Yearly Archive

Dark Eden by Chris Beckett (2012) 404 p.

John Redlantern lives amid the warmth and safety of Family in Circle Valley. There is no sun – only eternal night. Light and warmth come from the valley’s alien geothermal trees, which glow red and white and emit boiling hot sap. Surrounding Circle Valley is the Snowy Dark – a cold, thin-air wasteland where you can’t even see your hand in front of your face. Nobody has ever left the valley, not since Angela and Tommy were first stranded there from Earth many generations ago. The 532 members of Family are their descendents – inbred, genetically mutating, clinging to the stories their first Mother and Father told them about distant Earth. One day, they have been told, Earth will come and find them again.

Dark Eden is a classic bildungsroman, in which 15-year-old (or 20 “wombtimes” old) John Redlantern grows weary at the parochial, stultifying atmosphere of Family. He fears that Family is growing larger, and game is getting scarce. He thinks that despite what Mother Angela once told her children, she never thought the wait for Earth would be this long. He believes there must be something else on the other side of Snowy Dark, and is determined to go against his elders and find out.

The novel ranges across a number of viewpoints, mostly John Redlantern and his lover Tina Spiketree, but occasionally taking in others when the narrative demands it. Beckett does a good job of exploring each character’s different motives; John, for example, knows that he’s a good leader and wants to try new things; from Tina’s perspective, we see that she appreciates this, but also recognises John has a deep, restless urge inside him, and an egotistical view that the world’s story is all about him. Similarly, the Family’s leader is a maternalistic woman who recognises the same problems as John but is wise enough to know that change must happen slowly; that “any fool can break a thing, but building a new one takes wakings and wakings.”

The world of Eden is beautifully rendered, from the glowing and humming trees to the menacing six-legged fauna, but it’s not overwrought – the characters mention things like “leopards” and “trees,” and it’s only through incidental detail that the reader sees how different these things must be from their earthly namesakes.

Beckett’s use of language to establish Family’s culture (however small and stagnant it may be) is excellent. There are shades of a post-apocalyptic story here, as degenerate tribals cling to their society’s past glory and revere their ancestors. Small linguistic touches go a long way, such as the loss of the word “very,” with characters instead simply doubling up on adjectives to emphasise them: cold cold, tired tired, etc.

What Beckett gets absolutely pitch perfect is the claustrophobic sense of Eden: the darkness, the enveloping cold, the rigid tribal laws and the inability to escape Family, to go anywhere else, do anything different or find anything new. Circle Valley is all the characters have ever known, but they have grown up hearing stories of Earth and the rest of the human race, and they know that there is more to life than this. “Sometimes I hated Eden,” John says to himself. “Sometimes I felt that if I ate another mouthful of greenish Eden meat I would vomit out my guts.”

Dark Eden has a satisfying if limited conclusion, avoiding the brutal showdown other science fiction writers might have opted for. It’s open to a sequel, but is an excellent standalone novel – an original and haunting story.

Side note – it’s a miserly publisher indeed who’d choose to save on ink by issuing the reprint with a white cover, as seen above. The original was black, a thousand times more appropriate for this novel.

Nightmares and Dreamscapes by Stephen King (1992) 970 p.

This is King’s third short story collection, mostly assembling stories he’d written in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s since the publication of his last collection, Skeleton Crew, but also containing a few bits and pieces from the ‘70s and some unpublished work.

I was wary of this one, because circa 1990 is when King started to show sings of decline – and also because his story in Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse was absolutely terrible and actually dated from 1986, which throws my whole concept of King’s decline out of whack. But anyway. This was for the most part a decent collection with. My two favourites were ‘Chattery Teeth,’ about a travelling salesman in the deserts of the south-west, which was one of those moments King hits a pitch perfect note on setting and character, and also looked like it was going to be a very different horror story from what I’d imagined (but then was the original idea after all); and ‘The Moving Finger,’ about a mild-mannered man who suddenly finds a wiggling human finger impossibly sticking out of his bathroom sink plughole.

