Category: speculative fiction

A being darkly wise

On By CalmgroveIn review, speculative fiction35 Comments
T2i image generated by https://experiments.runwayml.com/generative_engine/

Roadside Picnic
by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky.
Translated by Olena Bormashenko,
foreword by Ursula K Le Guin,
afterword by Boris Strugatsky, 2012.
Gollancz, 2012 (1972).

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.

From ‘An Essay on Man: Epistle II’ by Alexander Pope

Superficially a speculative thriller, the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic for me turned out to be a deeply philosophical novel under its science-fictiony veneer. For the most part it focuses on a character called Redrick, a chancer who lives for the pleasures of alcohol, tobacco, gambling and occasional sex, living at some unspecified future time somewhere in North America. So, initially, a not very edifying tale.

The ostensible premise is that extraterrestrial visitors have touched down at six points on the Earth’s surface and then just as mysteriously departed, leaving behind their detritus in what turn out to be highly dangerous, disturbance-filled Zones. It is for this debris that Redrick and others enter the Zone adjacent to Harmont, to retrieve alien junk for the black market.

But there are deeper matters to think about than mere cupidity. At the central point of the novel we find ourselves listening to a conversation about the implications of this First Contact, implications that should matter to all humankind but which if ever considered are soon forgotten. In its underhand way Roadside Picnic encourages us to quietly consider those implications.

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Godforsaken paths

On By CalmgroveIn review, speculative fiction28 Comments
The third temptation of Christ: Christ and the devil on a pinnacle of the temple.’ Coloured chromolithograph after John Martin. Wellcome Collection.  (CC BY 4.0)

One Billion Years to the End of the World
by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky,
translated by Antonina W Bouis (1978).
Penguin Classics Science Fiction, 2020 (1977).

“I was told that this road
would take me to the ocean of death,
and turned back halfway.
Since then crooked, roundabout, godforsaken paths stretch out before me.”

Yosano Akiko (attributed)

A physicist, a biologist, an engineer, an orientalist and a mathematician walk into an astrophysicist’s apartment. No, it’s not the start of a joke but essentially the main action of this immersive novella by the Strugatsky brothers, also translated as Definitely Maybe: A Manuscript Discovered Under Unusual Circumstances.

Set in 1970s St Petersburg, then known as Leningrad, most of the action takes place in astrophysicist Dmitri Malianov’s apartment while his wife and son escape the city’s hot and humid July oppressiveness in Odessa on the Black Sea. Here he seems to be on the brink of discovering a link between stars and interstellar matter which he dubs ‘Malianov cavities’.

But he is constantly being interrupted, by phone calls, a delivery from the deli, even a visit from one of his wife Irina’s schoolfriends. And he is not the only specialist who isn’t able to settle to achieving a breakthrough — which is where the physicist, biologist, engineer, orientalist and mathematician come in. What is there to link their inability to progress their work, and who or what is causing it?

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A history of human stupidity

On By CalmgroveIn review, speculative fiction25 Comments

Cat’s Cradle
by Kurt Vonnegut.
Penguin Books, 1965 (1963).

“Why should I bother with made-up games when there are so many real ones going on?” — Felix Hoenikker

In early 1961 the world teetered on the brink of nuclear destruction at the height of the Cold War. Barely a decade and a half before this the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been virtually annihilated by atomic bombs, those supposed children of theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer.

Meanwhile, another scientific polymath – Irving Langmuir, with whom Vonnegut’s brother worked – was developing techniques in the 1940s to de-ice aircraft wings and to seed clouds for the purpose of inducing rainfall (though Langmuir’s attempts to lessen the force of a hurricane only succeeded in increasing its intensity). Around the same time, as a prisoner of war Kurt Vonnegut famously survived the 1945 Allied firebombing of Dresden by sheltering in a slaughterhouse’s meat locker. Motifs from all these historical events, along with much more, will find their way into Cat’s Cradle (1963).

The author, born in November 1922, had lived through momentous times, and unsurprisingly this novel reflects them. But it also has an extraordinary historical footnote of its own: in 1970 Vonnegut persuaded the University of Chicago to accept Cat’s Cradle in place of the thesis for his master’s degree in anthropology which he’d never completed. In effect it was a “history of human stupidity” such as that referenced in the final sentence of the novel.

