Published June 2016.
“’Tell me, Thorn. Are we out beyond the Rift?" I
can hear the fear. I understand what she's going through. It's the nightmare
that all ship crews live with, on every trip. That something will go wrong with
the routing, something so severe that they 'II end up on the very edge of the
network. That they'll end up so far from home that getting back will take
years, not months. And that, of course, years will have already passed, even
before they begin the return trip. That loved ones will be years older when
they reach home. If they're still there.If they still remember you, or want to remember. If they 're still recognizable, or alive.”
In Beyond the Aquila Rift
short-story, “Beyond the Aquila Rift – The Best of Alastair Reynold”
I've finally
finished this 768-page-mammoth tome. Is it everything Reynolds has ever written
in short form? Not by a long shot. It contains only eighteen stories of a total
of sixty-something that Reynolds has written so far. But this sample of 18
stories confirms it (I read some of these stories previously in “Galactic
North”). It's in the short form that Reynolds is at his best. I’ve read a
ton of Reynolds in short form. Almost everything I’ve read, I’ve liked.
Collections like this both excite and bother me. I’m a huge fan of the short
mode of writing, and an equally big proponent of the less-is-more idea when it
comes to the size of books. Massive magna
opera simply turn me off. Even when I end up loving them, like I did with
this one. What I don’t like is carrying some cumbersome volume around, and my
preferred method remains print over digital. For this one I had to go for the
electronic version. No way around it. If I’d had read the print version, I’d
never have finished it. The big hefty tomes I end up reading them on my Kindle.
Not my favourite venue, but I really wanted to read it.
Reading SF takes
a bit of getting used to; it's not like other forms of fiction and has its own
legacy-codes and ground-rules, just as mundane fiction does. The
difference is that people who've put in the time and effort to learn mundane
fiction’s values, proudly and loudly proclaim their superiority as readers,
while anyone who's taken time and effort to learn how SF works and how to play
that game is sneered at. Visual media, films, TV and games, can take elements
from SF and re-use them imaginatively (or not) but that's not the same as what
the prose-form does and expects readers to do. When a Brontë critic nit-picks
about Austen, this is legitimate criticism and shows how diligent reading ought
to function. When we talk about SF, a form of fiction built on close reading to
invoke a world otherwise unverifiable, is analysed that way, it's because we're
all neurotic and stupid. SF readership is reported on as weird
folklore
rather than as a side-effect of publishing economics or, heaven forbid,
just like readers of anything else but with an extra string to their bow
because they can read something most people won't touch. I read SF as a
teenager (I still do). I spent the time to learn its "rules". I still
read a lot of superhero comics, which also have their own "rules". A
few years ago, I read “A Game Of Thrones”, and the first time I genuinely
couldn't do it. It was so clichéd-riddled in conception, and its prose so tired
(it's like every other fantasy book) that I was astounded by
it and remain so. Well, 'Game of Thrones' is Fantasy and works by different
rules. I had trouble too. The Fantasy aspect of SF, unless it's done very well
and is entirely autonomous, isn't my thing. The mass-produced
Tolkien-on-a-stick stuff appears to be written to be skim-read. “Game of
Thrones” is set up that way, but once you get far enough you realise it's
actually a refutation of those genre rules and clichés on a number of levels.
That's why it's fun. I do wonder though how far Martin can smash those
conventions and still deliver a satisfying ending - epic fantasy, like romance,
having to fulfill certain expectations at the close. Without the conventional
set-up, the shock of finding yourself in a different moral landscape from the
vast majority of epic fantasy wouldn't be nearly so effective. For example,
every character can be either right or wrong depending on their perspective.
There are no good guys, and the guys who are set up to good guys
don't sweep along heroically and win the day. The characters set up to be
villains become human and understandable when we switch to their perspectives,
which is a neat trick. It's really not at all like every other fantasy. I can
understand finding the prose “difficult”, because it defies our own
expectations.
For me, it is
often style that separates the literary from the genre. For example, I felt I'd
read the story in “The Road” many times before, even down to that last little
glimpse of hope. I've seen in it books, I've seen it on TV. I've read better,
more interesting, wide-ranging stories that take on similar material and have that
very similar ending. But I've not read another quite so consistently and
beautifully written. This is why I don't hold with the 'SF and Fantasy are the
same thing' (they both belong to the SF line, but they’re quite different in
mode and form). There's less in common between 'Game of Thrones' and 'The Book
of the New Sun' (to cite an example publishers and lazy reviewers think is
fantasy but doesn't work if read that way, as it's unimpeachably SF). I've read
a lot of stylists, in a number of contexts. I suspect I've encountered more
than most people have. Moorcock (also a fantasy specialist) isn't one of them.
If these are the best examples you've read, I pity you... or maybe envy you for
the authors you've yet to discover. But it does feel as if SF advocates seem to
think that mundane fiction is synonymous with domestic realism, as opposed to
Pynchon or Borges. Of course, to acknowledge that the modernist and
postmodernist novel doesn't work that way would open up other pitfalls. When I
hear someone taking a pop at Ballard for his lack of characterisation, I just
go ballistic. When a significant proportion of literary
writing is suspicious of traditional realism, Ballard fits a European
postmodernist aesthetic pretty well.
SF (the Science
fiction kind) is the genre that deals with ideas, their consequences and how
they can exist. The latter meaning that there is a considerable amount of world
building that goes into science fiction. A huge amount of
effort goes into ensuring that the implications and extrapolations are
consistent with each other - a kind of ensuring that the hidden implicit world
makes sense. Believe me, as a veteran science fiction reader, the hidden world
consistencies have to be worked out, or the work quickly falls apart.
Rule of thumb: anything
in the Gollancz Masters series is worth a look, just to find out if you like
it, anything from Baen should only be approached if recommended by someone who
has had fluid bonding sex with you. Reynold’s sense of otherness and loss are
firmly ensconced in the first category. “Beyond the Aquila Rift” is one the
best collections that I've ever read and undoubtedly one of the best books of
2016. This is mindfuck SF. 4.5 as a minimum for the stories, rounding up to a 5
star read altogether. It’ll be on my list of favourites at the end of year. I’m
repeating myself.
Table of Contents:
◦ Great Wall of Mars
◦ Weather
◦ Beyond the Aquila Rift
◦ Minla’s Flowers
◦ Zima Blue
◦ Fury
◦ The Star Surgeon’s Apprentice
◦ The Sledge-Maker’s Daughter
◦ Diamond Dogs
◦ Thousandth Night
◦ Troika
◦ Sleepover
◦ Vainglory
◦ Trauma Pod
◦ The Last Log of the Lachrymosa
◦ The Water Thief
◦ The Old Man and the Martian Sea
◦ In Babelsberg
◦ Story Notes
SF = Speculative Fiction.
