2009 Clarke and Campbell – SONG OF TIME by Ian MacLeod

Ian MacLeod is yet another innovative Brit to break in at the start of the twenty-first century. This novel made a very good first impression on me. The prose is stunning; this is easily one of the best-written novels I’ve read for this project. I’m just not sure that the story lives up to MacLeod’s crisp and elegant language.

The novel is narrated by a British woman of part-Indian descent named Roushana Maitland. Most of it is a sort of memoir of her life through the twenty-first century, which turns out to be a rough one. As environmental disasters, war, refugee crises, and increased religious and racial strife take their toll on the world, Roushana deals with personal tragedies and becomes a violin virtuoso. This sort of dystopia pile-on isn’t especially new – I was reminded a lot of Butler’s Earthseed at times – but the perspective of a wealthy and successful artist is more original. Some of the sub-plots add some new wrinkles as well – like post-human “ghosts” and a Frankenstein’s-monster messiah figure who sells bottled water and takes Paris by storm. There’s also a framing story wherein we follow the elderly Roushana in Cornwall as she encounters and befriends a mysterious naked man who washed up on the beach.

The writing and Roushana’s story were strong enough to keep me turning the pages, but some of my initial enthusiasm wore off as the novel went on. It’s just so damned bleak. MacLeod piles hate upon disaster upon disease upon destruction. Again, this isn’t unlike Butler’s Earthseed, but there are two big differences: Roushana isn’t as strong or compelling as Olamina. She’s often lost and confused, and she ends up playing second fiddle (pun alert!) to her composer husband Claude for much of the novel. Also Earthseed was a struggle for survival, while Roushana’s privileged position precludes that exciting element. When MacLeod unleashed his final U.S.-destroying disaster, I responded with an “Oh come on!” rather than getting further absorbed in the story. MacLeod also piled on a series of “surpise” melodramatic scenes from Roushana’s personal life in some late twists that also had me rolling my eyes a bit.

So, the darkness overwhelms a well-written story about the arts, but it’s not quite dark enough to be a compelling story of survival. And all of this rather overwhelms MacLeod’s exploration of his central themes of memory and mortality. But, it was an engaging read, and I’d like to check out some more MacLeod.

Grade: B

2011 Campbell Winner, Hugo Nominee: Novel - THE DERVISH HOUSE by Ian McDonald

Ian McDonald has made a splash in the past decade with a simple but effective formula: take a broad cast of characters, put them in a near-future setting of a developing nation, and add the ramifications of an important technological trend. River of Gods gave us AI in India, and Brasyl gave us quantum computing in, well, Brazil. Both of those novels did quite well in the awards circuit, and I’ll be covering both of them in the fall, but neither won the Hugo. Now, McDonald has his best chance yet with The Dervish House, which explores the effects of nanotechnology on the Turkey of the 2020s.

As I said, there is a formulaic element to these books, but it’s a really good formula. For instance, the big cast of characters with separate but interconnected stories allow McDonald to explore several different aspects of his near future, non-(semi?)-Western society. We get an ambitious young couple – the man is trying to make a fortune on oil from an irradiated Iran; the woman is trying to strike it rich finding an impossible-seeming artifact. We also have an even younger woman seeking to start a marketing career with a nanotech DNA-reprogramming start-up firm. And then there’s a delinquent who begins to believe he can see djinn after he survives an apparent suicide bombing and gets drawn into a group of Islamic fundamentalists. And then there are the typical (for McDonald) outsider characters, an elderly Greek scholar who fears ethnic cleansing in his beloved Istanbul, and an adventuresome boy with a life-threatening heart condition. McDonald weaves all of these stories together and moves them towards a thrilling climax that underlines the possibilities and dangers of nanotech.

I think this is the odds-on favorite to win, but I did find the book somewhat uneven. Most of the characters aren’t particularly likable, others aren’t all that interesting. The trader Adnan Sarioglu is neither, and yet he gets a great deal of the book’s space. The Greek Georgios Ferentinou is by far the most interesting character, and I wished that he’d get a little more of the novel's focus. Of course, the most important character is Istanbul. McDonald employs some of the best prose in science fiction today, and he uses it here to convey a rich sense of the history and geography of one of the world’s great cities. I’ve never been there, unfortunately, but my Turkophile father-in-law has been there often. He read the book, and said that McDonald captured the city perfectly.

