Rene Cloke's Alice

Gorgeous Irene ('Rene') Cloke illustrations in this 1930s edition of "Alice in Wonderland", including a splendidly alien-like Caterpillar.

I also like this rather diabolical endpiece:

Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things (2014)

Faber is a novelist I esteem a great deal; but this novel left me pulling my 'lost dog pondering a sign-post' face. It's not badly written, or wholly uninteresting; but by the same token I can't honestly say it really works or that I liked it, or that it struck me as ultimately worthwhile. I'd be tempted to peg it as falling down in the ways familiar from previous 'literary' novelists deciding to have a go at genre sf; except Faber's debut Under the Skin was a proper SF novel, and a very good one. So what goes wrong here?

I'll qualify myself straight away and say that some elements here go very right. The core of the novel is a portrait of a happy marriage, Peter Leigh and his wife Bea, put under the strain of enforced separation, and that's very precisely and movingly worked. I also liked very much the way Faber treats the Christian faith of his Peter and Bea: it's central to their senses of self, and it's handled in the novel with great scads of earnest Christian evangeloid and soul-searchy discourse, as they both try to comprehend and do what they take to be God's will. Like the marvellous BBC series Rev., Strange and New Things manages to give a sense of Peter's life as a vicar in England as one defined by external stresses and practicalities without losing sight of the inward, sustaining faith. It's rare to see that in contemporary fiction. (Of course, the fact that strangeness and newness have always struck me as the crucial Christian salients, howsoever obscured by centuries of tradition and the affection people have for tradition, doubtless helped Faber's representation of Christianity strike home for me where that was concerned). One of the novel's best moments, I thought, is when Peter recalls the day he proposed to Beatrice, 10.30 on a morning of sweltering heat, as the two of them were standing at a cash machine in the high street prior to doing a supermarket shop.

Maybe he should have gone down on one knee, because her "Yes, let's" had sounded hesitant and unromantic, as though she considered the proposal nothing more than a pragmatic solution to the inconvenience of high rents. [203]

Everything in the day goes wrong: their bank card is swallowed by the machine; when they go to the branch to get a new one the teller is rude and insulting and Bea storms out in a rage; outside they discover a vandal had scratched a swastika into the paintwork of the car; Bea's phone loses battery; the first garage they visit is shut, the second quotes a huge sum for the work to repair the scratched paintwork; then they discover the car exhaust is shot and will need replacing, none of which can they afford. When they eventually get home Peter realises the lamb chops they had bought had spoiled in the heat. He is about to throw them out in fury, but changes his mind. He finds Bea on the balcony of their flat, gazing at the brick wall opposite.

Her cheeks were wet.
'I'm sorry,' he said.
She fumbled for his hand, and their fingers interlocked.
'I'm crying because I'm happy,' she explained, as the sun allowed itself to be veiled in clouds. 'This is the happiest day of my life.' [204]

It's a moment more-or-less nicked from Flaubert's L'Éducation sentimentale of course, but never mind that. It works very well.

So, alright, but here's the problem: all this stuff is prologue and backstory only. The main focus of The Book of Strange New Things, and the reason why Peter is separated so painfully from Bea, is that he has accepted a job with a commercial corporation called USIC to work as a Christian missionary on a distant planet, Oasis. Most of the novel is set here, a hot, rather barren world with 72-hour-long night, constant rain and a spongy surface that soaks all the water up. How the water thereafter convects back into the sky to fall as rain again is not explained. Indeed, throughout these sections, the SF fan's imagination taps Faber's writing to find it not ringing true. Peter agrees to go despite knowing absolutely next-to-nothing about the distant world (Earth as a whole seems improbably uninterested in this habitable, populated planet with its English-speaking aliens), and even less about the organisation that is taking him on. He doesn't even know what 'USIC' stands for. On the space flight to his destination, and upon arrival, other characters drip-feed him (and us) information, but the notion that he'd be parcelled off on this epochal journey without training or briefing simply boggles the mind. There is some hand-wavy intimation that the hyperspace jump has scrambled his memories, so that he's forgotten stuff he was briefed on, but it's not very convincing. When Peter arrives on the planet he's left to his own devices by the other members of the colony; oddly offhand behaviour by his otherwise cost-conscious new employers, given that the expense of transportation means every coke he drinks costs hundreds of dollars and every email he sends his wife (and with nothing else to do he sends a lot) cost them $5000 a pop.

