Gregory Benford and Larry Niven, Bowl of Heaven (2014)

Two big names in SF collaborate on a Big Dumb Object novel. The titular 'bowl' is a titanic construction built around a red star and travelling through the galaxy collecting life-forms. It is, in effect, half a Dyson sphere. Appropriate to this conceit, Benford and Niven have here written a half-arsed novel. Less BDO, more BOOO!

The thing is, I've a soft spot for these kinds of rude Rama retreads ('Re-rendezvous With Rama'?), and even Niven's hilariously cack-handed writing and plotting can't spoil the original Ringworld novel for me, where traces of grandeur still manage to cling, like wisps of morning fog, around the main idea (I say nothing of the myriad sequels, which are all terrible). BDOs are cool; scale and sublimity and the chance to let yourself wander, imaginatively speaking, around a varied and beguiling environment. Bowl of Heaven, though, is lamentably bad. There are two different levels on which it is simply not yet ready to be published. One is the level of story. We start with a sub-light interstellar spaceship SunSeeker, on its way from Earth to a planet called Glory. Key crewmembers are woken from hibernation because the ship's trajectory, in a co-incidence the scale of the cosmos licenses us to call 'bollocks', has crossed paths with the Bowl of Heaven. Since there's some question as to whether supplies will last the rest of the SunSeeker's voyage, on account of whoever supplied said supplies Earthside being obviously an idiot, the crew decide to fly their starship, complete with its sleeping cargo of thousands of human settlers, into the Bowl. This they do by nipping up the superheated plasma stream of the BDO's exhaust. You see, the 'bowl' has a big hole in its base, and mirrors in its concave inner surface focussing the starlight back on a spot on the star, which in turn shoots out the colossal plasma jet that moves the whole thing through space. The motion forward exactly counteracts the tendency of the bowl to fall into the gravitational well of the star, keeping the system in equilibrium. Except that late in the book some of the earthers see a sort of home movie of the Bowl being built, and there's no explanation of how the structure is kept in its orbit during the eons-long construction. No matter. Surely we can agree that flying up the stellar exhaust pipe is a stupid thing to do.

Of course, we know that Benford and Niven (I like to think of them as 'Nivbenford', the result of a tragic matter-transporter malfunction) need to get their human characters aboard Rama, Ringworld, Orbitsville, the Bowl of Heaven as soon as possible, so they can have Adventures. Let's give them a bye for that. The problem is once the characters are there, the story gets flushed down the cosmic toilet-bowl of heaven in short order. Nothing very much happens. The characters are so flat and interchangeable that not even the authors are able to keep them distinct. The landing party is a group of ten people [87] that immediately splits up, main character Cliff Kammash taking four with him, and Beth Marble taking, er, five with her. What? Sometimes the authors forget that Cliff is called Cliff and call him Carl [for instance on p.327]. Individuals specified as being in one group are casually referred to as being in the other group. One character is killed by native life forms, watched helplessly by other characters from the far side of a towering transparent wall. Those same characters later refer back to the event as if there had been no wall. Several events happen twice in quick succession, with slightly different characters, as if Nivbenford was trying out alternate possibilities only to forget to delete the less favoured one. The captain leaves the bridge, and a few pages later leaves the bridge. No sooner have the landing party arrived than they spend literally days trying to open a closed hatch (to, unless I misread, outer space) by burning it with seemingly inexhaustible lasers. It turns out they can't; but I don't know why they were even trying. There's little overall shape to the story, and only at the end do we discover (hah! ahaha!) that there is no end to the story either, for it is to be continued in an indeterminate number of sequels.

I mentioned two things; and the second is the worldbuilding. This is more deplorable, in a way, since the novel really only exists to display the cool BDO. But Nivbenford seem to have run out of space on the back of the envelope they used to plan this structure. It's big: 'bigger than the orbit of Mercury' [34]. To be precise 'it covered a perimeter about the size of Earth's orbit' [247]. Which is certainly bigger than the orbit of Mercury, I suppose. It rotates in nine days [247] except on p 315 where it rotates 'in about ten days'. How is the implausibly earth-like atmosphere kept inside? A barrier is stretched across the inside of the bowl, like clingfilm. Imagine the size of the roll they must have used! Ah, but how does the bowl steer itself, slow down to pick up new life forms, stop etc? We're not told, presumably because it can't. Out of what improbably rigid material is the bowl made, to prevent it breaking-up? Again we're not told, though we are vouchsafed that the construction of the Bowl entailed 'girders ... scaffolds ... crossbars ... joists and brackets the size of planets' [242]. Pull the other one. Nivbenford's imaginations have failed them, and they've reverted to an Empire State Building Sized construction rather than a solar-system sized one. This novel puts the 'ow!' in 'bowl' and the 'heave' in 'heaven'. If I were you I wouldn't touch this Bowl of Heaven with a barge-pole. Of heaven.