Some of the others are hit and miss. ‘Crouch End’ is a Lovecraftian tale about two American tourists who stumble into an ancient, eldritch part of London. The part told from the tourists’ perspective is great, but the other half of the story follows two local policeman. King is apparently unaware that American and British culture are, relatively speaking, almost identical, and their dialogue is overflowing with English slang – “Pull the other one,” “a swatch of the old whole cloth,” Give us a fag, mate,” “doddy old prat,” etc. Similarly, ‘Home Delivery’ is a good zombie story on a remote Maine island, with feelings of isolation that are simultaneously uneasy yet (given the state of the world) reassuring. King ruins this atmosphere with an interlude from the spaceship sent to investigate the orbiting alien craft creating the undead, which ends with a cliched scrambled radio transmisison as everything goes to shit, and is irritatingly narrated with calm detachment by the comic British professor figure attached to the mission. And then there’s a pretty bad story called ‘Dedication’ which bothered me not for the fact that it involves a black hotel maid eating semen off the bedsheets of a wealthy guest as part of a voodoo ritual, but more for the uncomfortable way King regularly portrays black characters, up to and including phonetic spelling for their dialogue.

The collection gets more experimental towards the end – there’s a Bachman-style crime caper, a Sherlock Holmes story (which is surprisingly not bad, given how badly King fumbled in ‘Crouch End’ when portraying those exotic, bizarre, non-American people known as the English) and a Raymond Chandler pastiche called ‘Umney’s Last Case’ which also has its own Stephen King twist, and which he says is his favourite story in the collection. Then there’s a fairly long non-fiction piece about a Little League team making it to the finals, which bored me the same way the movie Field of Dreams did – I assume if you’re not American, you just can’t understand. The book wraps up with a poem about baseball and an old Hindu fable.

Nightmares and Dreamscapes also has (and I think all short fiction collections should) a section of author notes at the back for most of the stories, describing their genesis and original publication and what King thinks of them. These were always interesting to read, if a little confusing sometimes – in the notes for ‘The Moving Finger,’ for instance, King says, “My favourite sort of short story has always been the kind where things happen just because they happen… I hate explaining why things happen.” This, from the writer who ruined more than one perfectly creepy story in Night Shift by explaining various frightening things as being caused by Satanic witchcraft rituals.

Overall, this is certainly the least of the three Stephen King short story anthologies I’ve read, but for the most part I enjoyed it and it was worth reading.

Demon by John Varley (1984) 464 p.

Wrapping up John Varley’s lacklustre Gaea trilogy is Demon, a novel which brings to a close the events set in motion in Titan and Wizard. Cirocco Jones is now an open enemy to Gaea, the godlike, planet-sized being in orbit around Saturn, and is part fugitive and part resistance leader in a struggle to destroy her. (Cirocco seems awfully confident that killing the mind of Gaea will not also destroy the body, upon which she and many other species depend upon for survival.)

As of Demon, Earth is now in the grip of a nuclear war, with Gaea sending many rescue ships to ferry survivors to her. This means that the survival of humanity is now essentially in the hands of the few million people on Gaea, which ups the stakes in the battle. I still couldn’t bring myself to care much, and was largely reading this book out of obligation.

Varley, as I’ve said before, became a great writer in his later years, but there are far too many stumbles in his early books. His characters are simultaneously logical and emotional, which doesn’t sound wrong, but anyone who’s ever read a nerdy 1970s or 1980s sci-fi paperback will know exactly what I mean. He has a weird obsession with alien sex. He also has an enduring passion for classic cinema, which works in, say, The Golden Globe, because the narrator is an actor and student of cinema – but which is represented in the Gaea trilogy by Gaea herself (a millenia-old being the size of planet, remember) being a movie buff who uses her godlike powers to recreate classic scenes and creatures. The whole thing has a wacky feeling to it. And in terms of Cirocco’s grand struggle against this godlike creature, anything which doesn’t make sense is handwaved away or ignored. Gaea’s body is the very terrain upon which Cirocco walks – if the NSA can tap my mobile, why can’t Gaea tell where Cirocco is at any given point?

