of an oyster-grit of veracity in it to, perhaps, roll-up into a pearl. Certainly, there is something elegantly distinctive about Vance’s use of language: refined, witty, sometimes orotund and rococo, often genuinely funny, always alive to irony. Indeed, it is as an ironist that Vance has, perhaps, the greatest claim upon our attention - an ironist in the Richard Rorty sense of the word (give me more space and time, and I’d dilate upon that; but as it is, we must hurry on). Vance’s novels tend to be set in hierarchical, intricate worlds, not because he valorises hierarchy or fetishes complexity, but because these sorts of worlds give his fertile imagination room to explore the tension between the rigidities of convention and the fluidities of endeavour. ‘Freedom, privileges, options, must constantly be exercised, even at the risk of inconvenience,’ notes a character in one of Vance’s best books, Emphyrio (1969). ‘Otherwise they fall into desuetude and become unfashionable, unorthodox - finally irregulationary.’ The sentiment gains much from its sweetly archaic mode of expression: a sense of the larger structures within which its call to restless action must be construed. A formal courtesy of manner against which the often violent self-interest of Vancean characters pulls.

That said, and as many commentators have noted, there is a same-y quality to Vance’s plotting, most of which spins restless variants on what academics call ‘Romance’ conventions: quests, journeys, separated lovers, concealed identities, knights overcoming monsters, wily magicians and marvellous devices. I prefer to see this as fidelity to a particular narrative form, rather than any paucity of imagination—after all, Vance, in his style, events and images, showed enough imagination for forty ordinary writers.

The plots work their energies out: revenge, quest, coming-of-age, the attempt to return home; because (Vance says) the world keeps throwing the same stuff at us. We must keep our wits nimble to counter these constantly shifting variations on the same encroaching threats. Only a fool trusts that what was the case yesterday will be true tomorrow. This applies to our lived-experience, but also to our literary or generic expectations as readers. I’ll give you an example. In Lyonesse, the wizard Shimrod is in love with the beautiful Melancthe. She persuades him to embark upon a quest into a strange alien dimension called Irerly to retrieve thirteen jewels, promising to give herself to him if he achieves this. Shrimrod, after the logic of these kinds of quest narratives, is given a series of magical props to aid him on his journey: a sheath to protect his skin, two insect-like robots called Hither and Thither to guide him in and out, and a pair of viewing disks or twinned monocles (Vance has a particular fascination for magic eyeglasses) to enable his organs of perception to work in the alien environment. We may not know exactly what will happen to the wizard on his journeys, but we expect them to pan out according to a certain set of generic conventions. Following the elaborate set-up, in which Shimrod receives all these items, we expect the wizard to use them, one by one, to navigate through the dangers of his quest. But as soon as we enter the perilous dimension, Vance knight’s-moves our expectations:

In Irerly conditions were less easy than Shimrod had hoped. The sheath of sandestin-stuff lacked consistency and allowed sound and two other Irerlish sentiments, toice and gliry, to chafe against his flesh. The iron insects, both Hither and Thither, at once shriveled into mounds of ash. Further the disks intended to assist perception were out of proper adjustment and Shrimrod experienced a startling set of dislocations: a sound that reached him as a jet of ill-smelling liquid; other scents were red cones and yellow triangles which, upon adjustment of the disks, disappeared completely. Vision expressed itself as taut lines striking across space, dripping fire.

Quite apart from its beguiling, synaesthetic strangeness (in what ways, I wonder, do toice and gliry add to our mundane five senses?), this seems to me to capture something important about the world. We are all born into a world that is, in ways, as bizarre as Irerly. We must all make sense of perceptions and circumstances as disorienting. The universe is governed by a set of apparently arbitrary rules which we must learn and must obey on pain of disproportionate punishment. Like the ancient mariner, whose crime (killing a seabird) seems massively out of whack with his and his crew’s extended, nightmarish punishment; or like the many fairy tales (a tradition to which, in the largest sense, Vance’s own writing belongs) predicated upon precise attention to near-incomprehensible magical rules, Vance’s writing captures something true about the world that is, speaking generally, better understood by kids than adults. The ruling deities operate according to a whim of iron. Your best bet, Vance says, is to be canny, observant, polite, but always ready to act decisively. That seems to me very good advice.