There are actually a lot of similarities in setting and story with one of last year’s winners, Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, though McDonald is far more optimistic than Bacigalupi. I like that, but it does lead McDonald wrong at times. For instance, 2027 seems a bit early for most of the technological developments shown here, which is a consistent problem for McDonald (see last year’s novella). This and my lack of interest in some of the characters keep me from giving this my highest grade, but I did enjoy it quite a bit, especially the excellent writing, and it’s a strong frontrunner for me so far.

Grade: B+

2000 Hugo and Campbell – A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY by Vernor Vinge

It’s a good thing that I’d built and increased the lead time in my reading for this blog, because the whole project came grinding to an awkward halt for about a month when this book came up on the list. For the past few years, I’ve been in a groove where I read a novel or two every week, and that includes some eight-hundred pagers…but this one stopped me cold for some reason.

Some reason? I actually know the exact reason. This novel may look like a svelt 800 page novelette, but there’s about 10,000 pages of story in those 800 pages, and a lot of it, frankly, ain’t that interesting. In fact, between A Fire Upon the Deep and this novel, I can see a clear pattern in how I react to Vinge’s books: Phase 1) initial interest in the Big Ideas presented, along with a little confusion as I get my bearings. Phase 2) a long slog through the middle as everything bogs down in jargon and the characters plot and plot and plot, stop to plot a little, then plot some more. Phase 3) a jumbo exciting climax and generally satisfying dénouement. So, I come out liking about 2/3rds of Vinge’s novels, and in A Fire Upon the Deep it worked out fine. In Deepness, however, that middle third took up a solid 9000 of the aforementioned 10,000 pages. It was a slog.

Deepness takes place 20,000 years before A Fire Upon the Deep in the same “Zones of Thought”-verse, though the Zones don’t actually come up much. Humanity hasn’t met many aliens, and they just chug around in slower-than-light sleeper ships. There’s a large group of freedom-loving space capitalist traders named the Qeng Ho who swashbuckle around space (they’re mentioned often in Fire). They’ve found a crazy star that periodically shuts down, which they call OnOff. That’s mysterious enough, but when they learn that it’s inhabited, they have to check it out. Another group of humans, called Emergents, also hear alien transmissions, and the race is on. The Qeng Ho and Emergents work together for about five pages, but the Emergents ambush the Qeng Ho with a virus called "focus" that turns people into obedient computing machines. Meanwhile, we also begin to learn about the spider-like aliens on OnOff’s planet, who are undergoing their own version of Earth’s twentieth century (these are actually the best scenes in the drudgery of “phase 2”). I’d mention some characters, but they’re all super-brilliant heroic/evil generic plotters, and there’s a minor spoiler about the main character.

I’m actually fairly excited about the summary I just wrote, and I wish I could remember this novel more fondly. There are plenty of interesting Ideas, half of which I haven’t even mentioned, and some intriguing twists at the end. But, that middle portion of the book just killed my brain. From the time the Emergents attack to the final confrontation is so repetitive, hopeless, and dull that I often put the book down for days at a time. I had zero connection with the characters, and there are several large time skips in the novel that really put me off. The whole thing takes place over several decades (I mean MegaSeconds…don’t even get me started on the metric time scale), and we’ll check in on a character after five years and find that NOTHING HAS CHANGED because they’re all SO DAMN BORING. This, of course, only increases the distance I felt from them.

It’s a rich book with wonderful ideas and some memorable moments. I tend to like this sort of ambitious, epic space opera, but I can’t really recommend this one, and I have to admit that I struggled to relate to it. I hope Vinge’s third Hugo-winner is shorter.

Grade: B-

1996 Campbell and Philip K Dick, 1995 BSFA –THE TIME SHIPS by Stephen Baxter

This novel racked up lots of awards and even more nominations, and it heralded a new wave of hard sf writers consisting of mostly British authors, like Baxter. The novel was authorized by the H. G. Wells estate as a sequel to The Time Machine to celebrate that landmark work’s centennial.

