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Slow Bullets by Alistair Reynolds

Slow-Bullets-cover-186x300When a new Alistair Reynolds novel comes out, fans can be confident that it’s going to be Space Opera of the highest quality, with a mix of propulsive plot and thought-provoking commentary on life, the universe, civilization. and the human condition. They can also expect that it’s going to take more than a few pages to do it’s job. Sometimes a few more pages than you might have time for.

Slow Bullets manages to fill the first bill, but in a novella (barely) length work. So barely that the editor had to ask Reynolds to trim 250-300 words(1) to make it fall within the rules. Hugo rules, anyway. It will be available from Tachyon Press(2) this June in paperback, as well as the usual online suspects in eBook, but it will also be out in a signed limited edition hardcover from WSFA Press this fall and available at Capclave, their annual convention.(3)(4)
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Trial by Fire by Charles Gannon

The good news is that Gannon has done his homework and produced a thoughtful and complex piece of space opera. The bad news is that he's so proud of the work that went into it that he spends a fair chunk of the book telling us about it, rather than letting his characters just get on with it.

The good news is that Gannon has done his homework and produced a thoughtful and complex piece of space opera. The bad news is that he’s so proud of the work that went into it that he spends a fair chunk of the book telling us about it, rather than letting his characters just get on with it.

Trial by Fire is complex, well-thought-out space opera. Gannon second book in the Terran Republic series is a collision of deep games by lots of players, clashing more than one civilization against another. He’s also worked hard to provide character conflict with a messy love quadrangle and a host of viewpoint characters. It’s a big book, partly because he’s thrown in way too much exposition, but partly because it covers too much ground. Fans may like the latter, as it keeps them from having to wait for the next installment, and there will be a next installment, we can be sure of that, but some hard editing would have made this a better read without sacrificing the book’s ability to convey its message. At the core, it’s a classic sf action adventure on the theme of human exceptionalism, but it manages to create a synthesis of everything from Niven’s Ringworld to James P. Hogan’s Inherit the Stars.

Charles Gannon’s first book in his Terran Federation space opera series, Fire with Fire, came out last year to enough acclaim to garner it a Nebula Award nomination. It was a enjoyable and fast paced tale of first contact and political intrigue starring Caine Riordan, a man slightly our of time. Caine was a civilian military analyst and sometime journalist who happened to fall in love with the wrong gal at the wrong time. When he showed up at her apartment (on the moon, btw) to surprise her with flowers, military security mistook him for a spy sneaking around an operative with very secret information they wanted to keep that way. Suddenly, Caine is bagged, tagged, and stuck in a cold freeze for the next 12 years. When he wakes up, it’s a whole new ball game. Interstellar travel, human colonies, and alien politics have all sprouted up while he was resting. To add insult to injury, the gal he was wooing’s dad turns out to be the head of a super-secret intelligence organization, hence Caine’s sudden nap, who had defrosted him so that he could put him to work as an operative.

Cain goes from reviewing ruins on a newly-colonized world and uncovering the unsettling news that there were humans there thousands of years ago, to uncovering the move towards war that lie behind humanity’s rejection from the alien Accord under which we’re applying for entrance into the local galactic community.

And now he’s back in book two, and yes, there will be war.

The story opens with Caine being briefed by an Admiral on “the Pearl,” our starbase at Bernard’s star. After serving as a civilian operative of the shadowy IRIS agency, ge’s been dragooned into the military, jumped up to Commander, and is now being deactivated. All fast enough to make his head spin, but for which reasons will, more or less become clear. Along with him is Trevor Corcoran, former Navy SEAL, son of spymaster (deceased) Nolan Corcoran, and brother of Eleanor…who happens to be the gal  Caine fell for before getting dropped into cold sleep. Fortunately, she was on the young side then, and they’re now more or less contemporaries. Trevor’s been jumped up to Captain, and like Caine, suddenly retired, all of which is prepositioning for what’s to come. Speaking of love interestes, if you haven’t read book one, there’s Opal Patrone, an Army Major who’d been in cryo far longer than Caine, but got drafted by IRIS on awakening and assigned to get close to our boy. As a result, we’ve got a complicated lover’s quadrangle. Opal loves, Caine, Caine loves Elena but due to a memory wipe isn’t supposed to know it, Elena loves Caine, and has a child by him besides, and Trevor love Opal, who, it turns out, is quite pregnant by Caine. Whew.

