Poul Anderson: Time Patrol (2006)

Edition: Baen, 2006
Review number: 1314

The Time Patrol stories of Poul Anderson are classics of the science fiction genre, dealing with the efforts of the eponymous group to maintain the status quo of history against the accidental or deliberate manipulations of other time travellers. This book, sharing the name of the original story which began the series, collects them all (and it is not to be confused with an earlier volume, also called Time Patrol, which contains only the first two or three stories).

The central character in the stories is Time Patrol agent Manse Everard, who is "unattached" - basically, a troubleshooter who can visit any time and place in order to sort out serious problems. (Most Time Patrol agents work in a single milieu, either as researchers studying the period or as officials regulating the activities of time travellers.) Apart from the first story, which is about Everard's recruitment, the basic plot of the remaining stories is simple and consistent: some problem requires Everard's intervention at a particular time and date.

Though the stories were written over a period of five decades and though they vary wildly in length (between about 30 and 160 pages, as reprinted here), they are very similar to each other. Anderson doesn't quite make the different periods and locations all that distinct (though having several stories set just outside the borders of the Roman Empire doesn't really help with this). Everard also remains pretty much the same through the series, maybe a little more world-weary, but basically an action hero. Like many long running series of self-contained stories, the Time Patrol tales work better in relatively small doses rather than by reading them all the way through in one volume.

Given these obvious flaws, why is Time Patrol worth reading, and why are the stories important in the development of the genre? For one thing, there is one story in the series which really stands out, which would be a classic of the genre even without the rest. Delenda Est has Everard returning from a vacation on a base in the prehistoric past to his own time (the mid twentieth century) only to discover that everything has changed. In what is effectively a parallel world, he has to work out what pivotal event has been altered, and then decide if he is morally able to destroy an entire new civilization in order to bring back his own familiar time line (or alternatively destroy the lives of all those living in his own timeline to save the new future). This single story is one of the best of all those ever written about time travel.

For the other stories, the point of this series is really the introduction of adventure to time travel, and particularly to stories involving time travel paradoxes. The fates of nations, of the godlike Danellians from Earth's far future (the beings who set up the patrol to preserve their existence) rest on Everard's capable shoulders: he is a hero who can think as well as act. In the original time travel story, Wells' The Time Machine, the use of time travel is to be a mechanism allowing the main character to see the far future (which is, of course, at least partly a reflection on Wells' present); the machine itself has very little part to play in the story. It is like the visions in The House on the Borderland, or the mental link to the future in Last and First Men: the point is the vision itself, not the mechanism by which it becomes available to the protagonist. Stories of time travel to the future tend to be like this in tone, and it is perhaps the introduction of the possibility of paradox with travel to the past which makes the idea work better as the background of a thriller. (The actual introduction of the famous grandfather paradox came as late as 1947, and even then in stories unlikely to be read by the mainstream English language science fiction fan: French genre fiction, with the exception of Jules Verne, is still considered pretty obscure.) Anderson joined other American writers of his time such as Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov in bringing adventure to mainstream time travel fiction (The Door Into Summer and The End of Eternity are approximately contemporary with the earliest Time Patrol stories); Anderson's stories are the most epic of these as adventures.

Delenda Est is a must read for any science fiction fan. The rest are interesting in small enough doses, though a bit too similar to each other to make the omnibus a pleasure. So I would recommend seeking out other collections which contain one or more of the stories along with others, rather than investing in the omnibus.

Michael Moorcock: The Vengeance of Rome (2006)

Edition: Jonathan Cape, 2006
Review number: 1313

After twenty-five years, the final volume of the Pyat Quartet has now at last appeared; it has spent almost all that time listed at the front of Moorcock's publications as "in preparation". The quartet as a whole must rank as one of the most ambitious novel series of the period, as well as one of the most slowly written; not content with being a historical narrative of the first half of the twentieth century, Moorcock has immersed himself in the repellent personality of Maxim Pyat and produced a study of how such a person appears to themselves while making it clear how others perceive them at the same time.

The story of The Vengeance of Rome takes Pyat from a fugitive in Morocco - the ending of the previous volume - to friendship with Mussolini in Fascist Italy, and then close links with the Nazi hierarchy in thirties Germany (extremely close in some cases), through imprisonment in the camp at Dachau to eventually meeting the young Moorcock while running a second hand clothes shop near Notting Hill in the sixties.

