Review of Jonathan Strahan (ed.), Fearsome Journeys: The New Solaris Book of Fantasy

This review first appeared in Interzone #248 in September 2013.

There’s something faintly paradoxical about the whole premise. Epic fantasy, but short epic fantasy? A further aura of oxymoron ― albeit a bit less pronounced ― attaches to the word new in the subtitle. That word is there because all twelve tales are unpublished elsewhere, but it also brings with it a suggestion of freshness. And who really wants to be an early adopter of epic fantasy ― isn’t it a bit like keying in a Google Alert for all the latest on cutting-edge single malt whiskies? And isn’t Fearsome Journeys in jeopardy of falling apart under the stress of its contradictions?

Yet somehow it all hangs together beautifully. A few stories, such as Saladin Ahmed’s ‘Amethyst, Shadow and Light’ and Daniel Abraham’s ‘The High King Dreaming,’ achieve a kind of ultra-compressed vastitude: epic.zip. Many stories position themselves as episodes, fragments, or specimens of palimpsestual sprawl. Characters prima donna up and down the pages as though this is not their first story and certainly won’t be their last. This is often literally true; for instance, Scott Lynch’s ‘Effigy Engine’ ― setting off Fearsome Journeys with innumerable bangs ― is slated as the first in a series of Red Hats stories; Jeffrey Ford’s ‘Spirits of Salt: A Tale of the Coral Heart’ relates to something he wrote for an earlier Strahan collection; Glen Cook’s ‘Shaggy Dog Bridge’ is a scrap of his much longer Black Company cycle.

Plenty of readers will happily follow these universes sideways into the various other books they exist across. Others of course may feel frustrated by all this unruly deferral and scatter. They may find the characters underdeveloped, the settings sketchy, the back-stories oblique.

Still other readers (this reviewer included!) will actually prefer not to have everything spelled out, and particularly not time-honoured fantasy tropes that are accessible via inference and a smidge of genre-savvy mental exertion ― The Dominator is bad, isn’t he?

As for the “new” bit, well, it doesn’t cancel out the priority which heroic fantasy gives to the archaic, so much as make that priority intelligible in the first place. Old and new, convention and subversion, high and low, heroic and mock heroic ― these things have always been difficult to disentangle. (The courtly love tradition, for instance, mingles private, unspoken and unrequited love of a theological fieriness with prankish subterfuge and slapsticky cuckoldry. Martial chivalry is similarly entwined with pragmatism, cynicism and brutality at its very roots). So what’s interesting in Fearsome Journeys is not the fact that conventions are subverted, nor the fact that subversion is inevitably conducted under the banners of innovation and realism . . . what’s interesting is the specific form and intensity of the subversion.

Generally speaking, that form is grit and its level is medium to low. There’s no out-and-out grimdark à la Abercrombie here; this grit typically involves a bit of undaunted erotic and/or scatalogical glee, plus some preoccupied, vague recognition of military and sexual domination as unshakeable dimensions of existence. Occasionally that vagueness seems deliberate or even pointed. In Lynch’s opener, the spirit of Fritz Leiber mingles with that of Square Enix: it’s obvious that these sorcerers’ agenda has something to do with strategy, but it also has everything to do with which spells have the coolest animations. Or take Ahmed’s ‘Amethyst, Shadow and Light,’ which is redolent of Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic or The National Lampoon’s Bored of the Rings in its sharp rebuff of cod Tolkienesque world-saving. Cook’s ‘Shaggy Dog Bridge’ attains a strange stylistic success as its hardboiled squaddie-speak harmonises with high fantasy loftiness: clipped expression and dropped words evoke the lacunae of skaldic epics, while the bleak roundabout linguistic doodles of military men (these guys have plenty of time to kill, when not they’re killing people) recalls archaistic periphrasis. On various levels, I make out the point that people busy with serious things (like massacres) don’t always take those things very seriously. In a sense, maybe they don’t even always pay that much attention.

That’s a fine message, but one which merges easily into something more awkward: the depersonalisation of suffering. For instance, we can all appreciate Ahmed’s Hai Hai ― a diabolic and foul-mouthed sabre-wielding (doe) rabbit-of-fortune, and the kind of entity one imagines soon will be despatched to gather Hugh Hefner to the hereafter ― as one of the anthology’s several Strong Female Characters. But what about the gender relations that make such a representation possible in the first place? (Whores as spoils, Hai Hai? ― care to say more?)

