Why, welcome back to my on-going catch-up with one of the most enjoyable series of books I’ve had the pleasure to sit down with (and miss bus/train stops) in a long while. I’m talking about Charles Stross’ Laundry Files series, of course, of which The Nightmare Stacks is the 7th instalment. The 8th novel, The Delirium Brief, came ouit in July, so you could say that I’ve caught up! The Laundry Files follows the fortunes (and, quite frequently, misfortunes) of a number of protagonists working for a secret and secretive Government Agency dealing with what we call the Occult - essentially MI5 for tentacled horrors from other dimensions (I simplify, a lot, as you will see below). Essentially, though - magic is real (it’s a branch of applied mathematics), and so are a lot of the mythological creatures and concepts going round, and someone had to keep a lid both on things which go thump in the night (and might terminally affect humanity, never mind the UK), and on people with a mathematical or programming (closely related in many cases) mindset who might just independently trip over some of the crucial theorems and algorithms (aka invocations…) which might do them, and us, much harm. This is, though, mixed in with a good amount of geeky jokes, irreverent discourses on the horrors of Bureaucracy and Politics, never mind Office Politics and Paperclip Audits; as well as peppered with references to other genres, writing styles, and societal structures. In short - it’s much more fun than simply something which crosses what is essentially Horror with a Secret Service Agent setting.
Charles Stross is a professional writer, now mainly of Science Fiction but previously also of Computer Science and whatever paid the rent for a freelance journalist. He’s a hugely entertaining presence, should you have a chance to see him speak on stage, or in a Bar at a SF Convention. He lives in Scotland, but was born and raised in Leeds, which, telling from the story at hand, he does not have a great relationship with! He has won multiple awards for his stories and books, and shows, thankfully, no sign of slowing down.
This is Jo Walton’s first short story collection, containing “two short stories I wrote after I knew what I was doing, two I wrote before I knew what I was doing, some exercises, some extended jokes, some first chapters of books I didn’t write, some poems with the line breaks taken out, a play, and some poems with the line breaks left in”. Her words… Jo Walton is a Welsh-born writer living in Canada. She has won a wide range of awards for her writing, including but not limited to the John W. Campbell, Prometheus, World Fantasy, Nebula, and Hugo Awards. I used to think of her as an SF Poet, but looking at the list of her publications (and awards for them!) I very much stand corrected. Still, per her statement above, the one thing she struggled with were short stories, which is rather different to how many (most?) other SF writers hone their craft, and move into the field of published authors. But, as they say, different strokes for different people. And here we have, within her own definition per the above quote, her first collection of short fiction.
Starlings starts with a poem on the topics of the birth of new stars - thus the title of the poem, and of the collection overall. It’s a lovely poem, too. And ways too clever for me… This is followed by an introduction, by the author, on the topic of herself, and her approach to writing short stories. I guess I can safely summarise this as not her forte, but she’s better at it than she used to be.
Reading the collection I can confirm that she definitely does just fine with the format, even if she does not think of most of the contents here as ‘short stories’ herself! Most to all of the content has been published before over the years, so unless you are completely new to her oeuvre you will most likely trip over the odd story or poem you’ve seen before - I did, occasionally. I’ll provide short capsule reviews on topics and my impressions for the individual stories below - if you’d rather enjoy this without too many spoilers then you might want to stop here, and go get the book, it’s worth your time and money!
Here's a blast from a past, and a great hope for the future, all in one package!
S. P. Somtow (or Somtow Sucharitkul, which he originally published under), the Thai/American polymath famous for both his writing and as a composer, has re-released The Comet that Cried for its Mother, an Inquestor originally published in Amazing Stories and later, in adapted form, included in Utopia Hunters on Wattpad.
So, firstly, go forth and read, and enjoy - I always appreciated the Inquestor stories for their fantastic Space Opera setting, mixed with a High Values/High Honour culture which could just as well be from a classic Fantasy setting, for its inspirational and evocative language and storytelling.
But, also - this is, as he states, part of the path toward a 5th novel in the series; which he plans to publish in Novella-length instalments as a Zine, with ancillary materials, original stories, and hopefully artwork. And me, for one, cannot wait to get my hands on new (or even previously unseen) material set in this universe.
The story is subtitled 'Working Back from Human Extinction', and does exactly that - provide a list of events and interventions, in reverse chronological order, of the run-up to human extinction. You will not be surprised that it begins in the today, or maybe even the yesterday, with 'Turn off the lights when you are no longer in the room.'
But if the path to hell is paved with good intention, then the path to human extinction is paved with decisions made with the best intentions. At least some of them, the rest of course were made due to greed, other interests than humanity overall, or simply stupidity...
Bruce Sterling came to prominence as one of the superstars of Cyberpunk, a genre he helped to create and shape. But he has not rested on his laurels, and has continues to release novels, novellas, and collections - a lot of which explore societal themes, extrapolated from where we are today. These settings are frequently highly believable, both from the point of feeling like true possible futures, but also because they are vivid, with substantial amounts of incidental detail to bring them to live and give them depth.
