2011 Hugo Nominee: Novella - "Troika" by Alastair Reynolds

Speaking of old-fashioned, Reynolds’ novella takes us to one of the most classic of sf tropes: the Big Dumb Object. In this case, we have a mission of later-twenty-first-century neo-Soviets going to examine a massive satellite complex they call the Matroyshka (named after the nesting dolls because it’s composed of a series of shells). Most of the story is told in flashbacks by an escapee from a mental institution as we learn that the members of the expedition have not fared well upon their return to Earth. There are a few interesting twists along the way, including a nice one that serves as the source of the title. The biggest twist, however, doesn’t really seem to serve any narrative purpose other than to give the story something shocking for its last ten pages.

Alastair Reynolds is at the vanguard of space opera and hard sf today, and I have a review of one of his works coming up when we resume our march through awards history in the fall (did I just use the royal we?). I’m not sure if this is the best introduction to his work though. Whereas many of our stories this year have done new ideas in a clean, retro-style; this feels like an old cliché dressed up in a more contemporary, Big Ideas style. I find that combination less appealing myself. It’s not that there was anything I actively disliked about this story; it’s quite decent. It just didn’t really capture my imagination (and it didn’t come close to drawing an emotional reaction from me) like a good sf story should.

Grade: B-

2010 Not-a-Hugo Nominee YELLOW BLUE TIBIA by Adam Roberts

I’m going to review a couple of 2009 novels that did not receive Hugo nominations this year, just to give a little more context (and because I have read or planned to read these novels already). The first I want to discuss is Adam Roberts Yellow Blue Tibia, which made the shortlist as a nominee for the Clarke and British Science Fiction Awards (and made some waves when Kim Stanley Robinson suggested that it should win Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize for literary fiction).

It’s an odd one. The novel takes place in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and it’s Roberts’ rendering of Soviet society on the brink of its collapse that is probably the most fascinating part of the book. The narrator, Konstantin Skvorecky, is part of a group of science fiction writers called together by Josef Stalin after World War II to design an alien invasion scenario that the USSR can use to distract the West. Forty years later, Skvorecky is a recovering alcoholic who hasn’t written in years. He picks up a job translating for Scientologists visiting from the United States, but he soon discovers that much of the scenario he helped create decades earlier is beginning to come true (beginning with the Challenger disaster). The next part of the scenario involves a nuclear reactor in Ukraine called Chernobyl.

As I said, the setting is brilliantly rendered, and Roberts gets a lot of mileage out of the science fictiony realities of the ‘80s (UFO religions, exploding spaceships, reactor meltdowns, etc.) I liked the characters, but there is a Coen Brothersesque cartoonishness to them: everyone has to be comically dimwitted, obese, or deluded. Skvorecky himself is supposed to be an elderly and broken man, and he is even further damaged as the novel progresses, but he still manages to make it through several action scenes and have a romance. The plot is also terribly convoluted and prone to seemingly random digressions like a Coen Brothers film. Overall, I do think the novel wavers too much on the line between straight sf and literary surrealism. I usually enjoy genre-bending, but, in this case, I was slightly bothered that the novel couldn’t establish a consistent tone.

Still, it’s fun and stimulating stuff. I’m not going to moan that it was robbed of a Hugo nomination, but I would recommend it, especially to fans of the Coen Bros., and I’d easily rate it above www.Wake.

Also, that’s one of the best covers I’ve ever seen.

Grade: B