What do you do if you were born in Israel, and have grown up on a Kibbutz, which you left to travel at the age of 15? If you have lived in South Africa, Laos, Vanatu, the UK, and many places in-between since? Lavie Tidhar’s answer is that you write about what used to be home - about Israel, and about what the future brings. Actually, that’s quite unfair. He has written about topics as far and wide as he has travelled, he has headed up the award-winning World SF Blog, has edited the first 3 instalments in the Apex Book of World SF series, and has published a long list of novels, collections, novellas, graphic novels, and non-fiction of his own writing. I guess the one thing you really cannot accuse him of is being a white, male, and UK/US centric writer. OK, he cannot help the male bit, but I’m sure you see what I mean!
But to come back to it - for Central Station, the novel/collection at hand, he returned his focus to the country, or at least the area, he was born and brought up in.
The Central Station of the title is a spaceport, a huge edifice reaching up towards the Stratosphere, providing a landing spot for the traffic coming in from the Moon, Mars, the Asteroid belts, and more exotic, ‘frontier’ type locations. It stands over and links the twin cityscapes of Arab Jaffa and Jewish Tel Aviv, and seems to have accumulated its own diaspora of immigrants from Africa and Asia at its base; what we find in the stories are families of mixed heritage, who have been here for generations, who helped build Central Station, and whose lives are intertwined with it.
On a lighter note, for once - here is a classic little tale, written by the inimitable Seth Kallen Deitch, called The Gaon of Chozzerai, published in Rudy Rucker's currently dormant Flurb magazine (worth reading around in, much recommended!)
I leave it to the reader to establish the meaning of the title - let's just say that it's quite pertinent to the story, which deals with a parallel dimension where things that are lost end up, and the fortunes of the (failed) scientist who finds his way there. If you ever wanted to know where your missing single socks go, this story provide an solution to the riddle.
This is a fun story, and whilst not terribly deep or important, but well worth reading.
The picture on the right is unattributed, and comes from a alien conspiracy site. If it's yours please let me know, and I'll add a reference!
Bruce Sterling is an award-winning American SF author who rose to prominence with the seminal Cyberpunk genre-defining anthology Mirrorshades. He has meanwhile 12 novels and 7 Collections (plus other publications) to his name, including the proto-steampunk novel The Difference Engine, written with William Gibson. He also writes non-fiction.
Heavy Weather is a (maybe overly?) prophetic book, set in a near future where the human impact on the biosphere has had major consequences. Essentially humanity messed up - the biosphere, and especially the atmosphere is shot. And it feels like a straight extrapolation from where we are now (never mind pre-95, when this was written…). There are whole swathes of land which are now simply uninhabitable where they used to be fruitful, and the weather is messed up, badly. Heavy Weather, they call it. It’s violent, unpredictable, and highly damaging.
The story starts with Alejandro ‘Alex’ Unger, prodigal son of a moneyed family, in an illegal/black market Mexican clinica, in a fug of self-administered medication, and about to undergo a lung enema (no, really). He is broken out of the establishment (where he meant to spend his remaining time) by his sister, Juanita ‘Jane’ Unger.
She takes him to the camp of the Storm Troupers, a gang of scientific Tornado/Heavy Weather chasers led by the charismatic Jerry Mulcahey. Jerry is a Mathematician, one of the best. And he specialises in extreme weather events, modelling them, forecasting them, measuring and documenting them, and comparing the actual data with his models, to make them better. You see, his troupe are not the usual tornado chasers and thrill seekers. Well, not solely thrill seekers. But his is a scientific approach, and so he employs Media Artists like Jane, and Scientists, and Lawyers, too.
Jerry has modeled and forecast an entirely new event, an F6 tornado, with never-before seen destructive force and impact. His simulations suggest that this monster might, under the right circumstances, become permanent, like the red spot on Jupiter.
Neal Asher is a British writer of large-scale high-octane Space Opera - if you are looking for horrific alien biology or simply a bigger kaboom then you cannot go much wrong with his stories. War Factory, the first book he publishes after the death of his wife (he stopped writing for a while) is the 2nd volume in the Transformation series, which follows an Artificial Intelligence which has gone ‘dark’ - translate this as mad, or unknowable, if you wish. It is set in his Polity universe (I count 13 novels and one short story collection in this so far).