Caine and Trevor are sent post-haste back to Earth, but don’t quite make it before the alien Arat Kur shows up and wipes out the fleet at Bernard’s Star. The two may well be the only survivors, and that only because their ship was showing diplomatic identification codes, a mistake caused by their sudden retirement. The ship that nearly kills them, and gets shot up for its trouble, turns out to be carrying the Arat Kur’s actual diplomat, Darzhee Kut, another character we ran into in the first book. Caine and Trevor survive by first taking Darzhee prisoner, then surrendering to his fleet…and the book jumps forward to after the invasion of Earth.

Seems like that could have been interesting…but….nevermind.

Back on Earth, Trevor has been given back to us, but Caine is kept on as diplomatic liason and very much a prisoner. The Arat Kur have two major allies in this war they’ve chose to wage, the hyper agressive Hkh’Rkh, another galactic race, and Earth’s biggest corporation, CoDevCo, who don’t see this as an invasion at all, just an alliance forged without messy government intervention. The aliens have taken over the orbital high ground, but the only piece of Earth they’re sitting on is Indonesia, where CoDevCo’s orbital cargo launching mass driver, a rail gun on steroids, is located. They’ve imposed a global no-fly rule, enforced by orbital laser and kinetic weapons, and only reluctantly opened Indonesia to ships carrying grain, since “looters” tragically destroyed the food stores forcing the aliens to let thousands starve or a few ships in.

That’s the setup. Caine’s inside, everyone else is outside trying to figure out how to get in, and it’s all going according to plan, a plan laid down by Nolan Corcoran before he died.

Despite the work the author put into creating character conflict equal to the military and political conflicts, the characters don’t pull us in. Caine spends much of the book on the sidelines looking on and explaining humanity to the aliens, Opal and Elena race each other to go save Caine, who wouldn’t need saveing except that Nolan’s successor, Richard Downing, keeps throwing him back ito the fire, and Trevor just hopes that things work out between Caine and Elena so he can snap up Opal.

At 464 pages, Fire with Fire wasn’t thin, but at 656 pages Trial by Fire trumps it by a nearly a third, and getting through the first couple hundred pages, despite a fleet on fleet space battle where we take it on the chin against overwhelming alien superiority, is something of an uphill battle. Gannon’s done a terrific amount of work getting his facts right, from the logistical to the political, but instead of letting his characters show us the results, he’s determined to have them talk them to death before, or as, things are happening. Gannon knows his art of war, from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz and beyond, but while i”Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics,” (1) he might leaven it with some of Hemming way’s advice;

“If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened…the test of any story is how very good the stuff that you, not your editors, omit.” (2)

That’s it. I blame the editor, actually, I really do. This book is good enough that some actual editing would have been worth the investment.

Now, you may be thinking that in this genre, exposition isn’t always a bad thing, and I agree. A large part of why I read science fiction is because good sf is driven by ideas, and from Robert Heinlein to Neal Stephenson, whether Morris the Explainer shows up as a sage professor explaining ballistics on the way to the moon, or a virtual librarian giving us back-story on the invention of writing and neuro-viruses by Sumerians, it’s actually what I came for. In Trial by Fire’s case, I expect that it’s in there to lend credibility to what might otherwise be dismissed as mil-spec porn. Not, as Bud Sparhawk once said to me, that that’s a bad thing, per se, but Gannon is clearly aiming higher.

Fire with Fire could easily have been broken up into two books, and in fact, it does so in the table of contents with Book One taking us from the opening slaughter of Earth’s fleet at Barnard’s Star to the invasion of Earth, and Book Two takes the fight back to the enemy both on the ground and between the stars. It’s a lot of ground to cover, and while fans will be no doubt grateful for not being left hanging, it’s a big read all at once.

