The Accepted Aliens: “The Tea Master and the Detective” by Aliette de Bodard

“When you’re out there, with no one and nothing to stand in your way - when you realise how small you are - you also realise that everything that ever was, that ever will be, is connected to you. That we’re all, in the end, part of the same great thing.”

In “The Tea Master and the Detective” by Aliette de Bodard

I find it extremely funny that in some reviews regarding "The Tea Master and the Detective", there are still people that blatantly produce such a snobbish abhorrence of the SF genre. Should everything in life be of such a pragmatic acumen, we would live in a "Brave New World"! Hello ALPHAs ... remember Aldous? Should Sci-Fi, Anticipation or Speculative Fiction - any label will do - be judged on its cover, the pulp covers? Of course not! Science Fiction is sometimes very well written. Its themes are amongst the most thought provoking ever! Are you all reneging in one fell swoop works like the Foundation trilogy (Harry Seldon & psycho-history), the first DUNE books, The Null-A stories from A.E. Van Vogt (translated by Boris Vian in France!), "The caves of Steel" and other robots stories ... These works created generations of young men and women who asked questions about their futures, who reached and grasped, if only mentally, at the various concepts and accepted novelty and strange as part of the unavoidable quest towards modernism. Generations that were tolerant per se since ... everything was possible ... that accepted alien ("Stranger in a Strange Land") ... etc ... To declare the genre unworthy is like spending your life in the underskirt of a bourgeois obsessed with self-preservation, wealth and the hatred culture of the difference ... wake up you snobs in your very real boring and well written world ... and let us dream whilst fingering the dusty and mouldy pages of our SF library, opening our minds to concepts and possibilities that you will never be able to comprehend ... however badly prosed you find them! The main problem with Bodard's novella is that there's no-one quite like Banks. It's not enough to use (mind)ships with descriptive names. Pratchett, at his most serious and angry (in books like "Small Gods" and "Night Watch"), did a similar thing in fantasy to Banks in SF. A lot of the biggest-selling SF authors are American military SF authors, who are mostly depressingly predictable. Dan Abnett is a good break from that in series like "Gaunt's Ghosts" and "Eisenhorn", but he's more the Bernard Cornwell of military SF than the Iain M. Banks. In Banks work we get the everything: the whole of life and death and the struggles shared by enormous AIs and slave girls, powerful ships and fallen ancient races. It is full of love and war, greed and murder, angels and demons. Not so with this Bodard's instantiation. But it's still pretty readable. Three stars for the effort, but Bodard’s work shows a lot of promise.

Tickboxing Screen SF: "Altered Carbon" by Laeta Kalogridis

It's a shame they've spent so much money on it as it isn't anything new, the only thing that is new is that you see a couple of willies (even though the willie count is going up generally, we always get an almost embarrassed shot which says look there's a willie in this but lets move back along to the tits, phew) along with the many, many boobs, bums and really as you get closer to the end, stomach churning sexual violence. There is a line spoken by one young actress which made me think that the thirteen year olds watching it (and there will be) will be off kilter for days if not months or years. And of course the scene where one actress fights naked. She seems to be fighting naked because she is a new clone and if she had been born from a vacuum pack I'd have gone with it, but she'd been reclining on a nice comfy chair which could have gone with some nice comfy sci-fi- sweatpants or even a slinky pair of pjs...but no she's naked. Some of the totemic cliches of the first two episodes are part info dump but are mostly faithful to the book. And unless I'm remembering the novel incorrectly, there's at least one Chekov's Gun lying in plain view that had to be there. There is a degree of lingering soft porn that's been overdone (e.g., the Bancroft clone vault scene), and the screenplay and acting are awkward against the expense and complexity of the effects. But I'm four episodes in and so far it's not even close to my expectations. Richard Morgan's novels are heavily invested in violence and sex. They do contrast the violent, casual decadence and immorality of the Meth's vs the street. It's the dark side to privilege that, say, Bank's Culture didn't always address with the same visceral ugliness.