It does pick up right where The Time Machine left off; in fact, I had to put the book down after the first couple of chapters, read The Time Machine, and then start over with The Time Ships. This was fine, since a) it’s pathetic that I hadn’t read The Time Machine earlier, and b) The Time Machine is a very short work, under a hundred pages. Anyway, the unnamed Time Traveler sets off on another trip almost immediately after the events of Wells novel. He moves hundreds of thousands of years into the future, but quickly finds that something is wrong, and he is now in a different future populated by super-smart Morlocks with astounding technology. Working from the multiple universes of quantum theory, Baxter posits that the Traveler’s jaunts through time take him into different histories. He takes a New Morlock companion named Nebogipfel and continues his travels through a wide array of pasts and futures, many of them references to H. G. Wells books (including an alternate World War II with giants tanks like his “Land Ironclads”).

It’s a wild ride and a very fast-paced read. Baxter managed to explain some very big ideas and complicated scientific concepts without ever losing me for a second. His prose is straightforward and unadorned, and thus unlikely to get a lot of notice, but I do think this kind of communication skill deserves more appreciation. I’ve read enough bad non-fiction science writing to know that understandable explanations aren’t as easy as they look.

Still, I’m not quite sure that this is a worthy successor to The Time Machine. Wells managed to use his adventure tale to comment on the growing class divide he saw in industrial Britain. Baxter doesn’t make the same sort of comment on contemporary society, though there is some discussion about human nature, war, etc., none of it that deep, specific or revaltory. Also, even though it’s narrated in first person (and over five times as long), we don’t learn all that much more about the protagonist, and the rest of the characters are even slighter. The focus is on Big Ideas and action, but at least it’s very fun. The Time Ships could have said a bit more and delved a bit deeper, but it is a very entertaining and worthwhile read.

Grade: B

1990 Campbell – PACIFIC EDGE by Kim Stanley Robinson

I'm going to have a lot of chances to talk about Robinson as we go forward, but he is one of the reasons that I'm doing this project, and I want to mention his first award-winning novel, especially since it represents that rarest of sf genres: the utopia. Pacific Edge is the third in Robinson’s Three Californias trilogy, in which he presents three possible futures for the LA basin. The Wild Shore depicts a post-apocalyptic subsistence society, The Gold Coast shows us a highway-obsessed cyberpunk world, and Pacific Edge examines an ecologically-oriented society.

In 2065, America has splintered and ecological crisis has fostered new pro-environment attitudes and an emphasis on local control and democracy – basically the precepts of social ecology which guide the Green Party, an important force in the novel. The reason that utopias are fairly rare (and good utopia novels even rarer) is that it’s difficult to set up the conflict necessary to drive a narrative. Pacific Edge, for this reason, does feel a bit relaxed. The narrative turns on a love triangle between the protagonist Kevin Claiborne, his friend Alfredo Blair, and a woman named Ramona Sanchez. Kevin spends his days reshaping the very un-ecofriendly geography of Orange County to fit the values of the new bike-riding, wind-powered utopian society. He eventually gets into a political conflict with Alfredo over real estate development… okay, the stakes aren’t too high here, but it does work as a personal story, and it does add a tinge of drama to a novel that is mostly about describing a better way of living.

I love Robinson because he really focuses on the intersections of history, ecology, and geography – topics that are close to my own heart and at the center of my work. Those concerns do add something to the Three Californias, which would otherwise threaten to be a bit generic. Pacific Edge is the most laid-back and slowest of the three, but it’s also the most original concept. Don’t expect a roller-coaster ride, but it’s a well-written, character-oriented novel that does depict a really admirable world well. Robinson also plays some games with intertextuality in the novels, as they bleed over into each other through storytelling. It’s not Robinson’s best work, but they’re worth checking out if you do like his work and are interested in these genres.

Grade: B

1990 Clarke and Campbell – THE CHILD GARDEN by Geoff Ryman

In The Child Garden, Ryman brings a welcome quirkiness to the usually bleak genre of the post-apocalyptic dystopia. The novel has a dreamlike quality, and it’s heavy on metaphor. I hate to sound like a literary lightweight, buy I do generally prefer a more narrative-oriented approach; ambiguity can get old for me. But, this novel was effective nonetheless.

In the future, humanity discovers a cure for cancer and spreads it through viruses that prevent the disease among all people. Unfortunately, they later realize that they have shortened everyone’s lives by half or more as an unintended consequence, so that few people live past the age of 35. This is the sort of irony that Ryman builds the entire novel around.

