Gregory Benford: Timescape (1980)

Edition: Millennium, 2000
Review number: 1467

Gregory Benford is an author whose writing I like, but I have never got round to reading much of his work. Timescape is a classic science fiction, not quite about time travel but considering how history might be affected by the possibility of sending messages to the past. Half of the novel is set in San Diego in 1963, and half in Cambridge in 1998, with chapters more or less alternating between the two settings. (The dates were clearly chosen to that the novel appeared halfway between the two.)

In 1998, the world is experiencing a massive environmental catastrophe caused by mutations in oceanic plankton induced by the indiscriminate use of certain chemicals in agriculture. Physicists in Cambridge are investigating tachyons, sub-atomic particles which travel faster than the speed of light, and it occurs to one of them that it would be possible to send some kind of message to the past by sending a beam of tachyons to the point in space where the Earth once was, and interfering with physics experiments being carried out at the time when the Earth was at that position (direct detection of the tachyons being impossible, as technology wouldn't be in a position to pick them up at that point). The early sixties were chosen as a target because experiments which can be affected by beams of tachyons were beginning to be studied then.

Some people divide the science fiction genre into "hard" and "soft" writing. Hard SF is concerned with science: it views the genre almost as a way to carry out an informal discussion of more less speculative ideas, usually in physics, in a fictional setting. Soft SF is more often interested in the social aspects of science and technology, centring on culture. It is perhaps something of an outmoded way to view the genre, which seems to be more simply speculative in nature (i.e. centred around "what if" ideas) than anything else, where science fiction elements (such as space travel) are not simply props to a story which doesn't depend on them except as part of the background.

If the distinction has any meaning, then Gregory Benford has usually been regarded as a hard science fiction writer, partly because he is also a physics professor, and partly because he is also concerned to get the science in his stories as compatible with known fact (and interesting fact-based speculation) as possible. Most of the physics in Timescape is  based on what was known, or what at least seemed plausible in 1980, including what is quite likely to be the earliest mention of dark matter in a science fiction novel. The exception to this is the tachyons, which physicists still generally doubt could possibly exist. How they could behave if they did exist has been the subject of a certain amount of speculation, and Benford builds in part on this. And of course, tachyons are needed for the central plot device in Timescape of sending the message back in time, even if this violation of causality is one of the main reasons that their existence is considered unlikely. Benford has a rather convoluted but clever and interesting mechanism to get out of this trap, which I will not give away.

At the same time, Benford is able to write well enough to avoid the major criticism often levelled at hard SF writers, that they neglect important aspects of the story such as characterisation because of their overwhelming interest in the scientific idea. In Timescape, the reader does care about the characters in both timelines, and the background is believable - possibly in part because the setting is the physics research community which Benford is a member of in real life. It all works well, and the end product is a fascinating novel - at least, I think it would be to anyone interested in the physics. My rating - 9/10.

Michael Moorcock: The Twilight Man (1966)

Also available under the title The Shores of Death
Edition: Sphere Books, 1970
Review number: 1466

Like The Blood Red Game (which I bought in the same second hand bookshop as The Twilight Man in May), this is a reworking of an earlier piece of writing, in this case a serial which was written to fill space in New Worlds during the earliest months of Moorcock's editorship of that later famous science fiction magazine.

Clovis Marca is a former leader of Earth's government, leading a humanity which is now doomed to extinction after an alien visitation has left everyone infertile. As the book begins, Marca returns from a year in space, his way of dealing with the catastrophe. The desperate decadence of the society he finds on his return is a clear precursor of my favourite Moorcock series, The Dancers at the End of Time.  The Twilight Man is a staging post between it and the Arthur C. Clarke novel, The City and the Stars, which appears to have influenced Moorcock greatly, though I do not actually know that he read this particular novel (as I discuss in its review). Doomed decadence is one of Moorcock's recurring themes, as well - part of what he wants to say to his readers through his writing.