It took a while for Trial by Fire to win me over, but eventually it did the trick. It’s a big book, full of good ideas and carefully thought out, but next time, could we have a little less talk, and a lot more action?

Links References

1) Possibly first said by General Omar Bradly, but it may go back further than that.
2) Ernest Hemingway (1990). “The Art of the Short Story”. In Benson, Jackson. New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-1067-9.

 

 

Before Tomorrowland: Disney Brings Cultural Appropriation to Fandom

Before Tomorrowland is more or less a prequel to Tomorrrowland, the movie, but you’ll have a hard time matching up the threads between them. Of course, some of them wound up on the cutting room floor, but even so, it’s lacking as a prequel. The action takes place around the first Worldcon and the1939 New York World’s Fair, when a secret society of scientists, the Plus Ultra gang, prepares to unveil the existence of a world of tomorrow, today. Somehow they discovered a fantastic world just a wormhole, or something away, and are keen to build the kind of techno-utopia that science fiction fans have been dreaming of.

Only it turns out that those dreams are really just a marketing campaign by Howard Hughes (and pretty much every historical science figure you can name from Tesla to Einstein). There really wasn’t a science fiction golden age, we discover. Instead, we find that it was a vision of the future funded and encouraged by Plus Ultra.

WELCOME: WORLD SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION. And what a fiction it was. Three men in front of the building wore garish costumes, probably inspired by publications Plus Ultra funded. Henry had files on dozens of magazines, book editors, and press agents, all operating under Plus Ultra’s thumb. Hugo Gernsback, the editor/ publisher of Amazing Stories, was one such honorary member of Plus Ultra, who used his magazines to plant ideas in culture and even, on occasion, recruit innocents.

Jensen, Jeff (2015-04-07). Before Tomorrowland (Digital Picture Book) (Kindle Locations 1015-1019). Disney Book Group. Kindle Edition.

Much to Plus Ultra’s chagrin, instead of a future full of promise and progress, fans insist on one full of alien invaders, mutant hordes and, global apocalypse. But they’re still scanning the crowd for a few dreamers with good hearts and they find two; Clara, a woman who put off chasing her dreams of being an illustrator for too long, now being eaten away by cancer, and her son Lee, who hasn’t really started dreaming yet. Clara’s dragged Lee to New York on the promise of taking him to see Lou Gehrig’s final appearance at Yankee Stadium, but she’s there to go to the first Worldcon in hopes of showing her portfolio to some publishers.

That’s interrupted by the arrival of a robot with the uploaded consciousness of a boy who was horribly burned in an accident working on Amelia Earhart’s rocket plane at the Plus Ultra testing grounds and a bunch of Nazis lead by a renegade Plus Ultra scientist who wants to get the robot body back for himself, and destroy the “good” guys in the process. Yes, you read that all correctly.

The science is outlandish, of course, claiming the mantle of super-science beyond what the years have brought to fruition, except where stealing from today helps the writers out. The writing is either dreadful or brilliantly hyperbolic in what I’m sure is supposed to be a period affectation rather than a failure to hire an actual sciene fiction writer. Cory Doctorow could have made this work, and he probably wouldn’t even have needed the Nazis.

The picture drawn of fandom isn’t pretty, though it’s fairly accurate. In a prescient echo of modern times, there was a faction of fandom barred from entry to the con because they had a social justice agenda for science fiction, while the organizers wanted it to remain free of stuff like that. Ironically, the barred group, the Futurians, don’t appear to have been co-opted by Plus Ultra who had thier own social agenda, but that’s utopia for you. There can be only one, and well, they were kind of far to the left of things.

I was hoping, as I expect Disney still is, that the book (and movie) would give people a way to reconnect to the Tomrrowland vision that’s crumbling in the corner of their theme park…but that’s not going to happen here. That the ending of the book doesn’t quite dovetail with the beginning of the movie is actually a blessing, as the movie comes much closer to getting the job done.