I get the sense that the source material may have been chosen in part because of the way it weaves an appealing character and novel cultural mechanic with settings and tropes that are familiar and popular. I wonder if Netflix see this as a gateway drug to get the “Game of Thrones” audience onto SF/Cyberpunkish stuff. The boob count certainly suggests so (although fringe benefit, pubic hair, is going to make a comeback in the future). The prime reason it felt a little strung out is that they'd (perhaps through necessity for a TV adaptation) expanded the roles of a number of characters that don't feature quite so prominently in the book. Reileen is barely in it, Ortega doesn't have anywhere near as much focus and certainly doesn't spend time with her family, Quell only appears in the form of quotes from her battle diaries and has no connection to Kovacs at all, The Hendrix (Poe) is a lesser character, Vernon Elliott is not a sidekick and Lizzie Elliott has one short scene. For me, the idea that you "shouldn't believe anything you see", or whatever way they put it, is a cop-out. It's lazy writing and has the potential to provide for an easy out for some awkward storyline akin to Bobby popping up in the shower in Dallas. Also, I found the over-use and stagedness of smoking cynical.

I think having read so much written SF over the years my expectations of its being brought to life on screen were very high. Perhaps I'm just a boring old fart who can't be the young twenty year old falling in love with “Blade Runner” years ago and boring everyone senseless over it. I would like to see someone throw money at Marge Piercy's “Body of Glass” or “Woman on The Edge of Time” though (or at “The Player of Games” or at “Consider Phlebas”), and maybe create a new equation of less sexual violence and boobs but more willies and pubic hair...

All that being said, I am finding it extremely frustrating, that people keep either comparing it to “Blade Runner”, which it is not even remotely similar too, or complaining that it is whitewashing because Kovacs is a white actor instead of Asian, which is exactly as it is in the book. Having said that, I was really looking forward to seeing this, but kind of disconnected during the fourth episode. The luscious visuals are just not enough to keep you interested, as there's bad acting, bad and increasingly fabricated plot, and cliche loaded elements that feel like randomly stolen from the modern history of written and screen SF. I guess with “Altered Carbon” most people fall for the great CGI, something that regularly makes me enjoy second class movies if they at least look great, but this was just getting more boring and sterile as it went along.

Coming back to Iain Banks, “Consider Phlebas” is the obvious one for a great adaptation, as it's a very "cinematic" story with a linear narrative focalised through one character's perspective and contains some absolutely massive action set pieces. The main problem is squeezing everything into a film's running length. The later Culture novels become progressively more ambitious in scope and setting. “Use Of Weapons” would be very difficult to do on screen due to the endless changes of place and time. I also don't see how you could preserve the vital twist ending in a visual representation of the characters.

It's a strange one isn't it? I guess the question really is: should we judge a TV show/movie/book on its value as 'art' (high brow/low brow whatever) or should we judge a TB show/movie/book on how much money it makes. I wonder how much money Moby Dick made (first example to pop into my head). And then of course the worry that if a trend comes out of this, it could mean that only works that have a money value start to be produced, which means we lose a great deal of potential art from a lot of artists, as they simply aren't recognised, and the only things that are then produced always fit a formula, one that has been shown to make money, which is what I personally feel has been happening for many years in Hollywood - though there are some notable outliers. It is another example of the 'echo-chamber' effect in some ways I guess. I do wonder if a Brave New World awaits if we continue down this path... everything fits in box A, B or C.

This series is what Stranger Things is to 80's Spielbergian flicks; it does the same to 90's Cyber Films and B Movie Fare like “Demolition Man”, “Johnny Mnemonic”, “Strange Days”, and even “The Matrix”, etc. Even has some pseudo Industrial Rock songs that smack of 90's nostalgia. I also found some references to Video Games like Bioshock (the Raven Hotel just reminded me of some of the beginning stages) and Final Fantasy 7.  “Altered Carbon” lacks invention and understanding of what constitutes reality. Yes, we know life on Earth is likely to be a replay of previous life. That much is obvious to anybody whose mind is agile enough to detect the nuances that life brings about. What this series needs is someone with inside knowledge of the complexity of life whilst bringing out the pain and joy in ways that are subtle and not overplayed or overstated. Too many series are lazy is this respect, they have lost the art of developing the narrative and building up the story. Showing full nudity is a cheap way of gaining stiction and is a clear sign that the director has nothing much to say.