Well-intentioned fiction can get stuck in the same old images of progress: sometimes it’s necessary to backtrack a little to find the onward path. Perhaps that’s why I took such a shine to the cronecore offerings, Kate Elliott’s ‘Leaf and Branch and Grass and Vine’ and Robert V S Redick’s ‘Forever People.’ Elliot’s tale focuses on a sweet little Save the King messenger mission. Anna must cross hostile territory undetected, mainly by walking sort of near people (like getting into a club). Redick’s is a gnarled, queasy-making tale, simultaneously claustrophobic and on a grand scale. It very adroitly ends in the midst of wretched uncertainty. Even though both tales arguably draw on some of epic fantasy’s more problematic tropes and stock figures (cunning old woman has deceitful tongue; gender transitioning is emblematic of the Ineffible Eldritch; hick jezebel stashes machete, hikes skirts, etc.) they never come across as exploitative. The gender relations they invoke feel insistent and concrete, but also contingent.

The collection’s quality seemed pretty even to me, but I might lurchingly pin my rosette on K J Parker’s ‘The Dragonslayer of Merebarton.’ There is a sizeable “Yeah, and?”-type risk with adventure yarns; yep, this may all be unabashed escapism, but if you don’t escape very far, or for very long, and can’t bring anything back with you . . . well, why did you bother? Parker’s romance is something of a @Seinfeld1200, insofar as (by heroic fantasy standards) nothing really happens ― a knight goes to slay a dragon and that’s literally it ― yet it is so breezily, so mesmerically voiced, I couldn’t dream of demanding “So what?”

If I have one niggle, it’s that I’d have liked some subtle reminder that Parker’s charismatic aristo narrator ― so crinkly, so put upon, so lacking in disposable income (estate dastardly dear to maintain, dotchaknow), so ever-so-slightly shellshocked and traumatised, bearing his griefs old and new with winces and wolfish grins, and occasional paroxysms of droll chippiness ― that this chap is a classic strut of a monstrously illiberal and unequal social system. It would be difficult to supply such a hint, of course, without disrupting that voice. Nice poshos are the worst. I almost forgot to root for the dragon.

From "Integration"

From a work-in-progress.

Preseron Norts, Chief of Pomp and Bribes, swam into Sylvester's sensorium.「Ma'am.」
  「Norts! New haircut?」
  「Thank you. Two are quite recent.」Like all Geffen, Preseron Norts was completely covered in pale lush fur, and tended to have several haircuts at once. He squirmed his arch, presumably showing off the new trims.
  Sylvester was mystified.「Norts, très trefoil,」she gushed. 「And to what do I owe this pleasant admin?」
  「Your birthday,」said the Chief of Pomp and Bribes, with a puzzled air.「It's only twenty-six days off.」
  「Not still searching for a prezzie, Pressie Norts? Everyone knows the fiefdom could do with a new mech. Our enemies know it especially. Hint, hint!」
  Several polite but pained rictuses gleamed in the shaved regions of Preseron Norts's arch.「Ha ha, ma'am. 」
  「Or they will kiiillll uuusss!」
  「Well, it's the Award for Diverse Innovations, you see.」
  Out loud, Sylvester was sobbing for the benefit of her therapist Konoshi.
  "There, there," said Konoshi.
  "Ambassadors make me sad," she wailed.
  「I don't think I should win the Award, even if it is my birthday!」she subvocalised to the Chief of Pomp and Bribes. 「Very kind though! Shall I bestow on myself any knighthoods this year? Or is that nepotistic?」
  There was a phrase she had taught Preseron Norts for such situations.「Ma'am,」said Preseron Norts awkwardly. 「I am done with your fucking bullshit.」
  「That's the spirit Norts. Is the shortlist finalised yet?」
  「Very near. One applicant needs your personal attention. I'll dump it in your intray, if I may. It's a solid pitch, but ... essentially she wants to write some software to apply for the Award next year, and every year thereafter.」
  「She – I see. So if we award it to her this year, we have to keep awarding it to her forever. Otherwise it proves we made a poor decision, funding something doesn't work! Oh, that's lovely! Give it to her, definitely!」
  「Really? It's not that exactly. The judging process involves ... interviews. If this applicant has proposed to automate an interview...」
  「... it would violate my prohibition on personality constructs. Oh dear. You want to know how hard you should come down on her. No! — you want my go-ahead to sweep this under the carpet!」
  「Precisely. Poor publicity for the ceremony, for your birthday celebrations, for the House Lorraine. So with your off-the-record permission, I will omit her from the shortlist? No further action necessary?」
  Sylvester reached her decision.「This is what will happen. Make it clear that all recipients of the Award must abide by all standard system-wide prohibitions. Then announce ... I will give her the Award, but should she fail, her eyes shall be forfeit!」
  「Ma'am?」
  「Or tail or something! — put together our anatomy options, Norts! Something I can have as a bracelet possibly! That'll be all.」
「Ma'am. Thank you.」Preseron Norts, Chief of Pomp and Bribes, rippled his respectful farewell.
「Wait, Norts! — how much bank does this vile innovator troll stack? Do we know if she's in it for the funding or the fame?」
「Fame. Background check unearthed a recent pelfie. She's stacking mad bank, ma'am.」
「So is it possible she's already done it? Written the program?」
「No of course n—」Preseron Norts paused and shivered.「I hadn't considered that. You think it won in a previous year? This year might be her big reveal?」
「Somebody's big reveal, anyway. Worth checking out. Analyse the last few awards. Include pitches that almost got shortlisted but didn't. And ... Norts, could this application have been automated?」
「Ma'am. I'll look into all this immediately, ma'am. Thank you.」
「On a bracelet or just on a pole. Props for taking this to the top. Laters, naughty Norts!」

