Category Archives: sf

Aliens Among Us

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I never bothered to watch Alien Resurrection because I didn’t like Alien3 (or Cubed, as I always see it). So now, browsing the new, freshly-in-beta SF Encyclopaedia I find it was written by Joss Whedon (who doesn’t yet have an entry in said volume, but no doubt will have eventually).

Why did nobody tell me this?

It seems a particularly timely piece of information as we’ve been introducing the kids to Buffy recently (in part to get us all over the lack of Doctor Who), and also to Firefly. We are deep in the Whedonverse.

Rainy Day Music and SF at the BL

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The Saturday before last we went to the London Feis Festival 2011, in Finsbury Park. The weather was looking to be quite bad as we set out: it had been oscillating between sun and rain all morning. Would we be drenched or sunburned? Or both? Only time would tell.

I had been hitting the festival website to try to find out who was on when, exactly. There was a page which said (and still does, a the time of writing), ‘Band and Stage Times: To be released on the day’. I had taken that to mean, ‘… will be announced on the website on the day’. I did wonder about how much use that would be, considering many people would be getting on their way early in the morning, or the night before, and wouldn’t have had the chance to look at the website. Then again, everyone has a smartphone nowadays, right?

Anyway, it turned out that they meant, …. will be released at the festival.’ On the bus to Finsbury Park I searched Twitter for the expected #feis hashtag, wherein some nice person had tweeted pictures of the running order (I can’t find those pictures now, but no matter). It appeared we were missing The Undertones, but we would get there in time for The Waterboys.

As indeed we did. We set up base camp near the back and listened to ‘Be My Enemy’ (timely, as I recently read Christopher Brookmyre’s novel which borrows that title) ‘Fisherman’s Blues’, ‘… And a Bang on the Ear’, and of course, ‘The Whole of the Moon’. It was great to see them again. Well, hear them; we didn’t see much from the back, and there were no big screens like at most festivals these days.

A trip to the second stage saw us Nanci Griffith, closely followed by Shane McGowan. Always good to see he’s still hanging in there, and he was in excellent voice. I note that it’s an alarming four and half years since I last saw The Pogues.

Shane McGowan at the London Feis, 2011


Heard a bit of The Cranberries while queueing for toilet and bar. They were OK. Some Irish youngsters at the bar sang along with ‘Linger’ very sweetly.

Then back to the main stage for Christy Moore, food, and finally Dylan.

Bob Dylan at the London Feis, 2011


That’s him there in the white hat; can you tell?

It’s been a long wait for me. I know he’s been over here in the last few years, but somehow I’ve never managed to hear about the dates until it was too late. Here we were, then, finally in the distant presence of the great man himself.

And it was, as I expected, like listening to him doing cover versions of his own songs. But there’s nothing wrong with that. It was quite a ‘greatest hits’ kind of set, though, to my surprise. I had gained the impression that he mainly did newer songs these days, but there was a strong focus on Blood on the Tracks and Highway 61 Revisited. And you can’t go far wrong with those. Here’s a full set list.

The only possible singalong moment was the ‘How does it feel?’ lines in ‘Like Rolling Stone’, and it made me wonder: maybe he started doing such changed versions of his songs because he doesn’t like people singing along.

I thought this stall would do roaring trade, but the rain mostly stayed off.

Umbrella stall at the London Feis, 2011


Then Sunday was Out of this World, the Science Fiction thing at the British Library. ‘Science Fiction, but not as you know it’, was the tag line. In fact, it was pretty much exactly as i know it, but I guess I’m part of some sort of rarefied elite, or something (or ‘fans’ as we’re known).

Anyway, it was very good, though perhaps it’s limiting, being a library: much of the exhibition was books behind glass. Which is fine, but sometimes you’d like to pick them up and handle them.

There was a Tardis in a corner of the Time Travel section, and a robot that seemed to be modelled on HAL 9000.1

All in all, a pure dead brilliant weekend.

  1. I know it wasn’t a robot. [↩]

Father’s Weekend

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I’m thoroughly looking forward to this weekend. Not only is it the London Feis festival tomorrow, with Bob Dylan headlining, but Sunday being Father’s Day, my treat is a visit to the SF exhibition at the British Library.

Let’s hope it all goes well; the weather forecast is rain, and at least three-quarters of the family are poorly.

Moxyland, by Lauren Beukes

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Lauren Beukes has just won the Clarke Award with her Zoo City. Congratulations to her, and all.

I just finished reading her Moxyland, which I was given at last year’s Eastercon, and… I’m not so impressed.

Strange Horizons has a good dual review of it. I kind of enjoyed it, especially towards the end. But in many ways I found it annoying, and I’ve been trying to work out exactly why that is.