The book starts with potted descriptions and background of the main characters, and a glossary of the main concepts and history of the Polity universe, inasmuch as it pertains to the story at hand. There are also a few further information dumps within the story, too. I did not really feel that this was conceived as a jumping-on point for the series (hey, it’s only the second book, ok?), but more as an anchor for the reader in the series and the world it plays it, given the substantial body of work this is by now!
There also appears to exist a record by composer Steve Baik (evokescape.com) inspired by the story, and apparently available via Amazon or iTunes. I have not heard it, so cannot comment on enjoyability, or suitability for listening to whilst reading the book!
We start more or less where the first book in the series, Dark Intelligence, let off: Penny Royal is back on the run after its short ‘official’ sting on Masada. It’s unclear if it’s up to more of its tricks, or making amends and fixing things it broke in its previous career. It is definitely pulling a lot of strings, mostly behind the scenes… Thorvald Spear is now linked to Penny Royal’s discarded spine, which seems to contain recordings of a lot of Penny Royal’s victims, which are uploading to Thorvald’s brain one by one. He is still on the his mission to chase Penny Royal down and kill it, somehow. Riss, the assassin drone/terror weapon from the Prador war 100 years hence is travelling with Thorvald. It is looking for meaning in its life, given that the war is over and it cannot fulfil its sole target in life and kill Prador anymore.
Let me draw your attention to an older story - Spider the Artist was Nnedi Okorafor's first 'pure' Science Fiction story (her words). So no Fantasy, no Folk Magic (well...), but, even with this first effort, her very own, distinct brand of African Dystopia.
The story is set around an oil pipeline, with the usual going-ons that such a transport for valuable goods brings. Except that pipeline is guarded by 8-legged, spider-like robots who do not take kindly to people tapping the pipeline, or interfering with it in any way. But it is also a love story, and a promise for the future, which is something I greatly appreciate in such a setting.
This was first published in an anthology called Seeds of Change (worth reading!), and later on re-published in Lightspeed Magazine, where you can read the story in full.
The picture on the right are illustrations from the Finnish translation of the story, as published in the magazine Tähtivaeltaja.
Aliette de Bodard is currently Hot Property, I daresay. She has previously won BSFA and Nebula awards, and has just won another two BSFAs as announced at Mancunicon (the UK National SF Convention this year) - a feat unheard of for quite some time. She is also nominated for this year's Hugo awards, in several categories (the shortlists are not released yet as I'm writing this), but I was wondering how her novella The Citadel of Weeping Pearls, published in the October/November issue of Asimov's and thus eligible for the 2016 Awards, would hold up in comparison to her other work; but especially in comparison to its (distant) prequel On a Red Station, Drifting, a Hugo and Nebula finalist which I very much appreciated.
Well, let me start by saying that the two stories are rather different, on a number of levels. Even taking into account that Aliette does not really see these as direct sequels, and that they are only loosely linked by being set in the same universe (Xuya, in the future strand), it feels like I'm not really comparing apples with apples here.
The Citadel of Weeping Pearls is centred on the Xuya Imperial court, and the Empress Mi Hiep. Mi Hiep quarreled with her daughter, the Bright Princess Ngoc Minh, 30 years ago. Ngoc Minh removed herself and her followers from the court, and founded the Citadel of Weeping Pearls to continue her quest of investigating teachings outside the court prescribed ones, and develop the teleportation, telekinetic etc abilities that were her focus of learning. When her mother felt threatened by the martial applications of these new developments, and sent her fleet do destroy he daughter and her creation the whole Citadel disappeared, and was never heard of again. But now Bach Cuc, the court's Grand Master of Design Harmony and key researcher in the effort to try and track down the Citadel has disappeared, and the Empress sends her former lover, the General Suu Nuoc, and the mindship The Turtle's Golden Claw (who is her own granddaughter) to solve the mystery and track him down, as having access to the Citadel and its resources and abilities might be her only chance in the war that is looming.
On a lighter note, for once - here is a classic little tale, written by the inimitable 