The Owl, the Pussycat and the Jetpack

We are giving away this mini-collection of short stories ("Fred," "The Invasion," "The Butteryellow Reliquary") free on the Kindle.

Robert Kiely: "You have gotten this far, you can see the elegantly shaped vessel and its invigorating contents above, why not partake? I did. Now all my wrinkles are gone and I eat fruit five times a day and veg five times too, doubling up on that shit. These stories are like the bald cry of a newborn baby, which I suppose might irritate some of you, but it shouldn't, it is beautiful, but perhaps I picked up the wrong metaphor, I am keeping it nonetheless. Deal alien goo? This is for you. Megabyte coding pastoral? Grab it by the dorsal."

Invocation

A revised edition (1.4) of Invocation is now out, correcting some minor errors. Like, I'd spelled pétanque "peutonk" (thank you, nick-e melville). The Kindle edition is also currently cheap as can be.

Meanwhile, have finally started working on something new. More SFish than fantasyish. I think this will be the epigraph:

The universe is made of atoms, not stories.

From "Touching the Void"

By Joe Simpson.

Touching the Void on Amazon. Joe Simpson's web site. 

Excerpts:

The voice kept urging me on, ‘Place-lift-brace-hop ... keep going. Look how far you’ve gone. Just do it, don’t think about it ...’

I did as I was told. Stumbling past and sometimes over boulders, falling, crying, swearing in a litany that matched the pattern of my hopping. I forgot why I was doing it; forgot even the idea that I probably wouldn’t make it. Running on instincts that I had never suspected were in me, and drifting down the sea of moraines in a blurred delirium of thirst, and pain and hopping, I timed myself religiously. I looked ahead to a landmark and gave myself half an hour to reach it. As I neared the mark, a furious bout of watch-glancing would ensue, until it became part of the pattern ... place-lift-brace-hop-time. If I realised I was behind time I tried to rush the last ten minutes of hopping. I fell so much more when I rushed but it had become so damned important to beat the watch. Only once did I fail to beat it, and I sobbed with annoyance. The watch became as crucial as my good leg. I had no sense of time passing, and with each fall I lay in a semi-stupor, accepting the pain and quite unaware of how long I had been there. A look at the watch would galvanise me into action, especially when I saw it had been five minutes and not the thirty seconds it had felt like.

[...]

As I gazed at the distant moraines I knew that I must at least try. I would probably die out there amid those boulders. The thought didn’t alarm me. It seemed reasonable, matter-of-fact. That was how it was. I could aim for something. If I died, well, that wasn’t so surprising, but I wouldn’t have just waited for it to happen. The horror of dying no longer affected me as it had in the crevasse. I now had the chance to confront it and struggle against it. It wasn’t a bleak dark terror any more, just fact, like my broken leg and frostbitten fingers, and I couldn’t be afraid of things like that. My leg would hurt when I fell, and when I couldn’t get up I would die. In a peculiar way it was refreshing to be faced with simple choices. It made me feel sharp and alert, and I looked ahead at the land stretching into distant haze and saw my part in it with a greater clarity and honesty than I had ever experienced before.