What Disney has missed is that the vision of the future people had in 1939 didn’t need a secret history to be something wonderful. It needed someone who understood it well enough to reveal that wonder to a new generation.

Daniel Abraham Interview: The Expanse, Writing as James S. A. Corey, and SyFy

DanielHeadshotSFRevu: Let me apologize up front for doing an interview with you which is mostly going to be about The Expanse, since you’re only half of James S.A. Corey. On the other hand, since I’m primarily an sf reader and don’t pursue a lot of fantasy, getting hooked on the Long Price Quartet was a real bonus.

Daniel Abraham: Not a problem. I’m happy to talk about any of it.

SFRevu: How did The Expanse come about? Every hero needs an origin story, so What’s this one?

Daniel: Well, we went to see Zorro one night, and on the way home there was this mugger, and… No, hold on. Wait.

My entry into the project was playing in a table-top role playing game that Ty Franck was running. It was really well-researched, with a lot of depth. The kind of thing where I could ask what the walls looked like or where the processing systems came together or how the banks worked, and he knew. It was this massive amount of world-building that had gone on, and I thought it would be a great setting for a novel. So I suggested we collaborate on a novel set there for fun. Apparently he thought it’d be cool too.

SFRevu: James S.A. Corey is the fusion of you and Ty Frank, though if you two are the brains, I suspect that there’s actually a whole village of people that might be considered vital organs. Who does what, and what do you do when you disagree … if you ever do?

Daniel: We very rarely disagree. There were a lot of conversations early in the process about what the project was. That helped a lot. Since we were both aiming toward the same thing, those times when we have seen things differently were pretty easy to negotiate. We looked at which one would be better at getting us to the kind of book we said we wanted. In case of a tie, we go for the one that looks most amazing when you picture it. We’ve never had a deep disagreement about the direction of the project.

SFRevu: In The Expanse, you achieve a level of physics, planetary science and biotech that would be respectable in something by Kim Stanley Robinson. Where does all that come from?

Daniel: Ty did a lot of background work for the table top game, and I have a degree in biology. We also know a lot of people whose expertise we can call upon if we need it for a particular issue.

SFRevu: My favorite science, which you handle very nicely both in your fantasy and The Expanse, is the dismal science, though in your stories, economics isn’t dismal at all, but provides a depth to the conflicts that most people miss. How did that evolve for you as a storyteller, and is there anyone else out there that you think does a good job with it?

Daniel: Ah, economics. I came to economics late in life, and with the zeal of a convert. I didn’t actually take any coursework in it when I was in college, so almost everything I learned was from books like Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan or one of Timothy Taylor’s lecture series on it. Or NPR’s Planet Money podcast. So I found this toolbox of analytical ideas that were made to look at how people acted and how the narrative of money and value are assigned and interact, and it was great.

I tend to divide the world into things that are discovered (rocks, laws of physics, stars) and things that are created (buildings, money, narratives of justice). I’d spent a lot of time in my intellectual career looking at things that are discovered, and economics was one of the first really extensive toolkits I found for thinking about things that are created.

It’s not an easy thing to incorporate into fiction, but it’s brilliant when it works. David Liss comes to mind as someone who did fiction really well with that. For non-fiction, though, there are some very surprising, wonderful books. Tim Parks is a novelist and writer about place. His book-length essay Medici Money is great. I’ve read it three of four times. And there’s a book called Payback: Debt and the Shadow side of Wealth that’s worth looking at to. That one’s by Margaret Atwood.

SFRevu: How much of you is in James Holden? Going over your Reddit chat from last year a couple things popped out that sounded very much like him, including, “You can ask me anything. Most of the time I won’t lie.” and “I had sex too early and grew a conscience too late.” That sounds like Holden to me.

Daniel: Some, but Ty writes the first drafts of the Holden chapters. My writing voice varies a lot depending on the project, but there are certainly personal choices and styles that just happen because all this stuff’s coming out of the same head.

