SF Diplomat

REVIEW - The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway (2008)

Strange Horizons has my review of The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway.

I think Harkaway has a frightening amount of potential.  I think that as a prose writer he's far better than we're used to in the world of SF.  However, I also think that there is clear room for the kind of improvement that comes with experience as I think that many of the mistakes Harkaway makes (manipulative characterisation, awkward ending) are due primarily to a lack of confidence.  Expect his second book to be incredible.

Some of the discussion about the book has dealt with the Englishness of his writing style and an interesting addendum to that is the fact that after reading it, my GF thought it was set in the UK.

REVIEW - The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod (2008)

I finished this book a couple of weeks ago but I have been mulling over how I feel about.  On the one hand, I think the book is a perfectly acceptable read, but on the other I don't think it's anywhere near as good as it needs to be.

As a result, I have written a piece about Ken MacLeod's The Night Sessions as well as Stross' Halting State, Morgan's Black Man and MacLeod's The Execution Channel and how they all fail to crawl their way out of what I am calling the Social Uncanny Valley.

You can skip down to the graphic of the front cover if you're just looking for the review without the more general thinking about this kind of book.

Media Tie-ins : Room for Nuance?

The debate about the artistic value of media tie-ins (or wookie books as I like to call them) is one of the older and more fruitful sticking points in SF discussion.  I even have an issue of SF Eye that explicitly blames Del Rey for killing SF by introducing Star Wars novelisations.

The debate has reignited recently and prompted Nick Tam to try and pull his thoughts together on the matter.  the result was about 12,000 words spread out over five different parts (starting here).

Personally, I have mixed feelings about how to even start thinking about this category of work but I tend to not see them so much as a failing by the authors involved as a failure by SF fans who would raqther read Stargate Atlantis novels than River of Gods or Light.  So my feeling isn't so much that these books suck, it's more that I think that there really should not be a market for them, but I think that about pretty much everything so I'm not closer to ariculating a position about them.

FACT : I got into SF by reading media tie-ins.  Worse that that, I read gaming fiction.  I particularly liked D&D tie-in Azure Bonds by Kate Novak and Jeff Grub as well as the Shadowrun tie-in Robert N. Charette's Secrets of Power trilogy (well... the first couple of books at least).  Now, seventeen years later, I couldn't honestly tell you what any of those books was about but the fact that I have this website speaks warmly of their power as I wasnt much of a reader before I got into those books.

FACT : A lot of writers that I like and admire have written wookie books.  Christopher Priest has written tie-ins for Cronenburg's  eXiste EXiS Existenz, Short Circuit and (somewhat weirdly) Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa.  Similarly Pat Cadigan (who, lest we forget, had a story in the Mirrorshades anthology) has written books based upon Lost in Space (a much under-rated film) and Jason X (a film that is not unreasonably considered to be shit).  Going even further, the Strugatsky brothers allowed Andrei Tarkovski to produce a film based upon their Roadside Picnic and then happily wrote a novelisation of the film entitled Stalker.

This is to say that I think that wookie books fill an important niche in the SF foodchain.  Many authors (including those on their way up or those who are having a creatively quieter time than at other points in their careers) make money by writing them and that is a good thing regardless of where you are at in your career.

However, if you asked me to review one of these works I would probably tell you to fuck off.

The reason for this is because I read for reasons that are completely opposite to the main selling points of media tie-ins.  I read because I want to be challenged and I want to encounter something new.  I do not want familiar characters and places and ideas.

This is very much like the final episode of the last series of Doctor Who.  The writers pulled together all of the various shit-munching NPCs that The Doctor has hung around with since the reboot and put them together.  I suspect that this was supposed to make me cheer as the "gang was back together".  Instead it made me reach for the sick bag as the writer was effectively cashing in on the accumulated good will that those characters had generated in normal episodes.  It was one trip back to the cow too many.

I feel no desire to ever return to the cow and this makes the mindset of the wookie book genre audience utterly alien to me.