Viruses are the great technology of Ryman’s future world. Viruses have been designed to convey different skills, information, and even opinions, and they propagate through the population, so that babies can be infected with a high school education. At adulthood (10 years), people’s personalities are integrated into a Consensus group mind, which rules their Communist society. Due to the side effects like the above mentioned shortened lifespan, and also apparently due to global warming, most technology has broken down. At the beginning of the novel, London is without electricity and messages are conveyed via runners.

In this world, we meet Milena, a girl who has a resistance to the viruses. She doesn’t have the knowledge or instant-learning skills of the others, but she is better equipped to learn things that are not part of the standard battery of virus-conveyed material. She also better appreciates things that are novel and different. She meets a musically talented, genetically engineered polar bear woman named Rolfa and begins to work on a massive artistic project – a holographic opera based on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Society seems both fearful and hopeful of the new ideas that Milena plans to provide.

The book fails quite spectacularly as a dystopia. To do a humorous dystopia right, I think a writer would have to lean on wry satire, but Ryman prefers sincerity and quirk. In fact, it seems at times that he’s just thrown all of the quirkiness he can think of against the wall to see what sticks – some of it works, but far from all of it. The novel seems to contradict itself at a fundamental level: the horror of this society is that everyone knows and thinks the same things due to the viruses, and we’re often told how conformist this future world is. But, the characters are all so wildly idiosyncratic that we never see that conformity. The dullest character is Milena, even though she is the one resistant to the viruses.

So, as biting social satire, The Child Garden doesn’t cut it. But I still enjoyed it quite a bit. It is fun and, at times, quite beautiful. Ryman is a skilled writer, and there are wonderful, lyrical passages describing childhood , art, love, and death. Ryman repeatedly refers to the work as a comedy, in the dramatic sense, and the transcendent and hope-filled finale was quite poetic as well.

Grade: B+

1986 Locus and Campbell – THE POSTMAN by David Brin

I recently read Cormac McCarthy’s lyrical post-apocalyptic masterpiece The Road for a book club. I think it’s going to be hard for me to read other post-apocalyptic novels after that one. I have read many of them before, including about half-a-dozen so far for this blog. As the Cold War winds down, however, they get fewer and farther between.

The novel takes place in the far-off year 2011, after waves of warfare and social destruction have wrapped around the globe following a world war that began in 1995. There were nuclear weapons, plagues, and fascistic militias. Gordon Krantz has spent much of the last sixteen years wandering across the mountain west, playing scenes from Shakespeare for food. When he discovers an old postal truck, complete with a uniform-wearing postal worker corpse, he decides that he can earn his room and board easier by delivering mail. This starts out as a cynical ploy, but he soon begins to weave a fantasy of a restored United States with a working Post Office in an attempt to unite the survivors of Oregon against a new militia attack. The messages are clear and simplistic – fascistic militias are bad, small town democracy (and America!) is good. It’s not that I disagree with these messages, but I don’t think they’re particularly interesting (though the view that a central state with strong institutions might be a good thing seems to get rarer every day). There are some more interesting ideas about the ethics of propagandistic lies, but this thread gets lost in a mélange of subplots and a manufactured action sequence that takes up the last quarter of the novel.

Actually, there are a lot of subplots here, and the novel’s biggest problem is probably how poorly they mesh. The first half is a merging of multiple novellas, and the plot does jerk through different episodes. The sub-plots also tend to really stretch the old suspension of disbelief. One involves a supercomputer* and the other a group of crazy neo-feminists. I’ve complained a lot lately about the lack of good female characters, and this novel is not an improvement: we have a comely and willing young married woman who sleeps with Gordon, and another comely-but-crazy, young neo-feminist who loves Gordon. That’s about the sum total of their characters.

I haven’t seen the Kevin Costner-starring film adaptation, which was a box office and critical failure (though I have some friends who like it), but I can see why the film might not work. The novel is a bit too transparent and sentimental in its patriotism and political messages, and it doesn't have the most cohesive plot.

*Brin wins an award for bad futurism here. He puts humans on Mars and gives them sentient AIs before the collapse…in 1995. Normally, I just let bad futurism pass with, at most, a sarcastic remark, but considering that one of the themes of the book is the problem-solving wonder of technology, it’s a tad more significant here.