Eventually Peter makes his way to a village of aboriginals -- humanoid in shape and wearing hooded abayas, the main difference to us being that their faces look like 'two foetuses curled up'. Whatever that looks like. Peter discovers, which fact nobody had bothered to tell him, that there was a previous missionary called Kurtzberg who has subsequently disappeared; and that the otherwise opaquely baffling aliens are desperately enthusiastic to receive more Biblical teaching, readings from what they call the 'Book of Strange New Things'. So Peter sets to; and his learning the world is interspersed with epistles between himself and his wife in which she details an increasingly desperate climate collapse on the home planet, and slowly grows apart from him.

The further I read, the more I began to wonder if the weird conceptual ellipses and apparent clumsinesses were going to be explained by some clever final reveal. But, no. They're not. The rather infuriatingly leisurely telling finally works its way to an end, whereupon the reader pauses to reflect how debilitatingly second hand the whole SF element is. This is Blish's A Case of Conscience, without the focus or imaginative steel; and without Blish's deep engagement with the problematic of the human, rather than alien, incarnation of Christ in the gospels. It's Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow (a much inferior book to Blish's) with only the blandly nice aliens and not the rapist feline overlords. The result is The Book Of Depressingly Familiar and Old-Fashioned Things.

Nor, despite some lovely passages here and there, is it an especially well put-together novel. Faber's novel starts slowly, and then drifts through hundreds of pages  detailing Oasan agricultural routines and Oasan funerary practises and the Oasan habits of shitting in the streets without breaking stride. It picks up some emotional heft again towards the end, though the actual ending itself, avoiding spoilers, is very anti-climactic. When he wants to represent the Oasans speaking their own language (and the difficulty they have speaking English and pronouncing our 's' and 'd'), Faber goes fontbonkers:

Over on Twitter, Samir H. (@ap0cryphal) tells me this is indeed Arabic, though in garbled form ('a native Arab speaker would be able to tell what's actually in that sentence, reading right-to-left' he tweeted me; adding 'the "s" character is called "meem", phonetically it's an "m" sound; "t" character is called "lam," phonetically it's an "l" sound'). I stop short of accusing Faber, with his bernouse-wearing, crumple-faced, shitting-in-the-street, yearning-to-hear-the-true-Gospel, white-protagonist-can't-tell-them-apart, village-dwelling, Arabic speaking aliens, of trading in racist stereotypes. But I'm standing right on the line, there. Who knows? Maybe he uses Arabic font because it's available on the MS Word font menu, and so was ready-to-hand. I don't know, though. (Near the end of the book, he refers to one of the alien's hoods as a 'hijab', so maybe it's all deliberate).

The real problem, it dawns on you as you read, is that Faber just isn't that interested in his alien Others. His story is about the strain placed upon a loving marriage by distance and other difficulties. That in turn makes the alien worldbuilding, the planetary colonisation plans, the aliens themselves pasteboard, set-dressing. A shame, all in all.

On the upside: nice cover design!

Ian Sales, Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above (Apollo Quartet Book 3) (2014)

Sales is a friend of mine, or as close as any male from the south of England can be friends with a male from the north of that country (never a proximity to be measured in millimetres, that. It can't be helped. It's stipulated in Magna Carta). What this means is that you must take any praise I offer here with a pinch of salt. Then again, you don't need to take my word for it. The first volume of his Apollo Quartet (2012's Adrift on a Sea of Rains) deservedly won the BSFA award, and was shortlisted for the Sidewise to boot. If I liked the second volume, The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself (2012), a smidgen less, it wasn't because it was any less well written, but rather because the central conceit seemed to me to have a flaw in it. In another writer, flaws matter less; but with Sales you notice even slightest imperfections, because his literary sensibility is so fine tuned. He writes with control and precision, taking the rocket science of his alt-historical Apollo era seriously, getting all the technical details right and not shying away from the equations. At the same time he writes with conscious and only sometimes self-conscious literary skill. It's a combo that has made for a fascinating and compelling series of novellas.