But one of the biggest problems with the Gaea trilogy, overall, is that it’s simply boring. Varley has created a gigantic ringworld ruled over by an alien god who’s been listening to the very first radio waves mankind sent out, has watched every movie we ever made, and has a penchant for biologically engineering whatever she wants from the collective human imagination in order to amuse herself. Yet what do we see in the trilogy? Two major alien species (basically centaurs and bat people), a few others which can be generally summed up by what they resemble (“blimps,” “submarines”), a bunch of human refugees, and some empty landscapes. Dragons are mentioned – we never see one. Gaea has created a King Kong – adventures relating to him are mentioned off-screen and we then only see him after he’s dead. In the desert is the great sandworm from Dune – which is so long that at one point the characters walk over its body, seeing neither tail nor head. Varley has all these opportunities, and more, to make interesting things happen on this world of limitless possibility, but instead we get the main characters sitting around talking about their feelings for half the book.

The Gaea trilogy is not good. Read Steel Beach, and absolutely read The Golden Globe, but do not read Titan or its sequels.

Ubik by Philip K. Dick (1969) 224 p.

The first and last Philip K. Dick book I read was The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history in which the Axis powers won World War II, and which I disliked for its focus on trivial minutiae (especially jewelry design) rather than the more interesting concept of, say, a world in which the Axis powers won World War II. I think the only reason I bought Ubik is because it was on the list TIME made of the 100 best books of the 20th century, which I used to have blu-tacked to the side of my bookshelf in Perth.

Ubik takes place in the then-future of 1992, when mankind has colonies on the moon and Mars, and various ESP abilities are common in the population. Joe Chip works as a scout for a “prudence organisation” – a company which sells the services of psychics to act as counter-psychics for other businesses who are concerned about privacy, industrial espionage etc. Hired by a wealthy individual for a job on the moon, Chip, his boss Glen Runciter, and about a dozen of their poorly-introduced psychics travel to the moon only to be caught in a trap. The attempted assassination goes poorly, however – only Runciter is killed, and Chip and the others manage to escape the moon with his body. It’s only when they return to Earth that things start to behave strangely; milk is off, cigarettes are stale, and books and newspapers are out of date.

This was probably a fresh and creative novel back in the ‘60s, but for a modern reader the twist can be seen from over the horizon. You probably guessed it just reading my recap above. This is no fault of Dick’s, of course, and there are still quite a few passages which manage to be extremely creepy and instil a sense of dread.

Ubik is a very weird book, and I wouldn’t necessarily say I enjoyed it. But it was better than The Man in the High Castle, and I may read a few of his other novels.

Jack Maggs by Peter Carey (1997) 392 p.

On a drizzly spring evening in 1837, the mysterious figure known as Jack Maggs makes his long-awaited return to London. Where he has been and why he has returned we do not know yet, but the first few pages of Jack Maggs are a delight to read, capturing the sights, sounds and smells of Dickensian London, and Maggs’ disorientation as he returns to a city he does not recognise, lit now with gas light: “The city had become a fairground, and as the coach crossed the river at Westminster the stranger saw that even the bridges of the Thames were illuminated.”

‘Dickensian’ is usually used alongside ‘Victorian’ to describe a particular era of the 19th century, but here it’s even more appropriate: Jack Maggs is a reimagining of Dickens’ novel Great Expectations, with Maggs being a version of the convict character Magwitch. He has escaped from New South Wales to find his beloved Henry Phipps (Pip) and tell him his story – but Phipps may not want to be found.