I had never been so entirely alone, and although this alarmed me it also gave me strength. An excited tingle ran down my spine. I was committed. The game had taken over, and I could no longer choose to walk away from it. It was ironic to have come here searching out adventure and then find myself involuntarily trapped in a challenge harder than any I had sought. For a while I felt thrilled as adrenalin boosted through me, but it couldn’t drive away the loneliness or shorten the miles of moraines tumbling towards the lakes. The sight of what lay ahead soon killed the excitement. I was abandoned to this awesome and lonely place. It sharpened my perception to see clearly and sharply the facts behind the mass of useless thoughts in my head, and to realise how vital it was just to be there, alive and conscious, and able to change things. There was silence, and snow, and a clear sky empty of life, and me, sitting there, taking it all in, accepting what I must try to achieve. There were no dark forces acting against me. A voice in my head told me that this was true, cutting through the jumble in my mind with its coldly rational sound.

It was as if there were two minds within me arguing the toss. The voice was clean and sharp and commanding. It was always right, and I listened to it when it spoke and acted on its decisions. The other mind rambled out a disconnected series of images, and memories and hopes, which I attended to in a daydream state as I set about obeying the orders of the voice. I had to get to the glacier. I would crawl on the glacier, but I didn’t think that far ahead. If my perspectives had sharpened, so too had they narrowed, until I thought only in terms of achieving predetermined aims and no further. Reaching the glacier was my aim. The voice told me exactly how to go about it, and I obeyed while my other mind jumped abstractedly from one idea to another.

[...]

A couple of times I looked back at the ice cliffs as I hobbled away down the rocks. Each time they grew smaller and I felt that I was shutting the door on something intangible but menacing that had been with me for so long. Those cliffs were the doors to the mountains. I grinned when I glanced at them. I had won a battle of some sort. I could feel it deep inside. Now it was just the patterns, and the pain, and water. Could I reach Bomb Alley tonight? Now that would be something to grin about! It wasn’t so far from here, twenty minutes’ walk, and that couldn’t be so hard! And that was my mistake. I stopped timing landmarks and set my sights on Bomb Alley and the silver floods of icy melt-water pouring down its flanks. When it became dark I had no idea how far Bomb Alley was, nor did I know how far I had crawled. Without checking my watch I had lain in stupefied exhaustion after every fall. Lain there and listened to endless stories running through the pain, watched short dreams of life in the real world, played songs to my heartbeat, licked the mud for water, and wasted countless hours in an empty dream. Now I staggered blind in the dark, obsessed with Bomb Alley, ignoring the voice which told me to sleep, and rest, and forget the alley. I got my head-torch from my sack and blundered on until the light died.

[...]

Turning towards the lakes I saw that I was a long way above the site of Bomb Alley. All that staggering in the dark had been for nothing. How stupid it had been to forget the watch-keeping yesterday, and how quickly I had lost any idea of time. Bomb Alley had then become a vague aim instead of a carefully planned objective. Without timing each stage I had drifted aimlessly with no sense of urgency. Today it had to be different. I decided that four hours would be enough to reach Bomb Alley. Twelve noon was the deadline, and I intended to break those hours into short stages, each one carefully timed. I searched ahead for the first landmark -- a tall pillar of red rock that stood out clearly above the sea of boulders. Half an hour to reach it, and then I would look for another.

[...]

I lay on my side watching them until I couldn’t fight off the appalling drowsy weakness any longer. The deterioration scared me deeply and made me wonder anxiously whether I had burnt myself out completely. It occurred to me that I was nearer to death than when I had been alone. The minute I knew help was at hand something had collapsed inside me. Whatever had been holding me together had gone. Now I could not think for myself, let alone crawl! There was nothing to fight for, no patterns to follow, no voice, and it frightened me to think that, without these, I might run out of life.

November: a few links

"With Augmented Reality You'll Always Know When No REALLY Means Yes," by Tim Maughan.  "Weakness analysis — having trouble finding chinks in her armour? Our powerful face and body analysis software will scan your target and compare her attributes to a constantly updated top ten of celebrity hotties, identifying areas where she likely feels inadequate. Make her feel a million dollars instead by complimenting her in the ways she’s desperate to hear." See also: "Collision Detection."