Grade: B-

1984 Campbell – CITADEL OF THE AUTARCH by Gene Wolfe

I have mixed feelings about this, the final volume of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. I’ve been a fan of the work throughout the first three volumes of its run, but the concluding entry is definitely the weakest.

In Citadel of the Autarch, Severian goes off to war and then chances into his destiny, which has implications for all of Urth. The first third is the strongest, as Severian finds himself recuperating in a military camp and becomes the judge of a story contest. The stories are all wonderfully told, and there’s a brilliant conceit involving a captured enemy combatant’s story; the people of Ascians can only speak in memorized passages from their holy text, but we still get his story in translation. In the second third of the novel, Severian goes to war, and we learn that….wait for it….war is hell. It’s a message that I approve of, of course, but it’s the most generic part of this extremely original series.

I won’t spoil the conclusion, even though it’s revealed early in the series, but it does occur through a series of random events, and it puts the character in an entirely different place than he’s been. I can see various reasons for Wolfe to do things this way, but it was a bit unsatisfying because a) it is such a chance occurrence and b) it takes Severian away from the very personal story that has always been at the series’ heart. The Book of the New Sun has been a sort of anti-quest, and the big finish didn’t quite seem an appropriate conclusion to Severian’s wanderings.

Still, this was a solid entry and what has been a fantastic and influential series.

Grade: A-

2010 Hugo, Campbell, and BSFA, 2009 Nebula Winner: THE WINDUP GIRL by Paulo Bacigalupi

My Hugo votes are in (the deadline is this weekend), and we're in the homestretch of our coverage!

In early 2008, high oil prices led to food riots in more than a dozen countries around the world. Paulo Bacigalupi's first novel, The Windup Girl, focuses on these sorts of connections between food and energy within the framework of globalization. In this future dystopia, the world has suffered a "calorie crisis" in which both fossil fuels and food sources have been exhausted by over-consumption, climate change, and genetically modified organisms gone wild. Electricity is a luxury. So is fruit. The automobile is virtually extinct. People depend on genetically modified animals such as mammoth-like "megadonts" to do much of their work. And, there are myriad new killer diseases that can ravage a population.

Bacigalupi sets the action in Thailand, a nation that has survived the worst destructions of the contraction caused by the calorie crisis with some nationalist and sometimes isolationist policies. Yet, it's still vulnerable to the big agribusiness/bioengineering firms of the West, the Calorie Companies. Bacigalupi writes in third person, but he alternately focuses on four interconnected storylines: Anderson Lake is an American "Calorie man" (or economic hit-man) whose duty is to gain access to Thailand's seed bank. Lake's employee, Hock Seng is an ethnic Chinese refugee from Malaysia who has lost everything and will do anything to regain success as a business man. Jaidee and his assistant Kanya work in the Ministry of Environment and try to protect Thailand from foreign business interests and their own government's corruption. Finally, Emiko is a "windup girl" from Japan. She has been genetically modified to serve as a sex slave, and she is hated and horribly abused for her differences. All of the characters face a series of dramatic crises that eventually explode with major geopolitical implications.

The Windup Girl is the heir to Stand on Zanzibar. Bacigalupi takes a set of contemporary problems and an understanding of global politics and projects forward a worse case scenario for a dystopian future. It's a chilling vision, but also a fairly grounded one. That's not to say it's a likely future (most alternative energy sources are inexplicably missing), but much of it is plausible, and thus it has a lot to say about the world we live in.

The characters are very complex - they all do terrible things, and they're all obsessed with their own success or survival. Yet, they also all got moments of compassion and redemption. There was some talk recently on the social science blog Crooked Timber as to whether Bacigalupi's Asian characters fall into stereotypes, and I'll admit to having a similar reaction early in the novel. Hock Seng, especially, seemed like a duplicitous schemer right out of a yellow peril story from a hundred years ago. As the novel continues, though, I do think that Bacigalupi presents some very complex motives and personalities for the characters that pushed them beyond stereotype. It's the kind of book where I didn't necessarily *like* any of the characters, but I had moments of sympathy and understanding with all of them.