Susan Gray, Sum (2014)

I saw Susan Gray's excellent science fiction play Sum at the Bread and Roses, in Clapham, last Saturday night. There are still a few tickets available for the final three performances, at the end of this week (Thu Dec 4th - Sat Dec 6th, 7:30pm - 9:00pm) and I urge you to snap then up.

Sum is a play about the early days of a hivemind, set in a blasted near-future and tracing, through a sinuously threaded string of intense set-piece scenes, the tension between assimilation and individuality. The direction, by Chris Callow Jr, very effectively focuses attention where it needs to be: on the performances and the words; and the acting of the all-female cast is uniformly excellent. Where so much of the dramatic force depends on the integrated work of the whole company it would be invidious to single performances; but, that said, Lydia Kay as Carrie/Lan does extraordinarily well with the technically tricky business of acting two rather different characters at once; Melanie Crossey brings real electricity to Syne's hopes of becoming the 'head' of this new acephalic entity. Gray's play is at once an imagintive new intervention into a venerable SF trope, and a meditation upon theatre itself. Callow, who trained at the Athenian Stage in Greece, knows very well how the interaction between individuated 'characters' and a group-mind 'chorus' determined the very shape of drama in Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; and Sum feels in one sense like a modern re-evaluation of the core structures of theatre itself.  Highly recommended.

Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book (Graphic Adaptation by P Craig Russell; 2014)

Today's third, and last, 'Illustrated Title' for review is this graphic novelisation of Gaiman's Graveyard Book: orchestrated by P Craig Russell and featuring the penmanship of Kevin Nowlan, P. Craig Russell, Tony Harris, Scott Hampton, Galen Showman, Jill Thompson, and Stephen B. Scott. It's all very professionally accomplished: a thoroughly realised bande dessinée. It's so well done, indeed, that it feels petty to carp. Nonetheless there was a small still voice, at the back of my head, that wondered at the point of the exercise. It's not as though Gaiman's prose (never less than plainly efficient at communicating its story) doesn't work in the original at getting the whole over to its YA readership. The rather wordy, explanation-heavy original has been scripted, here, into some text-dense panels, lots of fat speech balloons lousy with words, and a slightly sluggish pace. It's by no means bad though. By no means.

Emily Carroll, Through the Woods (2014)

An 'illustrated' theme today; this graphic novel by Emily Carroll collects together five deliciously chilling and haunting stories, all set in a Gothic-y, Grimms-y forest world somewhere between about 1800 and about 1920. These tales work through fascinations with murder, guilt, the disinclination of the dead to rest calmly in their graves. It's beautifully done. The worst I might say is that the illustrations, and the choices Carroll has made about individual or multiple panels, occasionally force or compress the pacing in ways that seemed to me disadvantageous to the larger mood;

More, at the end of the day Through the Woods is only five, fairly short stories, which perhaps makes the book seem, overall, a touch slight. But they are all very cleverly constructed, readable and every one of them stays with you after you've finished. That's the true test of this sort of tale.

The visual style is clear-line and moderately exaggerated cartoon-y figures rendered in a more atmospherically realised world of bold primary colours, blocks of composition and filigree detail. The latter are better than the former, and the art is (I thought) better as establishing an initial mood of unease and dread...

...than at cashing-in shock moments, or startling us with visualised horror:

You may disagree, of course: these things are not measured against absolute aesthetic tables, but upon the pulse of the individual reader. And it's possible I'm only registering the old truth of horror: what's not shown but intimated is much, much more terrifying than what's shown. It's not in the thing that terror resides, you see: it's in our own minds.