So while I can accept that they are part of the genre landscape and a lifeline for many authors as well as a gateway for many genre fans, I can't help thinking that wookie books are something that you should grow out of.

REVIEW - Incandescence by Greg Egan (2008)

My review of Greg Egan's Incandescence has just gone live over at The SFSite.  This is my first review for them (and hopefully not my last).

I did  no't think that this was Egan at his best but I applaud the uncompromising commitment to writing hard SF.  I was not initially going to review it but then I happened across Adam Roberts' review of the book at Strange Horizons and I thought it was unfair and wrong-headed and I decided to put my own spin on the book out there so as to add a different note to the conversation surrounding the book.

Some thoughts on Barleypunk

I read with great interest Martin Lewis' excellent review of Everything is Sinister by David Llewellyn and The Heritage by Will Ashon over at Strange Horizons.

When I linked to the piece this morning I coined the rather silly term "Barleypunk" to refer to the kind of near-future, frequently satirical work that is currently coming out of a lot of Mainstream British publishers.  I chose the term because everything is hyphenpunk these days and also because it sounds like it should apply to yokels in wraparound sunglasses.  Which is pretty much what Nathan Barley is all about.

...and before long I had a longer examination of the phenomenon.

This is partly tongue in cheek as I'm pretty sure that you can't issue a manifesto on someone else's behalf and besides I don't actually think that genre categorisations are anything other than fictional but amusing lenses through which to look at things.

20 Essential SF Books Of The Last 20 Years.

Don't you just love the picture? *screams* It's history's greatest monster!

Well, we have waited a little while but finally a Worldcon discussion has filtered back to the internet and it is... *drumroll* a top 20 list.

Look at it this way; at least it's not folk music.

The irreplaceable Cheryl Morgan blogged the fruits of a panel discussion involving Charles N. Brown, Graham Sleight, Karen Burnham, Gary K. Wolfe and La Morgan herself.

Niall Harrison then blogged some more.

And Karen crunched the stats.



So, for want of something better to do, here is my take on the list of 20 essential works of SF from the last 20 years, without including fantasy, without including whole series.

• Snow Crash - Stephenson (1992)
• Cryptonomicon - Stephenson (1992)
• River of Gods - McDonald (2004)
• Pashazade - Grimwood (2000)
• Stories of Your Life and Others - Chiang (2002)
• Pattern Recognition - Gibson (2003)
• Air - Ryman (2004)
• Vacuum Diagrams - Baxter (1997)
• The Road - McCarthy (2006)
• Accelerando - Stross (2005)
• Excession - Banks (1996)
• Red Mars - Robinson (1992)
• Pump 6 and Other Stories - Bacigalupi (2008)
• Axiomatic - Egan (1995)
• Only Forward - Smith (2000)
• Blindsight - Watts (2006)
• The Cassini Division - MacLeod (1999)
• The Difference Engine - Gibson and Sterling (1990)
• The Sparrow - Russell (1996)

I composed the list without looking at any of the others' choices and I found it interesting that there is a good deal of agreement between the different critics.  I don't think The Road, Blindsight or Only Forward were picked up by anyone else though.

Only one selection with a female author, though I do realise that I am part of the problem in this respect.  I thought about Including Ash but then remembered that I thought it was about 300 pages too long (something which is arguably true of all of Gentle's more recent works).

There are also more short story collections than I thought there would be.  I think Egan's Axiomatic is an amazing collection, as are Chiang and Bacigalupi's and Vaccum Diagrams made me decide to do post-graduate study in the philosophy of science rather than ancient philosophy and so I had to include it.

There also seems to have been some discussion over including whole series.  I think that this is a mistake as Grimwood's second and third Arabesque are nowhere near as good as Pashazade (the third one is particulary weak) and given the barroque complexity of Bank's Excession, the elegant simplicity of Player of Games and the stylistic might of Use of Weapons, Banks could justifiably have three books in the list.  I decided not to include them simply because it struck me as a bit lazy to list three separate books in the same series.