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Doom foretold

On By CalmgroveIn review, SF, speculative fiction12 Comments
mars2
Mars, showing one of the polar caps (NASA image).

Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert.
New English Library, 1972 (1969).

Talk, think, talk, think, talk;
conspiracies in deep space
while billions die.

I must confess my heart sank when I began reading this, the sequel to Dune, to find it seemed to be not just more of the same mind games played between key characters that its predecessor relied on but also relatively devoid of action of any kind.

There was the usual psychological power play conversations indulged in by powerful individuals who were either human computers, psychics, drug users with heightened prescient awareness, shapeshifters or revenants, in fact nary an ordinary human being among the lot of them.

How would it be possible for the reader to make an empathic connection with beings who are palpably superhuman?

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Genre straddling

On By CalmgroveIn fantasy, review, speculative fiction4 Comments
The model for Dune? The Red Planet: Mars image from NASA.

Dune by Frank Herbert.
Gollancz, 2001 (1965).

Foretold one gets dumped
in desert, then goes native.
Returns, beats baddies!

Dune is one of those thoughtful novels that successfully straddles the genres of fantasy and speculative fiction. SF often deals with philosophical ideas and scientific concepts in a fictional setting where exploration of the conundrum frequently takes precedence over the plot. Fantasy, on the other hand, often shows less interest in mechanisms and tends to go for a variation on a familiar narrative.

Dune presents itself as a fantasy (Chosen One has to restore or improve on the previously obtaining status quo using quasi-magical means) with a large dollop of scientific speculation (planetary ecology, resource exploitation, human behaviour and ethics).

A cursory reading will pick up on the essential Good versus Evil theme, while a closer reading will consider the dilemmas that the main characters have to confront within the harsh environment they find themselves in.

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Multi-layered page-turner

On By CalmgroveIn review, speculative fiction22 Comments
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.

Helliconia by Brian Aldiss.
Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter.
Gollancz SF Masterworks, 2010.

The Helliconian trilogy is a multi-layered composition, as long and as rich as The Lord of the Rings, as colourful as a medieval tapestry and as polemical as an eco-warrior’s handbook.

Aldiss is a prolific author in various genres, not just in science fiction; but SF at its best can itself include a great many genres, and this trilogy therefore has aspects of romance, epic, fantasy, prose poetry and science writing all flourishing in symbiosis with each other.

And, like any great narrative, it is not only a great page-turner but has you caring about its characters.

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Grendel’s galactic mother

On By CalmgroveIn review, SF, speculative fiction17 Comments
Cetus, Perseus and Andromeda, from a Corinthian vase (Wikipedia Commons)
Cetus, Perseus and Andromeda, from a Corinthian vase (Wikipedia Commons)

The Legacy of Heorot
by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes.
Sphere Books, 1988 (1987).

‘Chance favours the trained mind.’ — Louis Pasteur, quoted as chapter 21 epigraph.

A second close skim through this — I first read and reviewed it in 2001 — confirmed what a rich novel this was, from its maps by Alexis Walser to the range of apt literary quotes as chapter headings, and from its scientific premises to its broader and occasionally more dubious environmental messages. As always there is so much one could say, but a short(ish) review will have to focus on a few points that particularly intrigued me.

At twelve light years from our solar system Tau Ceti (or τ Ceti) has long been of astronomic interest in that it is known to have similarities to Earth’s sun Sol and therefore the likelihood of exoplanets orbiting it.

Given that this novel first appeared well over three decades ago it’s significant that recent research has proposed up to five planets in the Tau Ceti system, with one of these being possibly in the habitable zone (though a widespread debris disk may well have disposed of or reduced any evolving life forms).

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Biological meddlings

On By CalmgroveIn classic, review, speculative fiction35 Comments
Image created using https://wepik.com/ai-generate

The Day of the Triffids
by John Wyndham.
Penguin, 1999 (1951).

‘… their true origin still remains obscure. My own belief, for what it is worth, is that they were the outcome of a series of ingenious biological meddlings – and very likely accidental at that.’ — Chapter 2 ‘The Coming of the Triffids’.

Quoted by Erasmus, the adage “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king” may prove applicable in the case of Bill Masen, the narrator and protagonist of John Wyndham’s prescient 1951 novel. An example of what Wyndham termed ‘logical fantasy’, The Day of the Triffids posits a realistic scenario – technological innovations that get out of hand – and then speculates on what may reasonably be expected to follow.