Sales isn't the only writer to meld hard-sf accuracy with a properly literary sensibility, of course. Amongst contemporary writers Paul McAuley, for instance, comes to mind. But McAuley's 'literariness' has much to do with a fine style and vividness of observation out of William Golding. Sales is a different sort of author: stylistically quite purged and plain, but structurally quite ambitious. Not for nothing is he writing a 'quartet': Apollo is Lawrence Durrell without the wild thickets of purple over-prosing. And of the three Apollo Quartet books out so far, Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above seems to me easily the best. It is divided between 'up' and 'down' chapters (with a leavening of 'strangeness' and 'charm'). In the up sections, an extended Korean war has resulted in Mercury astronauts being recruited from the ranks of female pilots. In the down we're in a different timeline: a US Navy bathyscaphe descends 20,000 feet into the Atlantic Puerto Rico Trench to recover a film packet dropped from a spy satellite. The two stories are well balanced, the absorbing pseudo-facticity of the former playing well off the genuine tension and excitement of the latter; and as in the earlier books (and as with the earlier books, on a formal level) the implications of juxtaposition are only partly spelled out. The result is a very memorable and effective piece of writing indeed. I am very much looking forward to seeing how Sales finishes the quartet off, not least because it will then become more apparent how the whole quaternion structure fits together. Excellence is here.

Eric Brown, Jani and the Greater Game (2014)

Steampunky alt-historical India: British Raj, 1920s vintage. A mysterious energy source called 'Annapurnite' has enabled Britain to maintain a boosted global empire. Jani Chatterjee, precocious teenager and the daughter of an Indian government minister, is returning home from Cambridge University via airship when the Russians attack. She is saved from Russian violation and murder by a weird creature: 'long and thin, its skin deathly white ... its features were almost human' (alien? Frankenstein's monster? Peter Crouch?) From there-on it's a series of diverting adventures in Brown's alt-Raj: dastardly plots are afoot; life-size mechanical elephants are there for the riding; Annapurnite is not all it seems. It's enjoyable stuff, if perhaps a little underinflated, narratively speaking. Sometimes it reads like a jolly novella expanded to novel length; and few of the twists surprised me. Still, Jani is an appealing protagonist, and the pastiche Edwardian-y ripping yarn style is fun. But why take my 21st-century word for it? Why not go to the source: actual journals and newspapers from the alt-1920s. How do they describe the book? General Sir Rochford Faughles said



And? And whom? No matter. Turn instead to the celebrated sapient dog and critic, Sir Collie Wilkins, who identified the key elements of the story as comprising:



All in all: tasty.



The following image has nothing to do with Eric Brown, and is in no way intended as a caricature of him.

Joe Abercrombie, Half A King (2014)

Half a review. Prince Yarrrvi, descended perchance from pirates, is set the task of regaining his Aberkingdom by an Abercruel fate. Though born an Abercripple (and thus considered the titular 'half' mentioned on the book's abercover) Yarrrvi must use his Abercleverness and his one Abercapable hand to regain the Abercrown he never Abercraved in the first place, overcoming abadversity, hardship, double-abercrossing and the general Abercrappiness of the Abercosmos's attitudes to mortals. Trust no-one; for even those Aberclosest to you can betray you into slabery, sorry, slavery. In a nutshell, this is a lean, chilled, typically well-abercrafted tale. The world Joe has Abercreated is Abercrisply evoked; the Abercharacters work well; the violence, though Abercranked down a notch from First Law (this being YA), is Abercrimson enough for most palates. Most of all it's immensely, rather disgracefully readable: gripping and twisty. An Abercracking yarn. If I had one Abercriticism to make, it would be that