Like many historical novels, a lot of the fascination in this series lies in the way in which Pyat's story is threaded into the major events of the time. Though the most obvious counterpart to the quartet may seem to be George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series, the tone here is much more serious, and Pyat's character and role in history are both far more ambiguous. At the heart of the whole series, and emphasised particularly in this final novel, is the conflict between Pyat's anti-Semitism and his appearance: being constantly taken for a Jew is not a good thing in thirties Italy and Germany.

The conceit of the series is that the novels are in fact memoirs edited together by Moorcock from Pyat's papers and memories of conversations the two of them had. There is an introductory page, which suggests that the main task of the (fictional) editorial hand has had to try to harmonise conflicting accounts. One of the usual characteristics of Moorcock's fantasy genre writing is that he positively revels in incompatible versions of stories; this is particularly clear in the recent Second Ether trilogy, each of which treats incompatibility in a different way. So this is a somewhat ironic statement, one of many in The Vengeance of Rome of various different kinds.

One of the most interesting of these, because it reveals a lot about the character and the author's attitude to him, occurs when Pyat is interrogated by the SS about his career as an inventor: "I invented it all", he says, apparently without realising what this suggests about his history; and yet Moorcock also states in the introduction that he found corroborating evidence for many of the incidents that initially seemed most fabulous; this is clearly a deliberate contradiction. The reader, of course, knows that this is fiction, but it is being presented as true as any memoirs - with hints like this that it is at the very least, significantly embellished.

Moorcock fans may have wished to see the quartet completed more quickly, but there are obvious reasons why the novels would be difficult to write (and those obvious reasons may not of course have affected the author, no matter how strongly the novels may suggest them). These are the requirements of historical research and the repellent personality of Pyat already mentioned, together with the difficulty of writing from the point of view of an individual whose opinions in almost every subject seem to be diametrically opposed to those of the author. (Moorcock's own views can be read in the essays in The Opium General, for example, or on his website, Moorcock's Miscellany - currently down after attacks by hackers, an event that is itself something of a commentary on his views.)

It is possible to see the Pyat quartet as a sustained attack on racism. Indeed, the idea that an anti-Semite is so unable to see that Jewish people are just as human as he is leads him to be unable to perceive his own Jewishness is a barbed comment on the stupidity of such a view. But there is much more to it than that, and ranks as Moorcock's literary masterpiece, as The Dancers at the End of Time is its equivalent in the science fiction genre.

Greg Andrew Smith: The Pledge of Three (2005)

Edition: The Lucky Press, 2005
Review number: 1312

Zack Owens, a bored schoolboy waiting for his mother to finish work, is trying to amuse himself in the office of her employer. He picks up a book on medieval history, and a piece of paper falls out. This describes the Pledge of Three, which when recited by three friends together affects their futures: one will become rich and famous, one will be unchanged, and one will die. Rather unwisely, he takes the paper and shows it to one of his school friends, who is excited by the idea and wants to try it. It is only after some disturbing dreams and seeing an odd website that Zack agrees - a few days before his mother wins the state lottery.

Aimed at young teenagers, The Pledge of Three turns out to be quite an intriguing novel. While the idea of young people becoming involved in something they don't understand is hardly original (recent well-known examples including both Harry Potter and Buffy the Vampire Slayer), it is handled well, with an X Files-like unwillingness to decide whether it is describing magical events (putting in the fantasy genre) or a complex hoax (which would put it in the crime genre) that marks it out. The other reason why this novel is better than the average is the characterisation of Zack, who is made deeper by the way that his initial reluctance to become involved with the Pledge is overcome. Indeed, despite not being in the target age range by some two decades, I found myself keen to keep reading from chapter to chapter, and would certainly be interesting in reading sequels (The Pledge of Three being the first of a series, the Z.O. Chronicles).

The Pledge of Three is not faultless; there are occasional infelicities in the writing, particularly in the early chapters. For example, "soft-spoken" is not really the most common adjective to apply to people, but the first chapter uses it to describe two characters in the space of a few pages, which gives the reader a little jolt. I have not been a school pupil for a long time, and was never one in the US, but some details struck me as unlikely (is it really that easy to walk out of a class?) - basically, the plot and the setting could be better integrated. Once the reader is drawn into the story, which happens pretty quickly, this sort of issue ceases to matter.

Lucky Press are not a publisher I have come across before, and judging by their list, this kind of fiction, on the boundary between thriller and fantasy and aimed at the teen market, is a new departure for them. I hope that The Pledge of Three receives the success it deserves and that the Lucky Press won't be too strongly stereotyped as purveyors of lurid self-help books to get it into the shops.