“Breaking Bad” showed us what good screen writing and storytelling is about. Netflix should develop groundbreaking shows like that, rather than spending on CGI blade runner adaptions.

Bottom-line: Gave up after four episodes. Despite the lavish budget it came across like one of those tacky Charles Band knock offs like "Trancers." I know. It's not easy to adapt books like "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" by Phil Dick. But it´s possible...

SF = Speculative Fiction.

Non-canonical SF author: “The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks - A Critical Introduction” by Simone Caroti

"Banks loved metafictional negotiations, complex plots, and deconstructionist approaches, but he also loved story; he tied every subplot, told the tale of every character, and made sure to repay out good faith in him in kind.”

In “The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks - A Critical Introduction” by Simone Caroti

As a wildly innovative, imaginative, popular and subversive novelist, his works are infused with darker elements that give them a forbidden, cultish, underground status, but the fictions that are perceived as being in his more conventional and less evidently speculative mode fail to. It's entirely possible that readers expect SF to be simpler and less demanding based on their previous experience of reading SF, rather than on mere prejudice. After all, you don't have to eat all that much crap before you become unable or unwilling to distinguish it from fudge brownies.

Well I've done a systems check this morning and it appears that, yes, the anal probe has caused some slight damage to the self-censorship circuit boards, which may also have caused the nuance software to be over-ridden. This meant that the remains of the message was diverted to the spamsac. I include it here under the Full Disclosure subroutine:

"Of course, this logic doesn't just apply to SF. If, for example, someone gave me “Amsterdam”, “Freedom” and "My Brilliant Friend” to read, telling me that it was the best of contemporary fiction, then I would legitimately be led to expect that there was no such thing as a fudge brownie, and that the main requirement for reading contemporary fiction would be to install the Brainfuck 2.0 virus whilst sticking hot knitting needles in one’s ocular sensors." (although in italics, they're my own words) 

If Iain (M) Banks hadn't written non-genre fiction, lit critics wouldn't have given him the time of day. A damn shame, because, as he said "My best writing is my Skiffy stuff". Good and bad literature can be found in any form, since Sturgeon's Law applies. Some of the best written, most thought provoking things I have read are SF; some of the worst drivel, non-genre. Banks revealed in one of his last interviews that his SF never sold as well as the ‘literary’ novels. Which surprised me at least. The Culture was his true love. It's a damn shame. Most of his best writing about ethics, morality and the consequences of technological change - plus a lot of very funny observational stuff - are in the Culture novels. Mind you, “The Quarry” was a masterpiece of non-genre fiction.

The sheer dullness of the biases in favour of mundane fiction, which is usually about middle class people having divorces and is thus correspondingly dull. If some people would shaved their heads, stuck electrodes all over them, put them in perspex capsules and given them orders via an octopus in a crash helmet they'd have approached the experiment in a much more SF frame of mind. And I do read mundane fiction. Sometimes all that divorcing is livened up with a bit of satire.

Caroti’s take on the Banks’ works comes from a fan, and that’s the best kind of literary criticism to read. I’ve read the culture novels several times and I’ve also written several posts about those journeys. And I was still was able to find something worth reading.

My takes on some of the Culture Books:

1. Use of Weapons

So much going on in this one. With Sma, we see the Culture in all its high-minded liberal splendour. Then through Zakalwe we see the gritty, grubby reality of what the Culture's interventionist ideals really demand. Add to that one of the more charismatic drones, a dual narrative and one of the most gut-wrenching twists I've ever experienced and you've got yourself a Big Book.

2. Consider Phlebas

A close contender for number one. The scope and scale of this story and its locations are simply incredible, and Horza is a protagonist (?) who really gets under your skin. Many of his objections to the Culture are not unfounded and reflect the tendency of the progressive left to almost become a monoculture in its quest for diversity and inclusiveness. What I remember most of all from this one though, is Banks' shocking brutality (the train crash, most of all) and the miserable futility of it all, capped by Balveda's section of the epilogue.