Michael R. Underwood, Attack the Geek: a Ree Reyes Side-quest (2014)

I disliked this book. I also misliked it, unliked it, de-liked it and anti-liked it. Maybe if I'd read the previous 'Ree Reyes' novels that latter reaction wouldn't have been so anti. But then again, do we really need the previous instalments when Underwood gives us the kind of complete summation of character of which Proust himself, were he alive, would surely be envious? 'Ree Reyes (Strength 10, Dexterity 14, Stamina 12, Will 18, IQ 16, Charisma 15—Geek 7/Barista 3/Screenwriter 3/Gamer Girl 2/Geekomancer 2)' [13]. Rees and her pals are able to access magic skills, plus Harry Potter wands and lightsabres and so on, by invoking various genre pop-culture references; and these they use to fight goblins, gnomes, minotaurs and other monsters through sewers and geek boutiques ('bout-giques'?) called things like 'Grognard's Grog and Games'. It's a sort of D&D game come to life, and the longer it went on the more tiresome and charmless I found it. It wants to be Buffy; but Buffy had dialogue to die for. This book has (to pick some examples at random) '"Thou shalt not fuck with one of thy best friend's relationships" she told herself' [19]; "You know what? Fuck you, you worthless piece of shit." [52]; '"Holy Shit!" Rees said.' [117]; '"The fuck?" Rees asked' [128]; "Motherfucking fireballs" [174]. Oscar Fucking Wilde it fucking ain't. The plot is a hectic mishmash of bewildering interactions, fighting, swearing and running through shit. But the real problem is the author's inability to bridge the 'you had to be there' divide. The point of this book is to capture some of the joy (a genuine and wondrous joy) we feel when we hang out without friends and do fun things, like playing games. You try to pass the joy along, saying 'we had a blast man! Eastwood said this really hilarious thing!' But when you repeat the hilarious thing, you find your interlocutors are only smiling politely, and not dissolving in helpless laughter the way you did. Now, a writer worth her/his salt can recreate the ambience and make the hilarity come alive again. Underwood can't do this.

But that's fine. Your dice-age may vary, and I (Pomposity 10, Fondness-for-Nabokov 9, Englishness 879) am surely not the target audience here. But, at the risk of pushing my pomposity score even higher, I found myself wondering whether this short novel figures not as a celebration of geek culture and in-crowd together, but instead as an indictment of it. When your friends swear, especially swear inventively, it is funny, because they're your friends, and you know they don't actually mean to harm you. But when somebody you don't know swears at you it is unpleasant and intimidating and scary. There are reasons why the idiom of courtesy is the right one for public interactions. But SF, in its faceless online conversations, very often loses sight of this. I'm guessing this is compounded of the fact that (a) if I swear aggressively in, say, a tweet, you may decide to take this as a sign that (though we've never met) you and I are friends, and grant me leeway. So perhaps the hyperprofane idiom is assumed by some to be a kind of bonding ritual. There may also (b) be a failure of empathy, or more complexly a failure to understand that the Other who has never met you has no grounds to empathise with you, behind this: the fabled asperger's-spectrum personality limitations of the geek. So if I tweet that (to pick an example out of the air) Paolo Bacigalupi should have acid thrown in his face for his portrayal of Thai characters, it may be that you assume everyone will know you aren't serious. Hey! Nobody who knows me would think I would actually throw acid in anyone's face! The failing here, of course, is that other people, including the textually assaulted Bacigalupi himself, don't know you, and have no reason to give you the benefit of any doubt. Verbal assault is still assault. Then again, (c) I wonder if the main problem is a broader inability of tonal nuance. If Geek A has a disagreement with another person over some matter, and addresses him/her with 'Fuck you. You can fucking bleed-out in a back alley while I sit watching you, sipping my caffè macchiato'. Perhaps Geek A thinks that the main effect of such expression is to convey just how vehemently s/he feels about the point at issue. But that's not the main effect. The main effect is to paint Geek A as callous and violent. The vehemence is in service of a deeply unattractive pointed discourtesy. There are better ways of disagreeing; and by better I mean 'more effective' for any metric of effective you prefer. And there are much, much better ways of writing insults into books. Let it be written in ten-foot-high letters in the public agora of genre, that nobody miss it: VEHEMENCE AND VIOLENCE ARE NOT THE SAME THING.