While much more Moorcockian (so to speak) than The Blood Red Game, The Twilight Man is still not fully individual in its style: clearly still the work of a writer finding his way, even five years after the publication of the first Elric novel, The Stealer of Souls. Perhaps because it is more like the author's later work, The Twilight Man is less interesting to read than The Blood Red Game: it is slightly too much like the fan's guess as to what early Moorcock would be like to engage.

Reasonably enjoyable in itself, I would give The Twilight Man 6/10.

Anthony Horowitz: The House of Silk (2011)

Edition: Orion Books, 2011
Review number: 1465

The character of Sherlock Holmes has been part of a huge literary industry, possibly the largest collection of what would now be known as fan-fiction ever produced. But The House of Silk remains an unprecedented event, being the first Sherlock Holmes novel actually authorised by the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle. The writer chosen to produce this work is Anthony Horowitz. His prior literary output consists of thrillers for teens, the Diamond Brothers and the Alex Rider series. Rather more relevant, I suspect, is his role as the creator and writer of the acclaimed historical crime TV series Foyle's War.

As an authorised continuation of Conan Doyle's writing, it is to be expected that The House of Silk is more like the 'canon' than much of the Sherlock Holmes literature produced by other writers, and this is indeed the case. It does use some of the common devices of Holmes fan-fiction, in particular the idea that narrator Dr Watson had cases that he wished to write about but which were to sensitive to publish, and which were then stored after his death for a number of years. It does not play around with the canon as some Holmes novel do, including some of my favourites, Laurie R. King's Mary Russell series.

The many Conan Doyle-like touches include an American connection, with the story opening with Holmes employed to track down a man who has been terrorising his client, believed to be a gangster from Boston, Mass., where Holmes client had been instrumental in the capture of the gang he belonged to. This story bears a resemblance to the Scowrer plot in The Valley of Fear, also involving the early employees of the Pinkerton detective agency working against a violent gang.

Slightly oddly, given the potential of a series of authorised Sherlock Holmes novels, The House of Silk seems to be designed as a one-off, judging by the preface and afterword (in which John Watson explains the reasons for not publishing this story at the time it happened). Maybe Horowitz didn't enjoy writing this, maybe the Conan Doyle estate only wanted a one off - there's plenty of time for more, though, before the final US copyright runs out on a Sherlock Holmes novel (assuming no changes in the relevant law before then).

The incidentals of the tale - the atmospheric depiction of Victorian London and its exotica, the energetic sleuthing of Holmes and Watson, and so on - are very much done in the Conan Doyle manner, but I found the puzzle very simple indeed. I found it a bit hard to work out whether this is authentic recreation of canon, or something which is Horowitz's own, because I know the Holmes stories fairly well so am not surprised by the twists in them, and I am a much more sophisticated and experienced reader of detective fiction than I was when I first encountered Sherlock Holmes in a comic strip version of The Sign of Four in the pages of Look and Learn in the mid-1970s. Thinking about it, I feel that the mysteries in Conan Doyle are mostly more difficult for the reader to solve. This is my only real caveat; in every other way, The House of Silk is a pretty good addition to the Sherlock Holmes industry, even if in 2012 it would be hard to write a novel with the impact of the original series that was true to the originals as this is. My rating: 7/10.

Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending (2011)

Edition: Jonathan Cape, 2011
Review number: 1464

When The Sense of an Ending won the Man Booker Prize last year, I remember seeing a suggestion that this was more a belated recognition of Barnes' career than an award which was deserved by this specific novel. Length aside, I don't think that this is the case, as the The Sense of an Ending is an immensely enjoyable yet deeply felt novel which reminds me of the early works which I like best out of Barnes' output.

The Sense of an Ending tells of a school friendship, following by a gradual growing apart while the friends are at different universities and an end with the suicide of one of the young men. Then, in the second part, the survivor has the past brought back to life decades later when he is unexpectedly left a legacy, which includes the diary of the dead man. And so the narrator. now in his sixties, looks back on the events of his teens and his early twenties.