Bacigalupi is also a great writer, though there seemed to be more lyrical moments in the first half than the second. Overall, I likes the beginning of the book more than the end. It's such an unremittingly bleak picture that it did begin to drag me down. It eventually begins to feel like more of an anti-GMO, anti-neocolonialism screed than a novel with rich characters and insight into the human condition - the characters still shine, but they also get ground under heel to the point that they almost fade to the background. But, that's true for most of the great dystopian novels.

Despite the bleakness, I can understand why this novel has received the praise and awards that it has. It's a cautionary tale with rich prose that exposes the moral conundrums of global warming, peak oil, overpopulation, and genetic engineering through fascinating characters. The Windup Girl is a pretty clear contender for the best science fiction novel of 2009.

Grade: A-

1980 Nebula, Campbell, and BSFA - TIMESCAPE by Gregory Benford

I've always associated Gregory Benford's name with the hardest of hard sf - science fiction with real rigor in its physics. This is mainly because Benford is himself a working astrophysicist. This is the first Benford novel I've read, and I was surprised to find a very grounded piece that is much more about the lives of scientists and the culture of science than highwire applied astrophysics as the basis of a fictional world.

The novel tells two parallel stories. In 1998, the world is in a state of ecological crisis - the Green Revolution (which saved us from the fate of overpopulation that everyone in the '70s was so upset about) has turned into a disaster as genetically identical crops fail all at once at. At the same time, untested polymers have released toxic chemicals into the oceans, air, and food supply. Most of the novel takes place around Cambridge in England, where a group of physicists try to contact the past with tachyons in order warn them of what will happen and save the world. Meanwhile, the world begins to fall apart around them. We spend most of our time with John Renfrew, the head of the experiment, as he struggles to juggle his efforts to save the world while still spending time with his uber-housewife Marjorie. Slowly, the program's government liason, Ian Peterson, begins to dominate the 1998 sections - Benford apparently found him too compelling. Peterson is a privileged aristocrat and a ladies man, and it is fascinating to watch his uncomfortable reactions to the sudden deprivations and his efforts to get every women he meets into bed.

In 1962, physicist Gordon Bernstein at the fledgling San Diego campus of the University of California begins to notice the strange noise in his date. He soon discovers that it is a Morse code transmission with a great deal of biochemical data in it (the message from the future, you see). Many of his colleagues, however, refuse to believe that Bernstein is receiving strange messages from an unknown source, and Bernstein's career begins to suffer. Meanwhile, he has to deal with personal issues as his relationship with his girlfriend goes through a very rough patch, and his Jewish mother harangues him.

Despite the Big Ideas in here of ecological armageddon and communication through time, the novel is mostly a quotidian portrayal of scientists' lives, which is fine for most of the novel. The characters are richly drawn and Benford obviously has plenty of personal experience in the matter - his portrayal is certainly deeper and more balanced than the selfish and closed-minded cartoons of Flowers for Alrgenon...or even Asimov's The Gods Themselves. Still, after a few hundred pages of Ian's flirting, Marjorie's house parties, and Gordon's rotating fights with his department chair, girlfriend, and mother, it does start to get a bit old.

Actually, the novel's biggest flaw is how much the tachyon communication is neglected. Benford presents the communication like it's Sagan preparing a message for unknown aliens, but it's actually English-speaking researchers communicating in Morse code just a few decades back. And yet, the senders can't manage to find out how effective their messages are and can barely confirm that they are being received. Here's an idea: call up UCSD in 1998 and ask the physicists there if they got the message! And, if not....ask what would convince them! There's a lot of discussion in the novel about paradox, but no attempt is made to take the easy steps necessary to test any of the hypotheses.

By the end, it's clear that Benford has dodged the question so that he can make a big Twilight Zonesque reveal about the nature of time (I saw it coming from almost the beginning of the novel, but I've probably seen too much Star Trek time travel). It's an interesting conclusion, but it doesn't excuse or explain why the scientists were so damn dense.

Grade: B-

1979 World Fantasy Award and Campbell - GLORIANA by Michael Moorcock

Michael Moorcock is a big name in sci/fantasy literary history. He was most well-known for his Elric series, which focused on an albino anti-hero satire of Conan the Barbarian. Lately, he’s more well-know for his alternate universe tales of airships and other mechanical oddities. These stories helped inspire the increasingly popular steampunk subgenre and authors from Alan Moore to Thomas Pynchon have paid homage to them.