3. Inversions

One of my favourites, though I gather not so popular with many fans of the series. I think it just chimes with my interest in interventionism, combining it with more show-don't-tell (another weakness of mine) than we're used to from the Culture books. I found both Vossil and DeWar to be very relatable, even though they're so different, and I enjoyed trying to piece together the snatches we're given of their past relationship. The two nations are presented in an interesting manner - with the royalists and their charismatic king facing up against a republican nation who are perhaps more meritocratic, but also clearly more authoritarian. Once again, Banks treats us to a shocking climax, this time one that underlines the price of winning power.

4. The Player of Games

In which we are treated to Gergeh, something of a black sheep in a culture that's supposed to have none, being manipulated into subversively diverting the course of a less enlightened species. Though it doesn't have the big, smack-me-in-the-face moments of Use of Weapons and Consider Phlebas, this is probably the most tightly-written and pleasing book in the series.

5. Matter

Once again, one that I enjoyed a lot but many fans didn't. It's basically a more refined version of Use of Weapons, but with themes of family and coming of age taking centre stage. I also enjoyed the exploration of galactic politics as they are at this stage of the series, where the Culture is no longer the biggest dog in the fight.

6. Excession

A big favourite of many readers, and was amongst mine for a long time. Then I re-read it and realised that although the antics of the Minds and ships and the Affront are all great fun, the humans involved rather let the side down. It seemed implausible that Byr and Dajeil would want anything more to do with one another.

7. The Hydrogen Sonata

Great humans, great locations, great ships, great drones, and a fitting send off for the series, dealing as it does with events dating back to the birth of the Culture and the sublimation of a major galactic player. However, I didn't feel it was quite firing on all cylinders. The book's central McGuffin didn't seem big enough to justify all the fuss made over it. Most of all, I felt the process of subliming lost something in being translated from the abstract to the specific.

8. Look to Windward

I never thought this one was more than okay. I remember reviewers at the time speculating that Banks may have run out of steam and that this book, with its throwback to the Idiran War, might represent a bookend for the series. Although Quilan and Masaq Hub's are very moving, and we're treated to another example of what happens when the Culture's arrogance gets people killed, the rest of the goings on on Masaq just felt a bit tacked-on.

9. Surface Detail

This one just seemed a bit too 'cookie cutter' to me - a revenge fantasy protagonist goes after perhaps the most clichéd of Banks' villains. The best bit of the book are the Hells and the politics and conflict surrounding them. It's thought-provoking stuff, as you can sort of imagine a time when we might be able to digitise consciousness and there are probably already people on Earth who would advocate the use of virtual Hells. The Quietudinal Service was an interesting idea, but it seems unlikely we wouldn't have heard of them before now. It felt like Banks was kicking ideas around.

10. The State of the Art

One for the completists, really. The main draw here is the titular story, which is okay but only really serves to shock the reader that Earth is not, as we'd probably assumed, the birthplace of the species that eventually became the Culture. We get to see a little more of Sma and Skaffen Amtiskaw, but we don't really learn anything new about them.

NB: As you can see, I’m not exactly fanboying here. But I still think Banks fiction was one of the best things that happened to SF. If you do read genre fiction, or watch opera and ballet (typical plot: boy meets girl, girl meets wizard, wizard turns girl into waterfowl) or even read the classics - in short regularly take your brain outside of literary realism, which may as well be bloody soap operas, you’re going to have a whole extra bunch of mental levers available to get the most out of “other art”. Plus it’s not bloody soap operas.

SF = Speculative Fiction.

RIP Brian Aldiss, 1925 - 1917: "The Brightfount Diaries" by Brian Aldiss

It has been a while since I read his “Trillion Year Spree”, but I would respectfully submit that Aldiss may very well have made his case for the essential nature of science fiction in making and moving on the modern world.

It is difficult to think of another genre so relevant, and at the same time (in its various forms) so popular and influential. I think he did much to point out the debt we owe the revolutionary authors like Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), and the hot-housing role of science-fiction short stories in incubating new (or reheated) ideas.

Brian Aldiss championed SF to the world outside, and occasionally gave those of us who were a little bit . . . insular . . . the ticking-off we deserved. He was part of the community in a good way, attending sf conventions, always approachable, and being the life and soul of the party but always producing books and criticism which challenged us. You could never quite predict what the next Aldiss novel would be, but you always knew there would be something to think about. He was a remarkable man. Even though he received an OBE and an honorary doctorate for "services to literature", I suspect he would have been much more successful in "critical" terms if he had jettisoned science fiction, and he would have been more successful in the sf world if he had buckled down to churn out identikit trilogies. "His work is still [in a sense] to be discovered." Yes, that's correct. It was wide, various, and deep. But those of us who discovered even a part of it are grateful to have done so. 