Distraction, an Arthur C. Clarke Award winner, is one such novel, centering on a US which has declined, turned inwards, lost its power on the international stage, and has politically fallen apart internally, too. The story follows Oscar Valparaiso, the former/outgoing campaign manager for Alcott Bambakias, the new Senator-elect for Massachusetts. Oscar is nominally taking a paid vacation with his Krewe, but is picking up a new project to occupy his attention in the shape of the Buna National Collaboratory, a Federal Laboratory and Genome Preservation Centre in Louisiana - including Dr Greta Penninger, a research-focused, non-political (in stark contrast to Oscar) neurologist who, to her own despair, serves as a Board Member. The relationship between theses two is as unusual as it is interesting in its development.
The story plays out in a world where the US is not the world power it used to be - its economy went bust due to East Asia being faster, better, cheaper, and its military cannot pay its own power bills without setting up roadblocks to shake down travellers… American cash is no longer convertible to stable currencies outside the US borders (and larger bills are bugged, apparently). The cold war is now with the Dutch, over global warming and its consequences (yes the weather/climate has rather changed) - they literally are “with their backs against the dikes”, as Oscar’s former journalist girlfriend puts it as she sets off to cover this conflict from the Dutch side. Some of the other claims in the background are less likely or believable, like the changes to nutritions - fat and heavy cuisine has been made healthy as a reaction to the pesticide disasters which put an end to the diet and exercise movement, we are told.
Do I need to introduce William Gibson? Author of Neuromancer (and 12 novels since), winner of about everything which can be won in the field? Yes, he’s moved on from his Cyberpunk days, that’s perfectly ok, and to be expected. And, with The Difference Engine he is/was one of the founding fathers of Steampunk, too. Plus - he’s still putting out utterly compelling material, like the book at hand. The Peripheral is his latest novel (and yes, I’m behind, it’s been a year since he published this), it’s a standalone novel in a rather interesting setting, inasmuch as this plays in a future world (post-apocalyptic does not really cover it. post-dystopian?) which has learned to make connections to the past - each of which splits of another ‘stub’, creates another time line which started the same as the past, but which branches off from the point of contact. So far so Everett-Wheeler-Graham, I guess…
The story starts with Flynne standing in for her war vet brother, flying a paid shift running security in a game (or that’s what she thinks it is), and witnessing a murder in the process. Playing games for money seems to be one of the main ways of earning a living in Flynne’s world - the other alternative seems to be fabbing (think 3D printing, advanced), mostly counterfeit goods or drugs. But the crime she witnessed was real, and not in a game, and someone wants Flynne dead now, urgently. In parallel chapters we follow Wilf Netherton as one of his charges tries to contact the denizens (‘Patchers’) of the floating city in the Pacific Garbage Patch to cut some kind of deal - and the whole operation goes badly belly-up. This leaves Wilf initially out of work, and soon thereafter a target for elimination for reasons he is not entirely sure of - something else is afoot, and not just that deal/project having gone wrong and a number of Patchers killed in the process.
What do you get when someone deeply embedded in the Now, the discussions around our online culture, about our electronic rights, about where we are and where we are heading, and who has published copiously on these topics previously writes a work of fiction? The answer, for very good (and maybe even obvious?) reasons is with a cracker of a novel playing on exactly these topics - here is someone who knows what they are talking about, and who is telling us about what she feels we need to think of for the future.
Annalee Newitz is a journalist who writes about the cultural impact of science and technology, the former editor at iO9 and Gizmodo, a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and currently the Tech Culture Editor for Ars Technica. Besides all her online and magazine work she has 6 non-fiction books to her name, now followed by her first novel, Autonomous.
Autonomous is a story about bots, about ownership, and about self-image and self-determination. Or, alternatively, about business, intellectual property, and the protection of investment; including the question of what is socially, ethically, and morally acceptable (or can be got away with, at least). The story, set in a 2144 which is surprisingly recognisable, follows two main protagonists - firstly Jack, a designer drug pirate who travels in a stealth submarine, and distributes free drugs to the needy who cannot afford them; and secondly Paladin, a bird-like bot, freshly become incorporated and thus indentured to the African Federation, who now is set to work for the IPC to track down patent violations. You see, this world is nominally run by a small number of power blocks, but all the more so by ever-mightier corporations, who more or less can flaunt the law as they wish in the protection of their interests; we witness some events involving violence I found rather unpalatable, but apparently quite accepted as fait accompli by society. Jack has a problem though - one of the drugs she reverse-engineered, has had produced, and sold to pay for her charitable work belonged to a mighty corporation called Zacity, and has a flaw - it does not just make work much more enjoyable and desirable to do (as it is designed to), it makes the user dependent on continuing to do it to the exclusion of everything else - to their death. And Zacity will do anything to keep this from becoming common knowledge.