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Telling (2001)

Edition: Gollancz, 2002
Review number: 1311

All through here career, Le Guin has been known for her thoughtful social science fiction, as far removed from the "hard" SF which focuses on engineering and physics as anything in the genre. While her earlier novels like The Left Hand of Darkness are classics which helped establish that science fiction doesn't have to be about technology, the more recent The Telling is a comparitively minor novel in much the same vein.

The setting is a technologically primitive planet - a favourite choice of location for Le Guin. Using a familiar device from earlier Hainish tales, the central character is an anthropologist-like observer named Sutty. She is sent to this planet, only to discover it has radically changed from the information she read before her journey (which took seventy years, local time, because of relativistic effects). The society she studied, made up of peaceful beings who had no real concept of foreigner (or at least, so the narrative states, though there is also a suggestion that one group was regarded as "barbarians"), has been overthrown in what must be a deliberate reflection of the effects of the Chinese invasion of Tibet. The old books, and even the writing and some of the language are banned as reactionary. Sutty thinks at first that she, an alien, might be the only person on the planet able to read the old letters until she goes away from the cities into the mountain foothills where the remnants of the culture are still clandestinely preserved.

Why is this a minor Le Guin? The main reason is that it re-visits themes previously explored with greater subtlety. It is all too obvious that the reader is meant to sympathise with those trying to preserve the remnants of the old culture, and the details put in to explain why the authorities want to stamp it out are perfunctory and unconvincing. (This is partly because the main motive for doing so is kept for a surprise until the end, which is something of a plotting mistake.) The ideas used in The Telling could have been the basis for something more interesting; theere is more to the real world events than is picked up by the author, and there are additional reasons for cultures to die out in the face of new technology which we see all around us in the world today that could have filled out the somewhat perfunctory plot. No one ever suggests that the (to me rather dull) folk tales that make up the oral culture at the centre of The Telling (and provide the name for the novel) are boring or irrelevant - yet that has been the fate of many traditional ideas in the MTV generation. Those on the side of the authorities are portrayed as humourless ideologues, straight out of Orwell; one of them does have a change of heart, but it turns out that he was brought up in the old ways. There are reasons that persuade people to embrace technology, and to be a fully rounded person does not necessarily mean rejecting anything new; but that is Le Guin's implication here.

There are other aspects of The Telling which could be criticised; too much space is given to expounding the traditions at the expense of plot and character: an equivalent to being a hard SF novel which concentrates on the technical gimmicks at great length and a fault that Le Guin has always tended towards. But I did not actually dislike The Telling. It is beautifully written on a sentence-by-sentence level, and captures the attention. What is frustrating is that it could be much better.

Philip Pullman: The Amber Spyglass (2000)

Edition: Point, 2001
Review number: 1310

As anyone who has read my reviews of the earlier novels in the His Dark Materials trilogy will know, I am not a Philip Pullman fan. I did feel, though, that I should make an effort to get to the end of this series, as so many people rave about it. I had hoped that this would be a more interesting read, and I would finally begin to care what happened to Will and Lyra.

The novel starts with Lyra in a magical sleep in the power of her mother, while Will (and others, who are more sinister) search for her. Lyra asleep is a much more interesting character than Lyra awake, and this section is probably the best written of all three novels. But soon she is wakened, and from that point she and Will are questing through the worlds accessible with the knife (see The Subtle Knife) and the dullness returns, giving me an almost irresistible urge to skip large chunks (I only didn't because I was intending to write this review).

Pullman has frequently and loudly complained about the Christian symbols in C.S. Lewis' Narnia stories. However, the way that Lewis approaches his symbols seems to me to indicate a much greater writer and storyteller, regardless of his religious convictions. He subordinates the external ideas to the demands of his story (for example, the parallels between Aslan and Jesus are less exact than critics would make out). Pullman's ideas, on the other hand, seem far more important than any story-telling, and his symbols are clunky and irritating. They also tend to be pointed out very directly by the author - as when he describes the meaning of the knife towards the end of this novel. I don't really mind what the purpose symbolic objects hold in a work of fiction, as long as they're well done and their meanings contribute to the strengths of the novel. This is not the case here, and they just become intrusive, making the reader unable to ignore the fact that there is some kind of agenda behind what they see on the page.

My basic objection to this entire trilogy is that it is extremely dull. It certainly reads more like the kind of thing adults expect children to like rather than something that will really appeal to most children - a real contrast to Harry Potter. (I've seen lots of adults raving about His Dark Materials - but not one teenage or pre-teen fan.) I'm certainly not intending to read any more Philip Pullman, no matter how wonderful people think his books are.