Gloriana is another alternative universe tale, though there are no airships to be seen (a few clockwork devices manage to show up though). Instead, we get a different take on the reign of Elizabeth I in England, though here she is Gloriana of Albion. The biggest difference between this world and ours seems to be that the big monotheistic religions don’t exist – instead of God and Allah, people worship Roman and Norse gods. Instead of Henry VIII, sixteenth-century Albion was ruled by the brutal dictator Hern. His daughter, Gloriana, has restored peace to the burgeoning empire, but one of her advisors, Montfallcon, still uses spies to manipulate events. These spies include an especially devious rogue named Captain Quire, who soon develops his own agenda and eventually seduces the queen. All of these intrigues are made easier by the fact that the royal palace is the size of an entire town, and a hidden society manages to survive within the palaces walls.

As I’ve mentioned before, I am a professional historian, so it’s probably not surprising that I enjoy historical fiction. This does extend to alternate history (another growing subgenre) as well. However, most alternate history serves to explore the machinery of fate, or the vagaries of cause and effect. If we change one event, how does that ripple outwards to alter the broader story? How much does one person matter in the scheme of things? Kim Stanley Robinson explores some of these questions in depth in The Years of Rice and Salt. Moorcock does not do the same here. Gloriana hues much more towards historical fantasy, a genre that I love on paper, but always feel disappointed by in practice. The alternate universe here exists solely for aesthetic reasons. It’s as if Moorcock wanted to tell a fairly standard Tudor tale (popular stuff for the last decade or so), but he didn’t want to have to worry about getting the historical details right. In this world, he can make up all the characters, create his own standards of morality and international politics, and generally play around as much as he likes. That’s all fine with me, but he loses much of the appeal to the alternate reality setting for me in the process.

Maybe “standard Tudor tale” is too harsh though. There are some intriguing allegories here. Furthermore, this is a well-written novel, and Moorcock manages to create a broad sense of Elizabethan language in the dialogue-heavy novel while still keeping the prose easy and fast-paced (basically, it’s Shakespeare light). There’s a lot to like here, but, in the end, I felt that the “truth” of our world’s Tudor England was more interesting than Moorcock’s fictional Albion.

Grade: B

1974 Hugo, John W. Campbell and Locus, and 1973 Nebula and BSFA Award – RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA by Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke is often credited as one of the “Big Three” fathers of modern science fiction along with Asimov and Heinlein, so it’s a bit surprising that it took him until the '70s to win a best novel Hugo. Rendezvous with Rama is a great first winner for him though. This is probably his best novel, and it's science fiction at its purest.

In the 22^nd century, astronomers on Earth sight a large object moving through the solar system with some odd characteristics. A probe soon shows that the object is a perfect cylinder over 50 km long – obviously artificial, and thus the first alien ship that humanity has ever seen. A ship from Earth is redirected to rendezvous with the vessel, and the bulk of the novel consists of the exploration that follows. A crew of astronauts enter the ship, which is apparently uninhabited by sentient life, and explore it, while governments throughout the colonized solar system debate what to do with this new discovery. The exploration is particularly fun, as the astronauts use the odd characteristics of a cylindrical world that generates all of its gravity by centripetal force to do some interesting things.

I’m not going to get to into the specific mysteries or conflicts – suffice it to say that it’s the mood that matters. Rarely do you get a book that’s both thoughtful and exciting as this one. It’s a fairly simple story, and the characters can be a bit interchangeable, but Clarke really shines at portraying the wonder and mystery of a great discovery. The novel is absolutely thrilling. It’s definitely a page-turner. I highly recommend it, and it was very deserving in its sweep of the major sci-fi awards.

I will add that I’ve actually read the sequels. Unfortunately, the law of diminishing returns definitely applies with the Rama series, which were mostly written by Gentry Lee, not Clarke. Rama II recreates some of the mysteries and discoveries of the first novel, but the series soon focuses on the conflicts that emerge among the human explorers (and eventually settlers) of another Rama probe. There’s more exploration of social issues, which I usually enjoy, but there’s an overwhelming pessimism and misanthropy that really cuts into the original novel's sense of wonder.

Grade: A