So this is a novel about friendship, memory, and death. But although it addresses these potentially weighty themes, it is often funny, especially in the first section, which is set at the school. A lot of this section prepares the way for the rest of the book, as when, for example, the boys are made to discuss the nature of history by their teacher, an anecdote which is also used to suggest that the narrator of the novel is not entirely reliable: he ends up deciding that history is the story told by the survivors, rather than, as is usually suggested, by the victors. The Sense of an Ending is about "closure", hence the title, but it also has a satisfying and somewhat unexpected ending itself.

The problem with The Sense of an Ending is how short it is, especially by modern standards. I can think of several acknowledged masterpieces - oddly, mainly French - which are no longer but 150 pages is very short in these days of word processors. However, the important thing to realise is that this story seems to fit the length (which is more a tribute to Barnes' craftsmanship than something innate to the plot ideas). There are no wasted words, and no feeling that there are elements which should be in the book but are missing - even though there is a gap of forty years between Parts One and Two. A longer version of the novel would clearly be possible, but would lack the focus which Barnes is able to bring to his chosen subject by his concentrated treatment of it.

Barnes is a writer who I've read and enjoyed sporadically over the years, and this is in my opinion one of his best - 9/10.

Esi Edugyan: Half Blood Blues (2011)

Edition: Serpent's Tail, 2011
Review number: 1463

The treatment of Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War is well known (even if a small minority of people claim that the Holocaust did not happen), but the knowledge that similar efforts were made to destroy other groups (such as gypsies and homosexuals) is less widespread. This novel is the story of three black men, jazz musicians, in Germany and then France as the war broke out and France was occupied. Jazz music was banned as degenerate by the Nazis, which makes them even worse in the eyes of the German state and its functionaries, One of the musicians, trumpeter Hiero, is actually German by nationality, so is even more unwelcome in the land of his birth. He is unable to get travel papers as easily as the others, who are Americans, and they end up making a recording named Half Blood Blues in a tiny studio in Paris, which, when discovered after the war, is acclaimed as a classic, along with Hiero being regarded as a jazz great tragically lost when he is arrested and taken to the concentration camps shortly after the session.

Half Blood Blues was nominated for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, but failed to win. Neither is a surprise to me. The novel has some truly brilliant writing, but my interest flagged in the middle. The background of wartime Europe is less interesting than the sections about jazz, and what it feels like to be a jazz musician is far more enthralling than the plot.

Although jazz has never been music which really spoke to me - I keep on trying, to see if I can pick up what others love about it so much - I have done a fair amount of musical improvisation. I can't claim to be very gifted at it, but on occasion it has just clicked, and when this happens while playing with others also "in the groove", it produces a euphoric feeling which is like no other I have ever felt and which I can never forget even though I rarely play now and never perform any more. In her descriptions of the session when the main characters jam with Louis Armstrong and in the Half Blood Blues session itself, Edugyan comes close to expressing that feeling in prose, and then goes on to nail the draining numbness and despair which comes to those who (unlike me) have been able to touch a vein of inspiration frequently enough to become professionals when they are unable to perform as well as they want: a feeling probably at the source of at least some of the drug habits which have plagued many famous jazz musicians.

It is the wartime aspects of the novel - the terrible choices which must be made, the lost companions, the betrayals - which work less well. However gifted Edugyan is at bring the experience of music making alive for the reader, she does not appear to be a thriller writer. The slackness of this side of the novel is why the middle parts drag.

While tempted to give a higher rating to this novel for the brilliance of its evocation of performance, I don't really think that Half Blood Blues can be rated higher than 6/10 overall.

Alastair Reynolds: Blue Remembered Earth (2012)

Edition: Gollancz, 2012
Review number: 1462

The setting of Blue Remembered Earth is a post-scarcity world, where an environmental collapse has been followed by the rise of African states as superpowers, a renaissance which is originally solar then fusion powered. The Akinya family has played a leading part in this, and its members are now famous and wealthy. The plot is set in motion by the death of their matriarch Eunice in her space station retreat. The main characters are her grandchildren, the idealistic Geoffrey and Sunday, who have rejected the Akinya corporate legacy, and the mercenary Hector and Lucas. A secure deposit box belonging to Eunice sends the first two on a quest to discover her true legacy, the first step in a treasure hunt across the solar system where each clue points to the location of the next, and Hector and Lucas are not far behind them.