Notable exclusions from my list are the Hyperion books, which I tried to read quite early into my relationship with SF (aged about 17 I think) but I could never get into them and so I didn't include them.  I also left out Revelation Space because I thought it was dull, Light because I need to reread it and Fairyland because I didn't think that much of it at the time but it could probably do with a reread too.

Hugo Discussion - Best Novel

As has been announced everywhere, Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union has won the Hugo for best novel.

I reviewed it back in July 2007.

The voting breakdown can be downloaded from Here (thanks to Larry for the tip).


I think that this was always going to happen.  Some people suggested that Brasyl or Halting State might prevent Chabon from taking the Hugo but I think that it was pretty clear from Chabon's Locus win that the SF audience are not in any way turned off by his 'mainstream' credentials.

Unlike many critics, I was not overly impressed by The Yiddish Policemen's Union.  While I liked the setting, the characterisation and some of the themes (even if the 'struggling for identity' chestnut is quite elderly) I thought that the plotting was lousy.  I think that if you're going to ape hardboiled tropes then you should follow through with hardboiled story telling and The Yiddish Policemen's Union is not a gritty tale of sordid double-dealing and murder.  It is a vast, sprawling political conspiracy centred around the figure of a Jewish Messiah.  I think conspiracies are dull to read as in effect, all you have to do is stay one step ahead of your readers and then end the book by disclosing what is really going on.  I think that type of story is easier to write and out of genre and, as a result, less interesting to me. 

In fact, Chabon's rather uneven relationship with genre story-telling also crippled my enjoyment of his Sword and Sorcery pastiche Gentlemen of the Road.  As with The Yiddish Policeman's Union, I thought that the book (in fact a series of linked short stories published in the New Yorker) failed to completely embrace genre narratives in favour of what is ultimately a pastiche as opposed to an actual genre work.  Since then, my views on Chabon-as-a-genre-author have mellowed as he has joined the SFWA and clearly thinks of himself in those terms but I do continue to think that Chabon's genre work is flawed in that he has trouble with plot.

But then my favourite, Brasyl, finished fifth.  So what do I know?

REVIEW - Martin Martin's On The Other Side by Mark Wernham (2008)

My review of Mark Wernham's debut novel Martin Martin's On The Other Side went up this morning at Strange Horizons.

Mildly amusing in its use of the phrase "Fuck off you trampy twat!", the book is otherwise unobjectionable.

Consider his youtube video.

Consider his over-designed website.

The Stross Formula

Some books are easier to write about than others.  Some books practically review themselves by making their pleasures as limpid as their faults.  Other books are less obvious and so require more thought.  Saturn's Children (2008) is undeniably a book of the first order, its problems and pleasures are simple enough.  However, in order to articulate what I found so disappointing about this particular work I found myself having to compare it to a number of Stross' other books and before long, my review had turned into an essay about Stross' writing style called The Stross Formula.

For those less interested in my thoughts of Stross' style in general, there's also quite a bit on Saturn's Children towards the middle of the piece.



Those that are that way inclined can also read some of my other Stross reviews :

• Halting State (2007) on SFDiplomat
• The Merchants' War (2007) on SF Diplomat
• The Jennifer Morgue (2006) on SFDiplomat
• Glasshouse (2006) on RevolutionSF
• Accelerando (2005) on RevolutionSF

NB : This review was based upon a review copy provided by the publisher

REVIEW - Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (2008)

My review of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother has also gone live at THE ZONE.

This was a surprisingly quick review given how long it is.  I could also have gone on a bit more as I think it's quite interesting the way Doctorow portrays adolescence and young adulthood, and how different it all is to the Jocks/Nerds dichotomy that once dominated US cinema.  Having said that, I think that Jocks/Nerds is derived from America's pre-WWII can-do anti-intellectualism whereas I think that Doctorow's view of highschool owes a lot more to films like Dazed and Confused.

Was a good book to write about though.