§

An intriguing request from Karen Lord about her novel The Best of All Possible Worlds. "What I am wondering is whether certain parts of my book are being overlooked by readers and reviewers who are not well-versed in postcolonial and Caribbean literature. I’m referring to two chapters: ‘Bacchanal’ and ‘The Master’s House’. [...] I’d be so grateful if an academic or reviewer in Caribbean and postcolonial literature could examine, assess and critique the book in general and those two chapters in particular from a position of expert knowledge. My job is to write the stuff, not explain it, and my policy is to rarely react to reviews, so I can’t guarantee any kind of ‘you’ve got it’ endorsement. I simply want to see a discussion started in an area that I feel is significant but has been barely mentioned as yet."

§

Tony Ballantyne's "If Only ... A Taste of Your Own Medicine" (Nature / Concatenation, PDF) is a seething quirky one-page parable. "'Magic?' said Sacha, her eyes suddenly shining. “You mean there’s really such a thing?' 'Of course not. But I can’t explain to you how it’s really done because you’re not allowed science any more.'"

§

Greg Egan's The Arrows of Time is hitting a shelflike direction near you. "In between the timelike and spacelike directions are those traced out by light; these are known as lightlike or null directions." Try out his worldbuilding notes, in which there is no distinction between timelike and spacelike. Plus: spot the deliberate physics mistake!

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“Memorably described by Charles Stross as the 'fictional agitprop arm of the Technocratic movement,' science fiction has tended to do incredibly well in periods of hubristic cultural expansion when the boundaries of possibility somehow appear both endless and within easy reach. Despite this proven track record when it comes to frontier spirit and two-fisted optimism, science fiction has also displayed a remarkable capacity for re-invention that has seen it resonate in periods of intense cultural retrenchment when all thoughts naturally turn to the moral difficulties of empire and what it means to live in a culture that has definitely passed its prime.” Jonathan McCalmont's Future Interrupted column #1. Originally in Interzone.

§

Amazon nano-choppers delivering It straight to your driveway (BBC). You have a driveway, right? You want It, right?

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With 27 days still on the clock, Adam Roberts calls it for the best science fiction of 2013 (Guardian). Also: Roberts on Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam (Strange Horizons).

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Nicholas Royle's Nightjar Press publishes limited edition fiction chapbooks, with recent titles by M. John Harrison & Hilary Scudder.

My envelope arrived stiffened with cereal box cardboard: Crispy Minis and Golden Nuggets.

§

Patrick McCray on the futurism of Kaku and O'Neill.

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Edinburgh fowk: the 17th of December is Syndicate 10: Subsong, the last Syndicate of the year, & perhaps even the last.  Why not come along (Facebook)? Advanced poetry, the possibility of scattered robot parts, even a Syngularity.

The Ends of Humanity

"Now, with the death of communism and social democracy's struggle to sustain its postwar gains, the idea of the whole of humanity as a potential political subject barely exists. Socialism is dead, and its death — as Nietzsche observed of God’s — has had unexpected effects. One of the less happy consequences of the end of socialism as a mass ideology is the end of humanity as an imagined community. This has consequences in our real communities; the rise of far-right parties across Europe is one of them." Ken MacLeod on socialism and transhumanism at Aeon.

.@

Does .@ exist in science fiction?

It's a Twitter thing. Let me explain.

If your tweet begins "@so-and-so," that means it will appears in the timelines of so-and-so plus whoever follows both you and so-and-so. Your followers won't see it, unless they also follow so-and-so (or go looking for it).

That makes sense -- you're so different when you're around so-and-so :(

It's a clever piece of design, which encourages you to have one-on-one conversations on Twitter without worrying about spamming all your followers.

There's a little hack to circumvent this -- just stick any character in front of the "@" and it will appear in all your followers' timelines. (For some reason, .@ is gaining currency against the more aesthetically pleasing ж@ and ‽@). The use of .@ suggests a kind of solicited eavesdropping, or spectacle chitchat. It suggests, "I'm talking to so-and-so, but I want everybody to hear this."

Understandably getting an .@ makes some people squeamish. It can be reminiscent of the IRL situation where you're chatting with somebody who keeps glancing past you to see if there's someone more important or interesting (or less abrasively fascinating) they can talk to instead. Is my attention not good enough for you?

My hunch, by the way, is that the squeamishness will diminish, and that .@ will lose that tarnish of mild pomposity and neediness, and get assimilated into the quotidian, perhaps non-pathological practices of putting yourself out there and getting all up in everyone's shit. Posting on somebody's Facebook wall once felt weird -- you've got the message function, why do you want "the whole world" to see that you guys should really meet up for gin fizzes, or are readying the launch sequence, or whatever?