A. F. Harrold, The Imaginary (2014)

Lovely older child/YA fable by the impressively bearded A F Harrold, beautifully illustrated by Emily Gravett, concerning the state of whose facial hair I have no information at present. It's about imaginary friends, but from the point of view of those imaginary friends, troped here as real but supernatural entities. Amanda, the heroine, discovers Rudger (not Roger!) in her cupboard.

They have splendid play-adventures together. Some delicious chills are provided by the alarming Mr Bunting, who has unnaturally extended his lifespan by devouring imaginary friends, and now has got a whiff of Rudger. Amanda is well realised; Rudger's adventures, pursued by Mr Bunting, and properly tense and thrilling; but the most moving part of the whole novel, perhaps surprisingly, is the secondary story of Amanda's mum, who has forgotten about her own childhood imaginary friend, a dog called Fridge; who recalls him, and then forgets him again. Heartbreakingly written! All in all: a very lovely novel indeed.

Nick Harkaway, Tigerman (2014)

The Harkaway thing about Tiger(man)
(For Tiger(man)'s a Harkaway thing):
Its tops are made out of Batman;
Its bottom is made out of Greene.
Its bouncy, flouncy, lit'ry, bit twee, fun fun fun fun fun,
But by far the most Harkaway thing about Tiger(man)
Is its tangled-yet-self-aware-complicity-with-upper-middle-class-White-English-masculine-codes-of-right-behaviour-in-a-postcolonial-context:
Po-o-o-ost
colonialcontext.

John Darnielle, Wolf In White Van (2014)

I might say 'I enjoyed this', except that 'enjoy' doesn't seem the right word, exactly. For a first novel it's a very accomplished piece of work indeed: sensitively, evocatively and occasionally alarmingly written. It is eerie and weird and sticks in the mind after reading, like a piece of pungently delicious food sticks in the teeth. Quite apart from anything else, it offers a portrait of the inward oddness of the SF fan (the crossover between SF and gaming especially) a healthy distance away from the rather self-congratulatory cosiness of Jo Walton's Hugo-winning Amongst Others. There's little to love and much to recognise in this portrait of what it means to be a geek. Wolf In White Van shares with Walton's book a deliberately aimless structure, and little actually happens in it. A better book, though, I think.

Story: our narrator, Sean, lives alone in Californian suburbia, coping with the consequences of some terrible incident in his youth that left his face hideously disfigured. A nurse calls four times a day to check on him and top up his treatment. The rest of the time he runs a retro-style, postal-only role-playing game called 'Trace Italian': people write to Sean detailing their next move in the post-nuclear-disaster dystopia of his game-space, and he writes back with personalised details as to how their game is going. The novel is written, in a sinuous sort of way, backwards: so we start at the end, rewind through the story of two teenage players of Trace Italian who confused the game and reality and suffered (one died, one badly hurt) as a result, and end up with the initial trauma that wrecked Sean's face. Along the way are some beautifully written excursi on solitude, imagination, science fiction and games -- the stuff on the porousness of game-players' sense of game and world struck me, post-Gamergate, as prescient (Sean has a thing for Conan, and also for John Norman's Gor novels, although not to read, just to stare at their 'shamesful and garish' covers, 'pornographic, but in an almost dishonest way': 'I didn't need to hear the stories the books were trying to tell me: their skins haunted me enough' [49]). Sometimes these excursi drag a little, but often they are marvellous embedded essays on the side of being a genre Fan upon which Amongst Others prefers not to dwell. Sean is keen not to be thought a creep and a freak, and works hard not to be; but there is something creepy about him nonetheless, and as you read through the novel it starts to dawn upon you that this freakishness is nothing to do with his ruined face or hermit existence. It's the freakishness he shares with you: the combination of desire to escape and desire to control, the passion, passivity and hatred of being passive, the strange potage of imagination, generosity, anger and perversity that is mixed in the head of the true science fiction geek. I know whereof I speak.

It's a novel about SF rather than a SF novel, without even the set-dressing of magic that made Amongst Others Hugo-acceptable. But it's a very, very good novel for all that.

Downsides: Darnielle is, perhaps, a little too obviously coy about withholding the precise details of the 'event' that led to young Sean Phillips's disfigurement. Sometimes the prose strays into mere whimsy (though this is rare). And, though the blame for this can't be laid at Darnielle's door, that cover is rather too EEEEEK! for my taste. In fact, if you stare at it, and rotate it slowly through 35° you find yourself feeling physically nauseous.