Thank you, Brian.

Between Brian's own stories and his edited anthologies, (among others, e.g. Harlan Ellison, Phil Dick, Alfred Bester) new ways of processing the world were welcomed by me when I first discovered him back in the early '70s. The ground was also prepared for more left-field SF such as Iain M. Banks. Not that there are any second hand bookshops left around here anymore, (when they used to be a reliable way to browse and discover on a wet afternoon almost anywhere. Charity shops with a half-hearted shelf of TV related titles seem to have supplanted them), but I was able to get a Kindle copy of “The Brightfount Diaries”. I imagine that back when I first read it, such a thing might have seemed like science fiction. Having said that an ability to suspend critical judgement is key to the enjoyment of reading, I will also say that the books that remain with you are the ones that have greater psychological reality.

Ray Bradbury has faded, but James Blish grows stronger; Harlan Ellison was a flash-bang, and all we smell is stale cordite; The work of Phil Dick lingers like a bad dream; Philip Jose Farmer ages like H. G. Wells, but Asimov is unreadable now; David Brin is a low profile Arthur C. Clarke; Larry Niven wears bell bottoms, but may come into fashion again; Iain M. Banks big thinking feels as if it wasn't thought through, a half vision undone by plotting, half glimpsed.

And so it goes...

RIP Brian, your works made your mark on me and many others, and will continue to do so. Always an engaging writer. I notice I only seem to have “Last Orders” and “The Brightfount Diaries” on my shelf now. I think I must have liberated the other dozen or so. And good for them, they're meant to be read, not collect dust and tobacco film.

SF = Speculative Fiction.

A Country Without (SF) Readers: “Antologia Cyberpunk” by Editorial Divergência

Published 2016.

“O Neuromante foi publicado por mim em Portugal apenas dois anos depois da primeira edição em língua inglesa. Talvez tenha sido a primeira tradução para uma língua estrangeira. Estremeci de alegria quando o livro veio à estampa. Pensei: agora sim, agora os detractores da FC vão engolir mil sapos.

Infelizmente esqueci-me de que vivemos em Portugal. Num país sem grande futuro, nem mesmo o do Gernsback. Um país sem leitores. Trataram-no como se nem sequer existisse. Ou como se se tratasse de mais umas tantas páginas de lixo escapista. Nas livrarias, foi parar às secções de literatura infantil ou às prateleiras de estudos informáticos. Enfim, não vendeu. Nas Feiras do Livro que se lhe seguiram, foi vendido a retalho por tuta e meia, como se o quisessem oferecer a um pobre. [….] E por não ter vendido, nada de nada, foi razão mais do que suficiente para o Editor me olhar, imbuído de um triste desprezo, me dizer que eu só escolhia coisas muito más, e que por isso teria de pôr fim à colecção de FC. Meu dito meu feito.”

("Neuromancer was published by me in Portugal only two years after the first edition in English. Maybe it was the first translation into a foreign language. I jumped with joy when the translation first came out. I thought: 'Yes, now the detractors of SF must bite the bullet.'

Unfortunately, I forgot that we live in Portugal. In a country with no great future, not even Gernsback's. A country without readers. They treated the translation as if it did not even exist. Or as if it were some more pages of escapist junk. In the bookstores, it went to the sections of children's literature or to the shelves of computer studies. Anyway, it did not sell. At the Book Fairs that followed, it was sold to retail stores for nothing, as if they wanted to offer it to the poor. [....] And for not having sold, nothing at all, it was more than enough reason for the Editor to look at me, imbued with a sad contempt, to tell me that I only chose very bad things, and thus end the SF collection. No sooner said than done.")

In the foreword by João Barreiros in “Antologia Cyberpunk” by Editorial Divergência.