Although written in the postwar period when Cold War paranoia and fear of nuclear annihilation were ramping up, its themes of satellite warfare and unchecked biological manipulation find fresh resonance in the 21st century as anxieties over a new Cold War intensify.

In Wyndham’s novel matters are viewed through the eyes of a ordinary biochemist researching a carnivorous plant that can uproot itself and which poses a mortal threat to anyone unable to see it in time. Unfortunately, something has caused most of the world’s populations to become sightless overnight. Who will reign in the land of the blind?

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All knowledge is local: #Love Hain

On By CalmgroveIn #LoveHain, review, speculative fiction25 Comments
Nebula in the Orion constellation

Four Ways to Forgiveness
by Ursula K Le Guin.
Vista, 1997 (1995).

“All knowledge is local, all truth is partial,” Havzhiva said. “No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is a part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.” — ‘A Man of the People.’

Four interlinked novellas – to which are added detailed, almost encyclopaedic, notes indicating the degree of worldbuilding that went into the background of these stories – make up this contribution to Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle of speculative narratives.

Focusing on the neighbouring planets of Werel and Yeowe, both about to be newly accepted into the Ekumen family of inhabited worlds, this collection draws our attention not to broad brush strokes of the planets’ history but to the impact tumultuous movements and events have on the lives, relationships and imaginations of certain individuals caught up in social change.

As always, and for all that her stories are set in future times and distant worlds, her alien characters are faced with the same dilemmas, challenges and decisions as humans on our world have always faced, the same kinds which we’re facing now and which we’ll continue to face in the foreseeable years to come.

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Distorted perceptions

On By CalmgroveIn review, speculative fiction11 Comments
Isle of the Dead (painting) Isle of the Dead (German: Die Toteninsel) is the best-known painting of Swiss Symbolist artist Arnold Böcklin
Arnold Böcklin, ‘Die Toteninsel’ (1886, Basel)

The Dream Archipelago
by Christopher Priest.
Gollancz, 2009 (1999).

“Nothing was clear,” the narrator of the final story in this collection declares at one point, and that may be the judgement of many readers. What does become clear though is that the Dream Archipelago of the title can actually be a nightmarish place for individuals living on the islands, especially those coming from the mainland hoping to establish new lives for themselves in a new environment.

The world to which this short story collection gives us entry is one which is both like and yet unlike ours. There’s a northern continent with two opposing polities who have been, or will be, conducting a war for three millennia on the mostly uninhabited southern continent; there’s a Midway Sea with an archipelago of several thousand Islands girdling the equator and extending into the tropics.

But there’s also a pervasive disturbing quality about the whole world where perceptions are likely to be distorted at a moment’s notice, whether by natural or artificial means, meaning everything feels destabilised and nothing is certain.

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Carry their sun with them

On By CalmgroveIn SF, speculative fiction38 Comments
Icy seas: photo by Dylan Thompson on Pexels.com

The World in Winter
(original title The Long Winter)
by Sam Youd, writing as John Christopher.
Introduction by Hari Kunzru.
Penguin Worlds,
Penguin Books, 2016 (1962).

‘Put fire in their hands and they will not be afraid. They will carry their sun with them even here.’

‘The sun brings life,’ he said, ‘not death.’

Pt 3, 5

In the 1960s it was believed that we were due to a return to a Little Ice Age, an interglacial cooling such as those beginning around 1650, 1770 and 1850, each separated from the next by a warmer interval. Triggers suggested for this cooling included volcanic activity, changes in oceanic circulation, alterations in orbit or the tilt of the earth’s axis, reductions in human populations from war or disease, and cyclical decreases in solar irradiation or insolation.

In The World in Winter (first published in 1962 as The Long Winter) the author plumps for the final explanation as the cause of the so-called Fratellini winter, a rapid and drastic climatic change which sees much of the northern hemisphere above 35° latitude disabled by snow and ice packs in the sea, including Britain where the novel starts.

Here is where we meet Andrew Leedon, a television documentary maker, and through his eyes we view radical changes not only in living conditions but also in geopolitics, society at large and personal relationships. Ultimately where will loyalties lie – if, that is, one manages to survive?