SFRevu: One of the consistent themes in The Expanse seems to be the business of giving the job to the guy who you know won’t get it done, except that he does. I love the bit when someone explains to Miller that he’s “that guy” and he realizes that it’s what he’s become. Even Holden gets tapped for the role in Cibola Burn, though annoying anyone who tries to manipulate him is his charm. Is that just a reliable trope, or is it something you have a stake in? Got any favorite examples from movies or other novels?

Daniel: I think that’s a tool that a lot of people – myself included – can relate to. Who hasn’t felt like they were in over their head on something, right? Or had that “holy shit, I got away with it” thing when it actually worked out. Everyone suffers imposter syndrome at some point. That’s just a story that literalizes those fears and emotions.
For my money, the best version of that was Robert B. Parker’s Night Passage. That was his first Jesse Stone novel, and the way he built Jesse’s personal failures and the underestimation of those around him into the plot itself was great.

SFRevu: Here we are on Book #5, The Nemesis Games, which is the best book so far, in my opinion. I loved having so many characters from the other books show up, especially Sgt. Bobbie Draper, who Alex describes as “the woman with the power armor” when he’s too out of it to think straight. But I miss Miller, and I wonder how Prax is getting on. Any chance you could drop a hint?

Daniel: Prax is doing really, really well. He’s been working on the rebuilding of Ganymede, both as a researcher and – partly because he became a kind of minor celebrity – as an administrator. Mei’s doing well too. There are a lot of characters in The Expanse who come in, tell their story, and then their story’s done. We don’t see Prax again because he’s having adventures that aren’t very dramatic, and involve things like getting .3% better yield on a new strain of soybean and allocating the budget in a way that keeps as many projects as possible on track. It’s important, fascinating work for him, but it’s not much for us to watch.

Miller, on the other hand, is dead.
(Ern – Never stopped him before.)

SFRevu: Now that filming the first season of The Expanse is over, what do you think of the job they’ve done?

Daniel: I think they’re freaking brilliant. It has been a pleasure and an honor to work with these folks at remaking the story we told in the books, and watching how the things we did resonated and reformed in minds with new, different skill sets and aesthetic insights. There are so many profoundly talented people involved in this – writers, directors, actors, the guy who keeps us on budget, the visual effects team, the artists, the makeup folks, the construction crews that made the sets – the depth of expertise that goes into a project like that is insane and awe inspiring. I think they’ve done a really great job.

SFRevu: What was the working dynamic between James S.A. Corey and the other writers like Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby?

Daniel: It’s a little eerie sometimes. Mark and Hawk particularly have a working dynamic as a team that makes perfect sense to me and Ty. Of everyone involved in this I think Mark and Hawk have the story sensibility that’s most like ours. But there are a lot of people who are also involved and amazing who don’t. We’ve got scripts in the first season by Robin Veich who wrote for Mad Men and Dan Nowak from The Killing and Jason Ning who was on Burn Notice and Perception. And our other showrunner, Naren Shankar who’s been part of Star Trek TNG and CSI and Farscape. Everyone has a different style and set of strengths and perspectives. And they make a great team.

SFRevu: I’m sure there are lots of folks hoping that The Expanse will fill the void left by Firefly. Are you a fan of any other space opera or science fiction series?

Daniel: Yeah, I don’t think we’re going to fill the void left by anyone else. I mean, I’m probably too close to it, but it doesn’t look or feel to me like anything I’ve seen before. It’s too much itself. As to my fandoms, they are many and varied. My wife and I watched all of Cowboy Bebob, and I grew up on Star Trek and the ’73 Tomorrow People. And all the Alien movies whether they were good or not. And now the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And Firefly. And Orphan Black. And The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (which I first found as radio drama on my local college station). And the Mass Effect games, and the Deus Ex games. And that’s intentionally leaving out all the books.

So yeah. A few, I guess.

SFRevu: Reading the Long Price Quartet, it is clear you have fantasy under your spell. So it seems odd that space opera, and hard space opera at that, seems to be your forte…but it totally is. A friend of mine says that the two of you write as though you live in those worlds—both of them–and I agree. How hard is it to shift gears? How is writing for the two genres different?