Neil Gaiman: Anansi Boys (2005)

Edition: Review, 2005
Review number: 1309

Neil Gaiman's new novel is not a sequel to American Gods, but it shares a setting and many of the ideas behind the earlier story. There is one shared character, in a way: Anansi the trickster spider from African myth, a major source for the stories of Brer Rabbit that might be more familiar to many Westerners. The premise of Anansi Boys is that Anansi is dead, and his son Charlie, a London-based accountant, has to come to terms with who his father was, at the same time discovering that he has a brother who has inherited his father's supernatural powers, yet seems to want to take over Charlie's dull life.

Generally, the tone is quite light - this is Gaiman's sunniest novel to date with the possible exception of Pratchett collaboration Good Omens. This is true even though the original Anansi stories have a definite nasty side. The originals, some of which are retold here, are generally about practical jokes, which can really only be excused because they show the underdog winning by his cleverness - after all, what chance does a spider have against a tiger physically?

Perhaps because it is lacking in good ideas, Anansi Boys does not seem as good as American Gods. It's purpose is less serious, however; it is meant to entertain, and it does so magnificently. It does seem more Tom Holt than Neil Gaiman; not necessarily a bad thing, but not what I expected.

At the end of the book, there is a short series of appendices, explicitly compared to the extras that appear on DVDs. As there, some are more interesting than other; a deleted scene and a short interview with Gaiman add to the novel, while the banal questions for book groups don't. One good thing about the deleted scene is that it shows that Gaiman is willing to cut out good bits if they don't fit in to the flow of the novel, something that many of today's fantasy authors could do well to copy.

Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go (2005)

Edition: Faber & Faber, 2005
Review number: 1308

I have remarked before that frequently when a successful mainstream writer produces a novel with science fiction themes in it, critics overpraise it while it falls flat to long term genre fans. This is basically because both author and critics are unfamiliar with ideas that are commonplace to the fans. Most of the exceptions to the rule come from the early days - Huxley, Orwell, and so on - and succeed because of the strength of the reason for turning to the genre.

The first of the 2005 Booker Prize shortlist I have read, Never Let Me Go is also the first novel by Ishiguro I have read. My previous acquaintance with the author was limited to about the first half hour of the film of Remains of the Day, and that put me off reading his work. Though evidence in the story points to a setting in the recent past (use of Walkmans, for example), it uses ideas from the science fiction genre and reads almost as though John Wyndham were writing today.

The story of Never Let Me Go is about memories: an adult looks back on growing up. But she grew up as part of a group with an unusual destiny; her boarding school is strange, very cut off from the world, and there are occasional hints of a chilling fate awaiting the children. Hailsham is not an orphanage, but a hidden establishment to bring up clones, for later use as organ donors for transplant surgery. This is an idea that turns up reasonably often in science fiction, but I suspect that with this setting, the story would then probably go on to describe how the clones bring down the system through their intelligence, and Never Let Me Go is not like that at all. The characters in the novel never really consider rebellion or flight (except by talking about the possibility of a "deferral" within the rules), even when they reach the point of being selected as donors. The horror of their situation is to an extent understood by them (for example, they use the euphemism of "completion" to refer too their eventual deaths), but it is not what they think about. Indeed, the tone of the narration is reminiscent resignation, almost nostalgic regret, as Kathy looks back on her time at Hailsham. By creating an atmosphere of understated melancholy, Ishiguro has made this a more effective novel than it would have been if he had dwelt unsubtly on the horror of these children's lives.

A lot of the more intellectual science fiction has a purpose beyond the literal meaning of the words on the page - social criticism, a political or philosophical position to attack or defend, the impact of new technological ideas on individuals or society. The use of science fiction ideas suggests that there might be a similar purpose in Never Let Me Go, and there is - but exactly what it is is not made clear until near the end of the novel, at it is more subtle than just suggesting that the use of human clones as transplant organ banks is morally wrong. The reason no one has been willing to end the use of the clones is that they bring immense benefits (curing cancer among them), which mean that most people want to forget that the clones are real people and just think of them as though they were machines manufactured to grow the organs. So the issue that is behind the novel is about how people ignore the more unpleasant aspects of their culture, in order to live a comfortable life; and that this is not right, because there are some things that should not be done, no matter what the benefits are. Ishiguro makes no attempt to discuss where the line should be drawn - factory farming, animal experimentation, suffering in the third world to maintain the lifestyle of the rich nations of the world, or where. The end does not justify the means, and we should be aware of it; that is what Ishiguro is saying.

This is an atmospheric and thought provoking story, and proves that today's mainstream authors can venture into the territory of the science fiction genre without making their ignorance obvious.