Part of it is the characters, I think. I don’t mind unsympathetic — even unpleasant — characters. But I think the main problem with these ones is that it’s hard to tell their voices apart, and since the story is told from multiple first-person viewpoints, that’s a problem.

But I think the biggest point of disconnection for me was technological: there is one particular item that made my disbelief-suspension system collapse in despair.

Because I can easily believe in a near future where your phone takes the place of both credit cards and cash, where it is the heart and soul of your identity, and to be disconnected would make you an unperson. But even supposing that phones could be engineered to give their owners a taser-like shock at the command of any police officer (what if your battery is low?); even supposing that a society would not rise up in protest at the madness of a government requiring its citizens to possess such a thing; and even supposing that it all worked: I can’t believe that nobody would carry them in thick rubber pockets.

So in the end, in a novel containing much about political activism, it’s the political acquiescence of its imagined society that crashed me out of the story too often.

Still, it was her first novel, and shows much promise, so I expect that Zoo City will be a worthy winner.

From Easter to Volcano Days

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I don’t get round to these things quickly, but this is, at least in part, a report on my family’s visit to Eastercon. This year the British National Science Fiction Convention was practically on our doorstep, just the other side of London, at Heathrow.

As with two years ago, my son wanted to come. And since my daughter did as well, my beloved bit the bullet and came along too. SF isn’t totally her thing, but I think she may have enjoyed the weekend more than any of us.

The telling detail was this: there are lots of things to do.

I tend to use cons as a way of seeing friends that I haven’t seen for a while — often not since the last con I was at. So I mainly hang out in the bar. Or that, at least, is the impression I gave — give — to people who don’t go to cons.

In fact, I have always gone to programme items. I guess I just never made a big thing of them when I got home.

This con — Odyssey 2010 — had a particularly good set of programme items for kids. There were hands-on science workshops, making Dalek cakes, and building string-propelled robots (my son won a prize for the best ramp-mounting attempt). And not least, a thrilling battle between various knights of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA).

The programme was full of fascinating and fun things, many of which I wanted to see, but didn’t manage to, as ever.

And of course, I saw a lot of old friends, and had a good time hanging out in the bar with them.

We only stayed for the Friday and Saturday nights, to keep costs down. But after going home on the Sunday (and watching the new Doctor Who again), we went back on the Monday, and spent most of the day back at the Radisson.

Travelling all across London was a bit of drag, but it was a lot shorter than many people’s journeys. And of course, there was absolutely no chance of ash-induced delays.

Am I a bad person because I found all the volcanic disruption kind of amusing and quite fun, really? The cloudless and contrail-free blue skies over London were gorgeous, and it was interesting to follow people’s tweets of how they were striving to get home. And a world with a lot fewer flights is something we’re probably going to have to face in the future.

What annoyed me about it all were the idiots who blamed the government. Marginally more sensible than blaming ‘god’, I suppose1, but even if anything other than sending in the Navy had been the government’s decision, can you imagine the fuss if flights had been allowed to go ahead, and there had been a disaster?

Plus, the idea of getting a trip home on the Ark Royal is pretty cool.

  1. As somebody said, if that’s an act of god, then it’s a pretty limited kind of omnipotent deity. ↩

Easter Time is Here Again

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Easter rolls around on its mad-god-inspired schedule, and so too does Eastercon, the British National Science-Fiction Convention.

This year, as it was two years ago, it’s in the Radisson Edwardian Hotel, near Heathrow. Not the most pleasant or interesting of locations, but it does have the large advantage for me of being relatively close to home. An hour and forty minutes by bus and tube, if TFL is to be believed. And curiously, not much less time overall if you take the crazily-expensive Heathrow Express.

Anyway, the whole family are coming with me this time, which should be fun. We’re just staying for the Saturday and Sunday nights, though some of us may pop back on Monday.

I don’t have any particular plans to see anything on the programme, except the big ones: Iain Banks’s guest of honour speech, and Doctor Who. Looking forward to that one a lot. And it’s going to be interesting watching it with a few hundred other people.

Speaking of guests of honour, the other one is Alastair Reynolds, and i’ve never read any of his stuff (well, maybe a short story or two). So I thought I should do some homework. I’ve been meaning to check him out for a while anyway.

I’ve started Revelation Space, but I’m having a hard time getting into it. It’s just a bit slow to get going. I hope it’ll pick up soon.

Next-Door to a Sequel

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Last night I finished Living Next-Door to the God of Love, by Justina Robson. I enjoyed much of it, but found it kind of frustrating and annoying, in ways that were hard to define. The main one, though, was that some things were insufficiently explained.

Now, as SF readers we are used to jumping into new worlds, not quite knowing what’s going on, and picking it up as we go along. Indeed, that’s part of the toolkit for reading it.