In 2010 I wrote an afterword for a new edition of Vance’s Lyonesse trilogy. Afterwards, I received an email from Tim Sherburn, that said:

This last Saturday I was in the Oakland area and was able to have a visit with Jack Vance at his home. He wasn’t really aware of the new Lyonesse book being issued by Gollancz and he had me read him the afterword you wrote. He was very gratified and almost embarrassed by your praise for the books. Anyway, he asked if I would send you an e-mail thanking you for your kind words.

Few things in my career as a writer or critic have given me as much pleasure as this email.

Read Adam Roberts’s Three Surprising Theories of Science Fiction in Arc 1.1: The Future Always Wins, out now for tablets, phones and screens.

Keith Brooke enjoys love in a cold climate

Love Minus Eighty
Will McIntosh
Orbit, PPB £7.99

Sometimes you start a book and you can’t put it down. You sit up late, just waiting for that “convenient place to stop” when you know the only convenient place to stop is at the end. Will McIntosh’s Love Minus Eighty took me almost two months to read from start to finish. Those two months featured far too much in the way of hospital time for me and those around me, and there were plenty of other little dramas to intrude on my reading time. To read this book I had to pinch ten minutes here, twenty minutes there, often with long breaks in between. Reading like this can be a chore unless you’re blessed with a really good book, and this, I believe, is just that: it was one that occupied my thoughts when I was unable to sit down and read, one I genuinely looked forward to coming back to, and one I intend to revisit under better circumstances, when I’m free to stay up a bit longer, and stop at that most convenient of places.

Love Minus Eighty is the story of billionaires using innocent young women for sex: that whole rich alpha male thing. No, we’re not looking at the boom in Fifty Shades of Grey-led billionaire erotic romance (just search on “billionaire” at Amazon, I dare you); in this case the women are corpsicles, attractive women who died young and have been kept on ice with the possibility that they might, one day, be revived and fixed. Cryomed’s bridesicle programme revives such women for brief “dates” with their wealthy suitors. If they are lucky, they will revived and married off to the billionaires, contractually bound to do whatever their new husbands demand in return for a second crack of the whip. Fifty Shades be damned: while it is a story of love and relationships that cross paths and intertwine, McIntosh’s gripping and sweetly moving tale is anything but a pile of romance cliches.

There’s something very Golden Age about this lovingly detailed future: a constant and entirely welcome subtext of “look at this - isn’t it cool!” This is a world where the population are immersed in social media and extra-sensory augmented realities, where everything is overlaid by extrapolated versions of Facebook and YouTube, where things aren’t real unless they’re validated by your virtual followers. It’s a world where reality TV has become reality: exaggerated, superficial, and always played to the audience.

In a core cast of maybe half a dozen characters, the lead is Rob, an innocent musician, out of his depth in the High Town world of the elite, and a thoroughly decent guy (it’s hard to write convincingly about a character who is so nice, but McIntosh gets this spot on). When his girlfriend decides to analyse and destroy his private possessions in a bid to increase her virally-growing online audience, Rob drives off in a rage and, in a momentary lapse of concentration, knocks down and kills an innocent woman. When he learns that she has been “saved” as a potential bridesicle, he knows he has to somehow get in to see her and apologise, but how can a down-and-out musician pay the fees? And what becomes of a bridesicle who doesn’t get enough interest to justify the expense of preserving her?

While Rob’s story is powerfully told, the more poignant parts of Love Minus Eighty are in the form of the vignettes told from the point of view of Mira, the oldest woman remaining in the cryo facility. She is eighty years out of her own time, a gay woman who must pretend to be straight in the hope that one of her wealthy male suitors will rescue her. Fragmented memories of her past are set against the brief fragments of hell she experiences in the present day, sticking a wonderfully memorable character in an unforgettably impossible position.

For such a fine novel, the end is a disappointment - rushed and pared down, and a little hard to swallow - but that shouldn’t stop Love Minus Eighty being a contender for awards.