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Other worlds

On By CalmgroveIn review, speculative fiction26 Comments
‘Another World’ by M C Escher (1947): Escher Foundation

The Distance of the Moon by Italo Calvino.
‘The Distance of the Moon,’ ‘Without Colours,’ ‘As Long as the Sun Lasts,’ and ‘Implosion’, translated by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks and William Weaver.
Penguin Moderns 22, 2018 (2009).

Four short stories from Calvino’s collections known collectively as Cosmicomics – in Italian Le Cosmicomiche – make up this slim selection. With two translated by William Weaver and the other two by Martin McLaughlin and Tim Parks respectively, the pieces in the quartet have a convoluted history of publication and translation from the 1960s to the early 21st century which, luckily, need not concern us too much here.

How to describe them and their effects? Perhaps the best way is to consider M C Escher’s 1947 print ‘Another World’, a monochrome version of which appeared on the cover of the first Italian edition by Einaudi in 1965. Here is what appears to be a bird with a human face, which stands on the open ledge of a tower room poised above a lunar landscape with craters; in the black sky above can be seen celestial bodies; hung from an arch adjacent is a stopped animal horn, though whether it’s an ornament, a musical instrument or a drinking horn is unclear.

But most disturbing of all is that Maurits Escher offers us three impossible perspectives: from above, from below and face on. This perhaps gives the innocent reader a hint of what perplexities might await them in Calvino’s short stories.

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Bold travellers

On By CalmgroveIn review, speculative fiction35 Comments
WordPress Free Photo Library

Journey to the Centre of the Earth:
Voyage au centre de la Terre (1864)
by Jules Verne,
translated by Robert Baldick (1965).
Puffin Books, 1994.

Consider this. A bookish stay-at-home type is suddenly sent on an unexpected journey by a scholarly but forceful elder figure, reluctantly catapulted into adventure through the appearance of a document covered in cryptic runes.

The expedition leads to a distant land, where a secret tunnel in a mountain is revealed when a shadow occurring on a key date indicates the entrance. What riches will be revealed in the subterranean depths, and what perils and monsters will be encountered to jeopardise a journey home?

No, this isn’t a reference to the children’s classic The Hobbit, though aspects may sound remarkably like part of its synopsis. But it does beg the question of whether Tolkien realised key features of his fantasy, first published in 1937, may have owed much to Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, seven decades earlier.

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#LoveHain: City of Illusions #UKLGsf

On By CalmgroveIn #LoveHain, speculative fiction6 Comments
‘Futurity.’ © C A Lovegrove. Image created using Wombo.Art app

It’s the last Friday of the month and the time to pose three general questions for those who are participating in #LoveHain, my readalong event to visit or revisit most of Ursula K Le Guin’s Hainish fiction.

This month it’s City of Illusions, the third title in her early speculative fiction, first published in 1967 and now often republished, as the last in a trio with her two previously published Hainish novels, in a compendium entitled Worlds of Exile and Illusion.

April’s title for consideration will be one of her more famous SF offerings, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), and the discussion post for that will be scheduled for Friday 28th April – I do hope you’ll feel able to join in the conversation.

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Alike in dignity: #LoveHain

On By CalmgroveIn review, speculative fiction8 Comments
Photo by Dylan Thompson on Pexels.com

Planet of Exile (1966)
by Ursula K Le Guin,
in Worlds of Exile and Illusion.
Orb Books, 1996.

Five thousand nights of Winter, five thousand days of it: the rest of their youth and maybe the rest of their lives.

Chapter 14

Stranded for six centuries on a planet circling the star Gamma Draconis – Eltanin, ‘the serpent’s head’ – a community of humans live isolated in their coastal town called Landin, near a promontory rock to which it’s linked by a high causeway. They are known to their indigenous neighbours as ‘farborn’, and because they’re dark-skinned are visually distinct from the pale-skinned, golden-eyed inhabitants of the planet.

A further difference is that the highly intelligent life-forms (called ‘hilfs’ here) have a stone-age subsistence as well as culture – having no concept of the wheel, windows, or books – and in keeping with their ethical principles of non-interference with a less technologically advanced culture the farborns are careful to limit the reach of any innovations.

But two factors are coming together to upset the fragile standoff between the farborns in Landin and the hilfs in their incomplete settlement of Tevar. The severe planetary winter is coming, a season which lasts fifteen earth-years; and news is emerging of a mass migration south by the marauding Gaal, inimical to both communities. On a personal level a relationship is forming which will threaten any concerted action to counter the coming storms.

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