But here, there was something just not quite right, I felt. It was as if there was too much understanding assumed. Had the writer spent too long with her world, I wondered? So long that she could no longer tell what the reader would and wouldn’t know, since she knew it so intimately?

When I finished it I went looking for reviews, to see whether others had the same feeling as me. And what I found proved that, in a sense, I was right about her assuming too much knowledge.

It turns out the book is a sequel.

Oh yes. It’s the sequel to her previous book, Natural History.

Which is fine. But nowhere on the book itself does it tell you that. Nowhere. I’ve checked again and again: it’s not in the blurb, it’s not on the title page, it’s not in the front matter.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I would have liked to have known this little detail before I started reading. Sure, you can pick things up as you go along; and now that I know it, I realise that she gave us the necessary backstory very well. But really, Pan MacMillan: next time, let us know, OK?

Masks of the Illuminati, by Robert Anton Wilson (Books 2008, 21)

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If you had asked me a few months ago whether I had read this I’d have said yes. I thought that I had read most, if not all, of Wilson’s books that are in linked to the Illuminatus trilogy. But I’d have been wrong.

This one features James Joyce and Albert Einstein drinking in a bar in Zurich in 19??. They meet one Sir John Babcock, who has been studying magick (though from a Christian perspective) under the guidance of the Socity of the Rose Cross, or Rosicrucians.

Maybe. Unless it’s something else.

Stuff happens. Magic and monsters ensue, or people are made to believe that they do.

It’s not the best or most momentous of his works, but he makes the characters of Einstein and Joyce surprisingly compelling, and Babcock is an affecting innocent abroad, and it all keeps you reading. Good stuff.

Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson (Books 2008, 18)

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Cayce Pollard has a strange kind of allergy: certain brands make her ill.

Or at least, their logos do; seeing the Michelin Man, for instance, sets her off in a particularly bad way. She has a corresponding – and possibly linked – talent, which is that she can reliably tell whether a new logo, for example, is going to work; and she can spot trends that are developing on the street. Using these abilities she is able to make a pretty good living by acting as a freelance consultant to marketing people, advertisers, and so on.

It sounds like a pretty shallow kind of life, but she’s an engaging character, and Gibson manages both to make her role seem interesting, and to enmesh her in an international plot that keeps the pages turning.

The main weakness, perhaps, is that you never get the sense that she’s in any real danger. And the mysteries that she ends up investigating find their solutions too easily.

I don’t think Gibson has written anything really startling since his debut, but this is a fun enough read.

I always tend to touch on genre here, but I make no apologies for it. The odd thing here is that, while is clearly not SF in terms of setting and content (it’s the very near future of the time it was written, which makes it our very near past, and has some already-surprising spots that feel like anachromisms, but aren’t: like connecting a new laptop to a new phone by wire, rather than BlueTooth; and the only speculative content is Cayce’s curious affliction/ability), it still feels like SF. And I’m not sure entirely why that is. Gbson’s style is no doubt part of it, and the rest must be theme: it does, after all, address the way the world is changing, and the effect those changes are having on the people that live through them.

The curious thing, really, is that such themes should trigger an SF response in the reader (or writer) What does it say about ‘mainstream’ literature if that genre doesn’t address the world today?

American Flagg episodes 1-30 (and special 1), by Howard Chaykin and others (Books 2008, 15)

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I came upon these when I was digging out some old comics for my son. These are not for eleven-year-olds, but I realised I hadn’t read them in years, and I thought I’d see how they had aged (plus, I remembered next to nothing about the story).

The story is not bad, but not that great. In a post-collapse America, corruption and gang violence are rife, and the government (perhaps all the governments of the world) have left Earth, and are still ruling (or trying to) from Mars. On Earth the law – and to some extent, the peace – is kept by the Plexus Rangers. Or rather, as you eventually realise, the PlexUS Rangers, since there are also PlexUSSR Rangers. The Plex is the overall world government. Or something.

Reuben Flagg was a video star (ie TV or movie: there’s a lot about ‘video’ here, but it’s pretty much all broadcast stuff) on Mars. He played the eponymous ‘Mark Thrust, Sexus Ranger’. But new technology has made actors unnecessary, and he has volunteered as a Plexus Ranger and been sent to Earth, to Chicago.

He is the one (relatively) good man in a corrupt environment, and with the help of a clumsy android, a talking cat, and various women in their underwear, he tries to keep things under control.

Oh yes, the underwear thing: Chaykin is unable, it seems to draw women wearing anything other than basques, stockings and suspenders. No matter what they’re doing, pretty much. There’s nothing like wearing your fetishes on your sleeve, I suppose. Or, you know, lower down.