But my question is: are we seeing this kind of not-quite-private, not-quite-public speech appear in science fiction yet? It's a very common trope of postcyberpunk in particular to have characters who are permanently online (perhaps via wearable devices, perhaps via surgically-implanted neural interfaces -- a lace, a jack, a plexcore, a jewel, a cranial crest, an inlay, an e-i, a Descartes fin, a think tank, a cornoggincopia) and therefore, as it were, permanently fucking around on social media.

I can think of some science fiction that comes close. A character in Iain M. Banks's Matter hilariously makes arch, melodramatic asides to a presumed swarm of surveillance lurkers. In Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom characters sometimes hold one conversation out loud, and another subvocally ("Jesus, Lil, you are one rangy cowgirl"). There's Jennifer Egan's quasi-prescient Look at Me and innumerable tales of authenticity angst and self-fashioning under the social media gaze. People drop in on each other's consciousnesses pretty casually in an old Lorqi Blinks story of mine, "Fred." In Tim Maughan's "Limited Edition" Twitter is a ubiquitous and mandatory identity prosthesis -- for insight into a character, the ignorant gossip of online personae becomes just as important as an extended introspective soliloquy. The protagonist of Linda Nagata's The Red: First Light is a soldier who is networked not only with his squad, his spy drone, and his real time remote strategist, but is also the reluctant star of a reality TV show. The soldiers of Adam Roberts's New Model Army have naturalised their wiki-like comms medium and probably don't think of themselves as "using social media" any more than we think of ourselves as "using talking."

But I can't think of any true examples of "social living" (by analogy with social networking, social browsing, social learning, social tagging, etc.) in science fiction -- any works where the characters really seem to be surrounded by a penumbra of watchers, for whom they occasionally partly perform. Specifically, I can't think of any kind of ".@" moment.

Perhaps such moments are out there? Or perhaps they're coming?

Anyway, here's some Emma:

"Poor @MissTaylor!—I wish she were here again. What a pity it is that @MrWeston ever thought of her!"
".@Papa, I cannot agree with you; you know I cannot. @MrWeston is such a good-humoured, pleasant, excellent man, that he thoroughly deserves a good wife;—and you would not have had Miss Taylor live with us for ever, and bear all my odd humours, when she might have a house of her own?"
"@MyDear, A house of her own!—But where is the advantage of a house of her own? This is three times as large.—And you have never any odd humours."
"How often we shall be going to see them, and they coming to see us!—We shall be always meeting! We must begin; we must go and pay wedding visit very soon. #parents"
"My dear, how am I to get so far? @Randalls is such a distance. I could not walk half so far."

UPDATE: .@ruthlesscult suggests Rudy Rucker's Postsingularity (2007) is worth a look as regards living surveiled / monetising it; duly added to my TBR beard.

Wikiworld

"Imagine Bob Heinlein wearing a box-fresh leather jacket at a smart-drinks concession, speed-reading Wired from behind a pair of dime-store mirrorshades, and you're in the right neck of the woods." Over at Los Angeles Review of Books, a very distinguished review of Paul Di Fillipo's Wikiworld by Paul Graham Raven, which is also a crow's eye view (AAAARGH I DID THE JOKE WRONG) of the SF field more generally.

Reviews: Watts, Martin, Roberts

Mirrors of some recent Goodreads reviews:

Peter Watts, Blindsight (2006)
★★★★

Nasty, woebegone, butch and relentless hard SF (maybe "hard" in the sense of "difficult"), with a slight pulpiness to it. If it was adapted into a high concept puppet show the puppets would all have to be constructed from beetle carapaces. Rather spooky in parts. There's a lovely sustained twistiness to the plot, without it slipping into a lot of for-the-sake-of-it Big Reveals. The characters may not be very, uh, relateable but that just assists the dizzying ricochet of readerly sympathy, bouncing off every surface. It becomes part of the twistiness: plenty of sympathy, just nothing for it to fasten to.

A kind of overarching theme -- alluded to in the title -- is the conceptual disentanglement of sentience from intelligence. The novel argues that you can have intelligence without sentience. Searle's Chinese Room and [Chalmer et al.'s] zombies are the thought experiments which supposedly demonstrate the conceivability of this notion, and neuroscientific experiments -- the selective sighted behaviours of the cortically blind, for instance, and the trollish legacy of Benjamin Libet's notorious discovery of "commands" generated in the brain slightly before conscious volitions -- supposedly furnish some empirical rudiments.