I've been reading some old best-of-the-year SF anthologies lately, bought on eBay, as well as this one by Editoral Divergência, a Portuguese book publishing house; it was the last one of the bunch, and in there the cyberpunk trope seems to be swimming in foreign waters, literal and figuratively speaking. While the cyberpunk stories in these anthologies are generally good, there's a distinct sense of hardening sub-genre assumptions about them -- the shared idea that computer criminals would largely be members of street gangs seems particularly far off. By the 1989 anthology, most of the authors who'd been doing cyberpunk had gone on to other things. What about 2016 when this Portuguese cyberpunk anthology came out?

It's an interesting study in how ideas quickly die and solidly as genres. There are 100s of people self-publishing cyberpunk books, but I'm yet to see one that has any intellectual edge. Just abject copies (and usually badly written as well). Cyberpunk (as a sales pitch for unconnected works, then as a prescription for How-To-Do-It-And-Sell) is rather like the late 70s 'Disco Sucks' strop. SF in the late 1970s and early 1980s was getting interesting, with women, gay writers and people from ethnic minorities bringing their world-building skills and a literary sensibility to work in synch rather than against each other.

Obviously, a lot of nerdy white boys wanted an end to this monstrous regiment and, when Gibson happened, this looked like a suitable bulwark. The self-serving mythology, mainly from Bruce Sterling, is that “The Movement-With-No-Name” (as some of them preferred to call it) 'saved' SF from becoming contaminated any further. The same way “Sigue Sigue Sputnik” 'saved' rock. Gibson and Sterling wrote 'The Difference Engine' to try and make clear what 'Neuromancer' was about, the Douglas Hofstadter stuff that everyone missed concerning Wintermute, but that too got turned into a sales-formula that ossified.

Cyberpunk was about a certain vision with a certain technological path from where we were. Once things became clear that we weren't going along that path, Cyberpunk became an alternate history, a what-might-have-been than a what-if. Cyberpunk has become part of other sub-genres such as Space Opera, examples like “Revelation Space”, “Ancillary Justice” and the “Culture” novels. Like the music field there is nothing new, just a chance to get creative and take parts from everything that has gone before.

This anthology is no longer focused on certain aspects of a certain form of cyberpunk, which undoubtedly has somewhat come to pass (yet also still looks like a potential future). The wider themes of Cyberpunk still resonate and that's why cyberpunk still exists and is being written; it just looks differently because it looks forward to the potential future with an eye to current trends. All the examples about AI, inter-connectivity and virtual worlds half exist now. They don't really in the way they do in most cyberpunk, we still are looking forward to those. We are also looking forward to the new tech emerging. Then there is the other side of cyberpunk, the literary styles and examination of the political/social aspect of the genre which doesn't go away. That's why there are so many punk sub-genres now. They explore different tech potentials with the same principles as steampunk. This anthology is a good example of that. For example, “The Wind-Up Girl” essentially looks at the roots of the current revolution occurring in biotech and uses the cyberpunk mould to explore the far-flung potential of that in the way Gibson did with networked computers (it's called a biopunk novel by some). If anything, the genre becomes more prescient, along with all SF, but specifically cyberpunk, as technological advances have exploded in the last 35 years and we begin to consider the social ramifications of these technologies as they mature.

If someone says Portuguese SF does not have any depth, it’s all about style, and has got no substance, he or she should read the short-stories in this collection. True, most of them no longer have that characteristic gritty cyberpunk 'core' so common in cyberpunk from the 80s; what these tales embody are literary games by simply using a cyberpunk aesthetic for what could be any type of game underneath. It’s not cyberpunk? Maybe not, but it’s still good SF (e.g., “Deuses Como Nós”/”Gods Like Us” by Victor Frazão included in this collection). Either way, a cyberpunk game may not be called such just because it takes place in a futuristic urban dystopia. So maybe they’re cyberpunk of a different sort. When I think about great video games forming a gestalt, I think most of them have me actively partaking in actions typical of the cyberpunk tradition; hacking, investigating, violence, and theft. Not only that, but they can also tell fantastic stories, take place in a well-developed setting/world, and have stunning art direction. Is that what cyberpunk is all about or there’s something else at play here?