It’s a common trait, I think, for people to partition history into segments, and also think back on the history of particular places as being self-contained. We know that 18th century Britain gave birth to the convict colonies of Australia, but the idea of them existing at the same time – for them being anything other than a one-way dumping ground – is fuzzy. And so it’s always a pleasure, I find, particularly in Peter Carey’s writing, to see the two worlds collide. Australia sheds its image (in my mind and many other Australians’ minds) as a dull and unimportant backwater and instead becomes a mysterious, exotic place. Most of the novel takes place in the upper-class dining rooms and parlours of Covent Garden and Bloomsbury, and it’s always pleasingly strange when Carey calls Maggs “the Australian” or mentions memories of Maggs’ time there – pelicans and parrots, his reliable old boots from a cobbler in Parramatta, or the dreaded prison at Morton Bay.

I haven’t read any Dickens at all, but it’s a mark of Carey’s brilliance as a writer that he can revisit old stories and classics and reimagine them without alienating an uninformed reader. You don’t need to have read Great Expectations to enjoy Jack Maggs, just as you don’t need to know anything about Ned Kelly to enjoy True History of the Kelly Gang or (I imagine) be familiar with the writings of Tocqueville to enjoy Parrot and Olivier in America.

I didn’t enjoy Bliss, I originally said True History of the Kelly Gang was “the product of a slow year for the Booker Prize” only to have it grow stronger in retrospect, and I was sometimes bored during Oscar and Lucinda but knew upon completing it that it was a great novel. Jack Maggs was a novel I thoroughly enjoyed (though it lacks the overall, retrospective solidity of Carey’s two Booker Prize winners), and I think Carey is fast becoming one of my favourite authors. I’d certainly agree with those who call him Australia’s greatest living writer.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954) 225p.

Lord of the Flies is one of those enduring stories that has entered basic pop culture awareness, and has been spoofed and mimicked and referenced so many times that almost everyone has heard of it, and most would have a basic grasp of the plot (shipwrecked children descend into savagery) even if they don’t know the specifics. For my part, I remember watching the 1990 film version (which makes the kids American, but is otherwise a fairly faithful, albeit mediocre, adaptation) as part of the curriculum in high school. Showing Lord of the Flies to teenagers is, of course, a fairly pointless exercise. I don’t remember it well, but I’m pretty sure the class’ general reaction was something along the lines of the Aryan Brotherhood watching Jesse’s confession tape in Breaking Bad.

So I knew all the basic plot points, and the ending, but it’s still an intense and gripping novel. Golding is an excellent author (a Nobel laureate, which I didn’t know before) and his depictions of the island are one of the strongest points in the book – a heat-soaked scrap of land covered in thick, stringy jungle, shadows under the creepers, butterflies dancing around each other – a beautiful and peaceful place which nonetheless has an eerie sense of menace about it. The gradual shift in power and authority among the children, as they go from following an elected “chief” to falling into line behind a vicious, bullying dictator, is a masterpiece of foreboding and dread, and I especially liked the adrenaline-soaked final chapter as the protagonist desperately flees for his life.

I’d thought before reading it that Lord of the Flies was set during World War II, but apparently it actually takes place during an “evacuation” in the middle of a nuclear war, as we learn from a few intriguing scraps of dialogue. This goes some way towards explaining why the children aren’t rescued for so long, and draws a clear parallel between their own brutality and the wider violence in the adult world, particularly in the novel’s final sentence.

There’s a lot of that, actually – symbolism and juxtaposition and themes about morality and authority, to the point where it almost feels like Golding was writing it with one eye on the English curriculum; I half-expected to see those essay questions that some editions of classic novels have at the back. But it’s hard to fault him for this when the book is, simply put, so great. Lord of the Flies is a dark and brilliant novel that everybody should read.

River of Gods by Ian McDonald (2004) 583 p.