This theme has been beautifully and intricately turned out in Blindsight in a number of conceits and plot points, but my hunch is that some of this deftness involved knowing what to fudge or blur, and I wasn't always convinced that terms like sentience, intelligence, empathy, understanding, meaning, awareness, mind and sympathy were really being interrelated in a philosophically robust way, or that they together comprised a sufficiently fine-grained and rich vocabulary to pull apart the problems they raise. For instance, you might be left thinking that sociopaths don't have qualia. Or that sentience is a kind of primitive concept that can't be any further broken down (I think it kind of can -- intentionality, qualia, nonextension, self-perspectival organisation, transcendental unity of apperception, phenomenal structure, dynamic flow, affordance, all kinds of narrative, memory, self, etc.). Or, more generally, you might end up feeling that the concepts of intelligence and sentience are intelligible using only philosophy, neuroscience and evolutionary biology, without help from the humanities, social sciences and applied psychology. Watts documents his sources in the end notes: I guess I know where to look if I want to take my skepticism further!

[I do think the "Imagine you are" motif is particularly adroit, especially with the ambiguous "It-narrative"-esque permutation where "you" are a deep space probe. It might be interesting to compare Watts' approach to consciousness with Daryl Gregory's in the short story "Second Person, Present Tense" (2005), which posits a drug that -- more-or-less -- temporarily decouples sentience from intelligence.]

The disenchanted vampire conceit is ingenious. The Crucifix glitch (a sort of Langford Basilisk / Stephenson Snow Crash glyph) -- I guess that means your cleric has to hold that holy symbol VERY steady? Or rotate it till the seizure clicks into place. Are vampires OK with tall straight trees on the horizon? [Watts doesn't secularise the aversion to garlic or running water, or provide a scientific rationale for why the Cullen family are so cool, so there's everything to play for.]

It's also an excellent touch having the super-linguist tasked with first contact tell the ominous aliens they can suck her big fat hairy dick. [I really felt like I was there on the mission.]

Good evil aliens with gassy bones and no genes.

Four stars and an Oasa Emitter.

[Blindsight is available free under a Creative Commons license].

Felix Martin, Money: The Unauthorised Biography (2013) 
★★★

Maybe I was a little harsh on this book, having just finished David Graeber's excellent Debt, The First 5,000 Years, which has a few overlapping themes. Martin doesn't quite have Graeber's knack for making the water visible to the fish who swim around in it. But this is still an engaging and sometimes captivating account of a potentially dull and inaccessible subject.

I most enjoyed the early chapters (about the origins and conceptual prerequisites of money) and the later chapters (about the shifting relationships between policymakers and the disciplines of finance and macroeconomics, and about the economic crises of the past few years).

In the middle, I would have liked to hear a bit more about the links between money, value and precious metals. I'm not 100% sure I understood John Locke's monetary naturalism -- I got the sense (especially after the final chapter) that it was intended as some kind of antidote to seignorage, but I couldn't place my finger on how or why, and Locke just came across as a bit stupid. My hunch is that the Locke episode is a rare instance of Martin allowing the storytelling to get out of control -- a convenient villain is invited to move the plot forward.

Very busy bees may just want to look at the last chapter, which is a dialogue with an imaginary skeptic and summarises the whole book, making it feel a bit less like a history and a bit more like an argument. The skeptic accuses the author of being a revolutionary; the author says the changes he endorses may be radical, but that they are to prevent revolution, not to start it.

Minor niggle: most of the endnote links didn't work on my Kindle edition. [Kindle might not be the best way to read this, TBQH. It's a bit of a flip-back-and-forth-fest].

UPDATE: Having read quite a few more books about money now, I feel inclined to give this one an extra star after all. ★

Adam Roberts, Jack Glass (2012) 
★★★★★

I wanted to write a more substantial review (or even a big post on detective fiction and SF alas), but other stuff is piling up, so here’s a quick impression. V. v. slight spoilers ahead.

This is something of a concept novel, pursued with much acuity and panache. Roberts claims to be braiding together the two so-called Golden Ages of genre fiction: the Golden Age of crime fiction (roughly the interwar period) and the Golden Age of science fiction (roughly just afterwards). The Golden Ages are here to inspire, not to invigilate – Jack Glass does contain much which would be anachronistic in either period, and overall the feel is quite contemporary.

