Old-As-Dirt-SF Prop: "Gunpowder Moon" David Pedreira

I used to like Asimov as a kid but grew out of him. All of his characters sound the same ('Now see here') with the worst example being his later "Foundation" books where Asimov-as-he-is and Asimov-as-he-wishes-he-was fly around the universe searching for Earth and meet a shared-consciousness lass with a nice bottom. All of his books are detective novels and end with the hero spending three chapters explaining how he cleverly worked out the mystery to an incredulous antagonist who then throws an extra twist in there ('Ah but we are the Second Foundation/Mule/mind controlling robots'). Fun for a while but silly. Ask any SF fan why they like the genre and you often get the pat and crappy answers about wanting to expand the mind or explore new frontiers but Asimov's a good example of the kind of cosy SF which seems the antithesis of this.

I admire Pedreira though (in Portuguese it means "Quarry"; does Pedreira have Portuguese roots?) for the balance he's bought to an old SF prop. And he really seems to stick to the "What's possible" law whereby you push vintage props, models and sets to the absolute limit of what you can get away with visually without having to bring in the "CGI" (aka more literary SF devices). Pedreira's Moon's self-consciously-retro vistas felt a teensy bit like a safe gambit to me, one which barely worked but... I guess I like it better when SF pushes a look, even if it's cheesy or dates quickly - that's part of the joy. If you are capable of having an imagination and a sense of disbelief, you can have it either way. It all depends on how much you're willing to lose yourself in the story. It's true that some technologies haven't gone as far as the Golden Age authors thought they would (the way Pedreira writes I think of him as an Golden Age SF author), but others have advanced further than almost anyone imagined - look at the way that computers permeate everyday life now. The thing that dates a lot of classic SF isn't the space travel, it's the computers (or lack of them). In James Blish's 'Earthman Come Home', the characters spend months working out complicated equations with slide rules, before feeding the results into the city's computer (which consists of vacuum tubes). I think that's one reason why Jack Vance still seems so fresh - although his stories are often set on alien worlds, his stories typically concern societies, language and personality, rather than specific technologies. On the other hand, while I admire the gumption of writing stuff that resembles Vintage SF, the result seem quite stale. It's already done before a zillion times.

Bottom-line: 3 stars because I’m a sucker for SF novels set on the moon. 

Good Back-in-the-Day-SF: "Telzey Amberdon" by James H. Schmitz

(My own copy)

A lot of very readable and entertaining SF is grounded in Clarke's observation that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." A character who pops what looks like an aspirin tablet into what looks like a microwave and then retrieves and eats a vindaloo is behaving as realistically as I am when I order a pizza. If the character then steps into a time machine, he or she needn't know any more about how it works than I need to know what really happens when I turn on the lights. In fact, I'd worry about the success of a book that said "Gwen's knowledge of farming and baking enabled her to eat a pizza, and since she understood the principles of electrical transmission, she was able to eat it with the lights on." If anything, I think that too many SF books try to explain made up science that their characters, if real, would probably just take for granted.

Some of the best Golden Age writers sometimes had little formal education; on the other hand, we fail to recognise that some of the best SF writing is not very technical at all (not exactly Vintage SF, but “Neuromancer” springs to mind.) I'm thinking here of the likes of Philip K. Dick, or Walter M. Miller, who tried to make philosophical points about humanity and our past and future without alienating readers with scientific mumbo jumbo. The technocratic side of SF is all well and good, but it isn't the whole story either. Remember the Telzey series anyone? I believe only SF geeks would have heard about Telzey and Trigger! I still have most of my collection of Analog Science Fact and Fiction (plus earlier Amazing Stories). Every so often I get a period when I re-read them - all. Analog’s stories were NOT all about Aliens. Lots of them postulated other "social" systems (usually that had gone or were going wrong; Poul Anderson, and Christopher Anvil spring to mind.) Or "studies" in human reactions under odd stresses (deep dive I think it was called), Or just a modernized version of "detective" type novels. Some were just funny. But thinking about it, it was all very morally prim and proper, apart from the cigarettes. After a bit the BEMs got a bit boring (bug-eyed monsters), and see one teleporter, transmogrifier or faster than even light, and you have seen them all. As it was the actual story that counted (don't seem to remember LEDs, but "cold light was mentioned several times though). Was it blasé even at the time? Not sure. Science HAS come up with most of the things mentioned on “Star Trek” as I pointed out somewhere else. But maybe the difference is between the "written" versions and film, the latter being less imaginative at first (for the spectator). Modern Film SF has at least progressed from Flash Gordon to Avatar, with only small stops for the X-men and other "ordinary kids from the neighborhood".

(Bought in 2000)

Some of my reading buddies question me: should I read stuff like this? There’s so many Nabokovs out there to re-read they imply...this begs the question: "Should SF do more than entertain?" This headline conjures up for me some soberly dressed parson with a cane intent on making sure your art only Serves God - or an ideologue with an AK-47 ensuring it only Serves The Party. No. There is a place for candy (or fruits), and a place for meat and potatoes (or whatever your preferred protein source). We must trust readers to balance their diets with select servings from all the food groups, not stand over them demanding political correctness in their choices. This trust must be extended to writers as well. If I want to write a mindless sitcom I should have that right. If I want to read Telzey (“Telzey Amberdon”) or Trigger Argee (“T'nT: Telzey and Trigger”) rather then reading a Nabokov’s book I will. Schmitz was one of the first Golden Age writers to depict “strong female characters” in his novels, which was virtually unheard of for SF of the time; it's also great to have these stories back in print and in order; I remember well my confusion in the 80s as I tried to sort this out from the previous books. The truth of this hinges on “Better”. Not everyone agrees on what is “Better”. Some may focus on the style of a story, the paint strokes and chiaroscuro and such. Some may focus on the substance conveyed by the style, the "painted" seen THROUGH the window of the "painting". Others, sometimes, just want a mindless SF romp!

Telzey and Trigger rule! These two cut a swathe through the bad guys of the Hub worlds like no other. If you want badass female characters from Back-in-the-Day-SF, Telzey and Trigger deliver! (I love using exclamation points even when the purists say they’re a big no-no!)

Anyway, we are still screwed up when we have: on my right - the climate change and science deniers, Even further right - the arms industry, GM foods and TSA databases from body scanners, and right off the chart financial CDO's, Flash crashes and stuxnets. Most of that is REAL-fi.

More importantly: we still don't really know what is at the bottom of the ocean.

SF = Speculative Fiction.