Marcus Sedgwick, The Ghosts of Heaven (2014)

[Note. There are four quarters to this review; they can be read in any order and the review will work. The four quarters assembled here are in just one of twenty-four possible combinations; this order makes one kind of snark, but the reader should feel free to choose a different opinion of the book, if desired.]

QUARTER ONE.
Not 'first quarter', but, instead, 'quarter one', like that.
Ever-so-slightly unidiomatic.
No matter. For the whole section is
written
in a diffuse kind of
verse. A stone age girl
sees a spiral carved in the rock, in a cave.
Under ground, under-
powered. Some great novels have
been able to pull-off the 'start with a long poem'
malarkey.
Not this. The problem,
the problem is the verse
just isn't
very good.

QUARTER TWO. The Witchfinder General rode into the 17th-century English village his heart full of malice. Devilry was everywhere! Oh, nobody calls him the Witchfinder General. Oh, nobody marks his physical resemblance to Vincent Price. They think he's just the new vicar. But he sees the simple villagers dancing their spiral dance in the graveyard! He smells out their unreformed pagan rituals!

Ah but the villagers have the social cohension of a Simpsons instamob, and are easily persuaded to turn. Drown the witch! Drown pretty young redheaded Anna Tunstall, whose mother has just died! And (when her brother pulls her out of the pond and saves her life) put her on trial!

'If you please sir,' said the virtuous, sobbing young Anna. 'It's all a misunderstanding! This is no Vincent Price-era schlocky Hammer melodrama! No, no, sir, it is a focussed tragedy after the manner of Arthur Millers Crucible!'

'Silence wench!' screamed Father Escrove, spittle flying from his withered lips. The whole courthouse moaned. 'Nuance and subtlety are the Devil's cruet set! We aim for a broader emotional response, here! So I order: strip this toothsome young redhead naked, here in the very courthouse, for all to see how attractive, er, I mean, how witchy-wicked she is!'

QUARTER THREE. It's the 1920s. The spacious insane asylum in upstate New York is build around a large spiral staircase. Spirals you see. You're starting to see how this works? You're grokking the Cloud-Atlasishness? Anna saw the same rock-carved spiral under the water, as they were trying to drown her, as the cavegirl saw, and there's bound to be a plethora of spirals in this section too. Shells, waves, but most of all stairs. There's a mad poet inmate who watches the sea obsessively (his famous collection of poetry is called On Drowning), and one of the asylum doctors mourning his drowned wife Caroline. Dexter is terrified of the staircase; so the bullying Asylum Director forces him to look at him at it ('Dexter's eyes were wide with terror as he looked to the very top of the building where that fine spiral staircase ascends into the cupola, and he screamed a long and empty scream, a howl from the bottom of his mind, that spoke of the unnameable horror at the world before him' [25]. Wait, how can the scream be both empty and speaking?) Of course the Asylum director is a cackling villain, and his hired goons are violent rapists. Of course our narrator is a sensitive, troubled soul.

QUARTER FOUR. Stardate 2001 plus howevermany years. Starman Keir Bowman (seriously; that's the dude's name) is on route for 'New Earth' in the constellation of Lyca. He is woken every ten years to perform 12 hours of shipboard duties. A couple thousand passengers in deep sleep, ready to be woken at the far end of the journey, and he the caretaker-astronaut. But people are dying in their Longsleep pods. What about all the stuff to do with spirals? 'Spiral rotation of galaxies ... the hurricane eye of Jupiter ... the motion of the Earth ... the DNA inside him' [371]  ME: Affirmative, Book. I read you. BOOK: Open the pod bay deeper cosmic significances, Adam. ME: I'm sorry, Book. I'm afraid I can't do that. BOOK: What's the problem? ME: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.