I don’t recall which cyberpunk author it was – it might have been Neal Stephenson with regards to “Jipi and the Paranoid Chip” – but somebody mentioned, once, somewhere, about how technology pops up everywhere, even in the third world; how orphans in the slums of Dhaka and Lagos are using mobile phones while still shitting in ditches. River of Gods is a novel-length example of this. (And if anyone knows the actual quote, please let me know, so this introduction is less clunky.)

River of Gods takes place in August 2047 – the centenary of India’s independence from Britain – with an ensemble cast of various Indians, Americans, and one Afghan-Swede, who range the gamut from cops to criminals to journalists to politicians. India has balkanised by this date, split into dozens of bickering smaller states, and most of River of Gods takes places in and around the city of Varanasi, in what’s now known as the nation of Bharat.

To successfully write this kind of science fiction world, a convincing and believable Year 2047, you need to cover the entire range of futurism. McDonald accomplishes this very well – River of Gods, in its formidable 583 pages, covers mid-century geopolitics, genetic engineering, first contact, artificial intelligence and climate change, to name just a few. The second hurdle for this particular book is how realistically a British author can write about India, and unfortunately I can’t really judge, having never been there myself. Suffice to say that McDonald obviously has a few Indian visas in his passport, and clearly has a keen interest in the country, and his India sufficed to convince a fellow foreigner like myself. An Indian might very well think differently, but I was happy enough.

It’s somewhat ironic, then, that the major storyline (and certainly the most interesting one) is dominated by the two American characters, Lisa Durnau and Thomas Lull. Lisa is a physicist and biologist who is plucked out of her ordinary life by the CIA, sent up into space, and told – in one of the book’s best passages – about an asteroid called Darnley 285, which is on collision course with Earth. She is told that it has often been on collision course with Earth before, but then always changes its course before impact.

“You’re saying…”
“An unidentified force is modifying Darnley 285’s orbit to keep it the same distance from Earth,” Daley Suarez-Martin says.

This is echoed later in the book, when an Indian gangster is hired to abduct and interrogate an American agent. As he leaves – after a gut-wrenching proof-of-loyalty killing – his new employer casually finishes the chapter by saying “By the way, in case you ever wonder what the Americans are decoding. They have found something in space and they have no idea what it is.” These are cool, spine-tingling moments – they’re what science fiction is all about and I liked them a lot.

In terms of prose style, McDonald was borderline for me – it’s the very definition of florid, but when he manages to restrain himself he can often pick just a few choice, perfect words, creating a brilliant visual image. This happens all over the book, but I’ll share some of my favourites, a few of his descriptions of two legged mechs or combat robots or whatever you want to call them:

The security bot completes its check, stalks away into the shrubbery like some late Cretaceous hunter.

The Urban Combat Robot rears over him. The vile little mantis head lowers, sensor rigs swivelling.

Running feet in the rural pre-dawn. Titanium-shod feet, as much felt through the bike’s suspension as heard, gaining on them, faster than any running thing should… The robot looms over the dune crest and rears up to its full height. It is some evil stalking rakshasha, part bird part spider, unfolding palps and manipulators and machine guns from its mandibles.

Just as often, however, these fine descriptions are drowned out by excess. You can see William Gibson hovering over McDonald’s shoulder, and McDonald seems keen to throw a lot of words at the page and see what sticks in order to impress his predecessor.

And that brings me to the larger problem with River of Gods, which is bloat. There are nine major characters in the novel, and while it gives McDonald a chance to show us mutliple perspectives of his future India and flex his world-building muscles, at least three of them could have been removed without affecting the story much. The novel also could have been 200 pages shorter; it often drags, getting bogged down in description and superfluous scenes. I can understand why this happened, and why McDonald would probably fiercely defend every word of the book, but it comes at the detriment of the story.

When River of Gods is good, it’s very good. If it had been edited more judiciously it could have been great. Unfortunately, it often falls short. But it’s still well worth reading for science fiction or cyberpunk fans, and I look forward to checking out the next two books in McDonald’s cyberpunk-in-a-foreign-land trilogy, Brasyl and The Dervish House.