Daniel: It’s not really harder than switching genres or projects in reading. It’s a different set of characters in a different set of circumstances, but the tools of writing stay the same, and the essential humanity that I’m at least trying to reach for doesn’t move around much. I think the biggest thing is that there’s a shift in diction that comes with fantasy and space opera. Le Guin talked about it in her essay From Elfland to Poughkeepsie – the kind of using intentionally archaic or formal-sounding language to help evoke a particular kind of relationship to the present. Space opera doesn’t have that as much, because we are all tacitly in its past – or at least we are in the stuff I’m writing. But really, it’s not hard.

SFRevu: I’d imagine you’re pretty busy with the series and the show, and the occasional blockbuster Star Wars tie in. Do you have any time left for writing fantasy? What’s Daniel Abraham up to these days?

Daniel: Well, I’m actually still finishing up the last Dagger and Coin book, The Spider’s War. After that, I’m not sure what the epic fantasy projects are that I’m looking at. I may go play in the field next door for a little while. I’ve got a crime novel I’d like to try, and Vandermeer’s Southern Reach books have convinced me there’s still something interesting to do with cosmic horror. But if I find the right epic fantasy and something I want to say in that genre, I’ll pick it back up. I’d particularly like to try writing some one-volume stories. I’ve done a lot of books, but surprisingly few in that format.

SFRevu: And because you are both clearly creative geniuses in your own rights, what became of the game Ty Frank was developing?

Daniel: We sold all the rights to Alcon Entertainment. Ty’s been doing some work in video games, though. He was part of the team that put together Telltale’s Game of Thrones serialized game.

SFRevu: I understand that your decision to be a full-time writer had more to do with being able to help out with childcare and support your gal’s career than the expectation of becoming a household name. How’s that working out for you? Or should I ask?

Daniel: It’s going really well. My wife’s finished up a fifteen-year long clinical career as an occupational therapist, and she’s in graduate school now. The kid’s discovering videogames and Terry Pratchett novels. And I’m pretty sure I’m going to be able to keep things afloat with the writing until neither of them need tuition.

Because Obamacare. Seriously.

Links / References

  • Speculative Fiction Database; Daniel Abraham; http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?10297
  • Author’s Blog: Lizard Brain; http://www.danielabraham.com/
  • Daniel Abraham’s Expanse Page; http://www.danielabraham.com/books-2/the-expanse/
  • Peter Orullian’s Interview with Danil Abraham: 2012-01-31; http://orullian.com/writing/danielabraham_interview.html
  • Apex Magazine, 2013-04-02; http://www.apex-magazine.com/an-interview-with-daniel-abraham/
  • Clarkesworld Interviw by Tobias Bucknell; DATE???; http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/abraham_interview/
  • Orbit Books; An Interview With Daniel Abraham on THE DRAGON’S PATH; http://www.orbitbooks.net/interview/daniel-abraham/
  • Reddit.com; Hi, Reddit! I’m NYT Bestselling Fantasy & SF Author Daial Abraham…; http://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/1glrwq/hi_reddit_im_nyt_bestselling_fantasy_sf_author/
  • Wikipedia; The Expanse; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_%28TV_series%29
  • Variety; The Expanse; http://variety.com/t/the-expanse/
  • MTV; Bubonicon; Long Prince Quartet; Video Interview; http://www.mtv.com/videos/interview/690608/bubonicon-43-daniel-abrahams-long-price-quartet.jhtml
  • IMDB; The Expanse; http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3230854/

2015 Nebula Award Winners

2015 Nebula Award Winners

2015 Nebula Award Winners: L:R Winners and accepters at Nebula Awards ceremony: (L to R) Steven Gould, Nancy Kress, Mary Ann Mohanraj, Scott Edelman, Ursula Vernon, Larry Niven, Stanley Schmidt, Usman T Malik, Sam J Miller, and Matthew Kressel.(photo: Ernest Lilley 2015)

You can see the list of winners over at Locus Online