NB: Reading what literary people must say about science fiction is such an aggravating bore. Was cyberpunk ever supposed to be taken seriously? William Gibson has admitted that he really didn't know anything about computers when he wrote “Neuromancer”. Cyberpunk was nothing but a style; it was not really cyber. Check out “The Two Faces of Tomorrow” by James P. Hogan. That is CYBER.

SF = Speculative Fiction.

Smart-Alecky SF: "Skullsworn" by Brian Staveley

“’If I wanted you dead, you would be dead’?” He sucked some blood from between his teeth, then spat it onto the cobbles. “What is that? A line from some mid-century melodrama? You heard that onstage a few nights ago?”

In “Skullsworn” by Brian Staveley

Reasons to avoid some Fantasy:

1. Trilogies - a story seldom needs 3 volumes, nobody wants to read the 'excluded middle' of tosh, let alone wait for the third volume when they have forgotten the contents of the first - strike George R.R. Martin;

2. Sequel proliferation. Ditto objection 1 squared - strike Eddings et al;

3. Formulaic - It's often better to re-read Tolkien, skipping some of his embarrassing attempts at females than read the whole thing again with different silly names - strike all sorts of piffle;

4. Silly names - countries; cities; people. How about concepts; recipes; politics - invent something - move to include Iain M. Banks 'Culture' - or does invention have to belong to THE science fiction part of SF?

5. Written by die cast. Surely much is the product of hashish and D&D - this you can make up for yourself;

6. Poor writing - to wit the obviously much beloved Staveley - whilst his books were entertaining they are limited by his repetitive vocabulary; why can't his educated characters master the conditional subjunctive…?

One of the common failing of most fantasy fiction is that the morality and emotional conflict of the antagonists is never explored or it feels gimmicky. We get a lot of stuff wherein the good guys become less good, and the bad guys stay smart-alecky. Characters tend to be stupid. It’s how an author can impart information to the reader that the character themselves haven’t picked up on yet. It’s also an engagement tactic: did you guess, right? May as well read the next chapter and find out, you stupid reader. What else? Ah yes. Strong romance...check, Romance the focus...check, World Without Plenty of magic...check, some clichés...check, Some semi-explicit stuff...check. All genres of books have many poor and average writers and some great ones - fantasy writing is just as good as any other kind of writing and the best fantasy provides some excellent analysis and criticism of reality as well as imagining coherent alternative realities and managing to be both funny at some points and gripping at others.  I despair of so much fantasy fiction. There is a lot of landfill quality stuff out there; but also, too many multi-volume epics with formulaic plots. How many more times will that downtrodden turn out to be the heir to the kingdom? (feel free to substitute “ploughboy orphan” by “Assassin that has ten days to kill ten people enumerated in an ancient song, including ‘the one you love / who will not come again.’” or by any other input placeholder you wish).

I don't know why I bother reading crap like this. Staveley no more...

SF = Speculative Fiction.

Islamic Thought: "Dune" by Frank Herbert

(My own copy)

A great book full of grand themes.

Time has only made it grander in its vision. I mean, there was a time when Islam wasn't the great, dangerous "other" to Western eyes. Moderate Islam had an appeal to the west, for example, Goethe's west-eastern Divan. Dune stands in this tradition. It describes a world which is full of Islamic thought. It is world in which Islam probably pushed aside Christianity to become the world's leading religion. In demographic terms, Herbert will most likely turn out to be correct. Also, Paul Atreides is a soldier as well as a religious leader, that means, he is not a Jesus figure (who was not a soldier); he is a Mohamed, the leader of a state and of a religion. Then there are the themes of climate change, genetic engineering, the artificiality of religion, which were prophetic. Herbert had a keen eye for the themes that would dominate the next decades (centuries?)

And then there's the literary impact, for example, the way the inner thoughts of the characters is written in italic. “The Song of Ice and Fire” copies that. And thinking about it, the story arc of Robb Stark has similarities to that of Paul Atreides: their fathers are being made an offer they can't refuse and are being forced to relocate to a hostile environment (the desert/the south); the fathers die in a political intrigue and the son and his mother lead the army to avenge them; if it wasn't for the Red Wedding, Robb Stark's arc would have (almost) been the story of Paul Atreides. However, the supernatural elements of the Atreides' character are transferred to Bran Stark.