Just for instance: the Jac of the first, rather gruesome act, is a pretty much a stock figure of TV and Hollywood’s “stuck in this hellhole” trope. He’s the quiet, isolated scrawny one who survives because of his smarts and his audacious will to survive. He is stubborn (as stubborn as a jackglass).

He’s Omar Little in The Wire proactively ass-shanking an inmate in the luncheon line. He’s anyone who survives a Saw puzzle. He is Hannibal Lector escaping his maximum security asylum in Silence of the Lambs in a mask made from a guard’s face, or cleavering off his cuffed hand in Hannibal. He’s Keyser Söze in The Usual Suspects. He is Rorschach in The Watchmen growling, “None of you seem to understand. I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here with me.”

Jac is also legless: compare for instance the immolating longbow of hitherto soft touch Gizmo in Gremlins II, plus also any number of physically disabled badass ninjas from Hop-Frog to Forrest Gump to Peeta Mellark.

After the first arc resolves itself, the tone lightens, and the book begins to bristle with jokes, little lyrical set-pieces and charming allusions, both overt and deniable.

For instance. Jac was to be stuck on the asteroid for eleven years. Why eleven? The book's gorgeous (prize-winning) cover – stained glass rocket ships – reminds me a bit of a playing card. Jacks carry a rather tricksy aura in cards. Hesitate, as you scoop that cityscape of poker chips into your chest, and ask what the heck something called a “Jack” is doing next in line to a Queen – shouldn’t it be a Pope or a Princess or something? He’s not exactly the royal fool – i’faith, the Joker fills that role. So what is he? Jacks used to be Knaves. It’s possible “Jack” comes from Jass, the Dutch word for Knave. Posh English people called Jacks Knaves until quite recently. Maybe some still do. Jacks blend in disquietingly well with the royal party. Indeed, the name change was partly driven by desire to disambiguate King and Knave – previously indicated by the letters “K” and “Kn.” Jack-of-all-trades – even the regal trade of no trade at all? Anyway: I reckon eleven years because the official value of the Jack card is between that of a Ten and a Queen.

Later on there seems to be a sort of pun on "red hair ring."

There are three main puzzles in the novel, fairly ingenious, and relying on outlandish technology and circumstances to varying degrees. I wasn’t completely convinced by the dream sequences, although there are precedents for that sort of thing in the crime fiction of the interwar period. Indeed, Roberts checks some very well-known boxes – the locked room, the clearly demarcated list of suspects, the missing murder weapon, the multiplicity of motives – but he has obviously read widely within the genre, and his devices and allusions are not confined to the impoverished view of the genre as a set of camp, arid formulae, uninterested in realism and hermetically isolated from psychological and socio-economic categories (check out e.g. Raymond Chandler’s “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944)).

I was particularly interested in the central role of revolutionary upheaval in Jack Glass, a theme fits neatly on the end of interwar crime fiction’s tendency to question the validity of officially available forms of legal justice and social reconciliation. Roberts confesses that his emphasis was upon Golden Age crime fiction. That makes sense to me, because although this is obviously science fiction – there are lasers and so forth – is it really Golden Age? The shibboleths were probably hushed and a little garbled here. The "eat your severed penis!" bit breaks the 1950s mood. We do see some problem-solving of a technological nature, and Roberts does evince a judiciously respectful attitude for physics, and in particularly does not lightly transgress the speed of light. The action does takes place on a grand scale, and features techno-scientific achievements of a sort associated with a sense of wonder in among gullible ingénues. But there just weren’t quite enough details of science and engineering to persuade me that this really was “hard SF,” and the “worldbuilding” bit (OK, that's a 1970s term) seemed to depend too much on an appendix which, rather inevitably, felt a bit tacked on at the end.

That’s not to say I necessarily wanted more technoscientific data or sociological exposition. They might have spoiled the crime side of things. Perhaps Roberts is sloshing together two immiscible substances? Among Ronald Knox’s rules of fair play, we find: “No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.” It's a bold attempt nonetheless. There are also some moments where the two genre’s characteristic epistemological preoccupations interact in intriguing ways. For instance, one of science fiction’s preoccupations is the mental life of the radically (or just very) Other, and one of crime fiction’s preoccupations is the relations among the everyday, the uncanny and the impossible. When a character who is unused to gravity comes across a corpse, she is shocked by the way the blood presses flat against the ground, rather than hanging in the air in spheres as it normally would. This functions as a sort of clue, since gravity turns out to be a key feature of the murder ...

All in all, gimmicky, but I wished it would never end.