I don’t like all the sequels; had to read book 5 and 6 twice though to really mildly enjoy them, and the philosophical basis of the narratives wears thin at some point. I mean, the sequels mostly tell stories that are being described as logical consequences of their predecessors. Paul Atreides's rise must lead to his downfall. Leto Atreides does what Paul couldn't do, and then things happen the way Leto predicted them. And then the books stop before the ulterior motive (possibly shoehorned into the Dune world at the time of book 4) is revealed. But I guess the Star Wars novels sort of picked up that concept with the Yuuzhan Vong.

(Bought in 1993)

Some random thoughts:

- The more recent mini-series version of Dune & Children of Dune provided a story much closer to Frank Herbert's original;

- David Lynch's version still gives me nightmares - the scenes on Salusa Secundus are quite horrifying; I always knew the Harkonnens were bad from the book, but that bad? whoa. On the other hand there are some aspects I think Lynch really did well - the Giger-esque sets were based on the sketches for Jodorowsky's film. Sting in cod-piece? Classic!

- The music by Toto was still pretty good, and don't forget one of Brian Eno's most famous pieces "Prophecy" is used for Paul's first vision. Also Patrick Stewart as... Patrick Stewart. Actually Gurney Halleck, but since I saw him in this before Sting I picture him more as a lute-playing scottish-sounding psychopath;

(All of them in a row...)

- What amazed me about the original Dune series was how almost all the real action occurred 'off screen' as it were; the narration only showed action scenes that were very small, but highly pivotal events. This evokes to me the real coverage of wars we see in the media - we only see 'news-bytes' and little 30 second vignettes of what a clearly larger, far more complex events. Growing up reading action novels and other media like Star Wars or Star Trek, Dune was a real eye-opener to another way of story-telling, and I felt a superior one;

- I gave up on the mini-series almost immediately, due to the fact they gave away the big twist at the end of the novel very early on, as if it were no big deal. Paul's eventual control of the Spice on Arrakis gives him complete control over the so called Spacing Guild (who have a monopoly on space travel) and therefore over interstellar travel, due to the fact that the Spacing Guild need the Spice to make interstellar calculations. This is the big reveal at the end of the novel. It's this complete control of the Spice that gives Paul complete power over the empire. The Spacing Guild had been keeping their total reliance on the Spice a secret. The first prequel novel also made it seem as if everyone knew the Spacing Guild were completely reliant on Spice for their abilities. I gave up on it almost immediately. Yes, I'm a Dune nerd;

- As for George Lucas, I had read Dune by the time I saw 'The Empire Strikes Back' so I was well aware of how much George Lucas outright plagiarized it. 'Dune Sea' - verbatim. Sandpeople = Fremen, Mos Eisley = Arrakeen, Jabba's Palace = Ducal Palace / Paul's Palace, Moisture farmers, sandcrawlers, the skeleton of what is clearly a sandworm, the Sarlac; rather pathetic.  I seem to recall Mr Herbert was disgusted by the wholesale rip-off of many of his themes;

- Tried to read all of the prequels as well, seduced by their bullshit claim of having found a trove of Frank's notes, but once I got to Dune 7 and read the hack, trite garbage they had coming out of my beloved characters' mouths I realize I had been royally buggered. Literately speaking;

- Another ingredient was Charles L. Harness for the semi-permeable shields causing a return to swordplay and a lot of the drugged-up superbrain stuff.

(View from above)

- The basic point about 'Dune' was that it came just after Mariner IV robbed writers of the default exotic locale of Barsoom. Arrakis is one of the first times an author had to invent a planet from scratch to do this sort of thing, rather than as an end in itself as Hal Clement had been doing;

- My memory of the sequels is that the "odd" books were good and the "even" books were terrible, though I confess that the only one I ever return to is the first, and the way Herbert built major changes into his future-history is something I probably overlooked at the time;

In all of the above-mentioned points it's an odd kind of SF; Dune’s world is entirely self-contained. Herbert also had the knack (beautifully developed further by the late great Iain M. Banks) of dropping just enough hints about the historical origins of his world and other "off-stage" establishing details - enough to make you believe that he conceived a totality, without having to explicitly spell it out.