This rather childish-seeming plot is not what the book is really about - and Reynolds can certainly do better at this aspect of novel construction. Reynolds is a master at world-building, and Blue Remembered Earth is basically a tour of the man-made wonders of the solar system of the future. The novel is a gallery to show off some of his ideas, some of which could easily be the foundation for whole novels of their own: from the "ethics shunt" installed in Lucas' brain to prevent morality getting in the way of business, to the Evolvarium, an area of Mars in which machines are left to evolve and compete, like a physical version of the genetic algorithms run in many of today's computer simulations.

While most of Alastair Reynolds novels remind me of writers like Iain M. Banks, Blue Remembered Earth is much more like older genre figures, in particular Arthur C. Clarke. Instead of writing a wide ranging space opera, here Reynolds sticks to the solar system, which is full of its own wonderful objects, including an updated version of Clarke's famous lunar monolith - Reynolds' version is on the Martian moon Phobos, and is fantastically carved by human tourists. There is an element of guided tour about the novel as a result, which will not be to all tastes. Like Clarke's 2001, the story builds up to a climactic revelation. The big question for a potential reader is going to be whether this ending really is a climax, or just a disappointing let-down. This is of course also the case for any story in any medium which is constructed as a sequence of "reveals" (to use a film-making term); The Whisperer, which I recently read, is an example of a thriller set up in this way, which I don't feel has a sufficiently good climax to work. Here, at least from the point of view of the characters, the ending is better, but to this reader, some aspects (particularly the reasons for the secrecy and the treasure hunt) don't quite gel properly.

Which brings me to the title of the novel. It is derived from A.E. Houseman's A Shropshire Lad, of which the relevant lines seem to be "What are those blue remembered hills...? That is the land of fat content ... The happy highways where I went and cannot come again." It is hard to see how Houseman's poetic evocation of nostalgia relates to a novel which has such an optimistic view of the future of the human race, even if some tribulation has to be endured before that future arrives. The key is, I think, that this is the first of a new series: it is the blue remembered earth described in this novel which will be the object of nostalgia later on, suggesting that the series will become darker as it progresses.

My rating: 6/10; not appealing to me as much as Reynolds' earlier work.

Liz Jensen: My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time (2006)

Edition: Bloomsbury, 2007
Review number: 1461


If the title did not warn the reader, the first sentence's appropriation of the famous opening to Rebecca would make it clear that My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time is not going to be entirely serious. It is a personal history, told by Charlotte, a prostitute from late nineteenth century Copenhagen. When times are hard, she manages to inveigle her way into a respectable house as a maid, only to be accidentally catapulted into twenty-first century London bye the HG Wells-style time machine hidden in the basement.

My Dirty Little Book is broad comedy, sometimes even cruel (Charlotte's treatment of the dim overweight woman who accompanies her is a case in point). But it is still very funny. In fact, I was reading it alongside a P.G. Wodehouse I hadn't read before (The Girl in Blue), and Liz Jensen held her own even in this company. Few indeed will be those readers who follow Charlotte's exhortation in a time of adversity to return the book in disgust to the shop or library from which it was obtained.

I have tagged this review as science fiction because of the time travel element, though one of the reviews quoted on the cover describes it as "less science fiction than fairy tale", which is in many ways true. I don't have a tag for fairy tale currently, but I actually think that science fiction is the right genre in which to place this book (subsidiary to humour, which is obviously its main point). My feeling is that Tom Holt and Terry Pratchett are readily filed under science fiction or fantasy, because the genre themes and ideas are important elements in the structure of their books, provide much of the humour, and are the subjects of parody. Not only that, but the detailed nature of the genre elements is frequently given in some detail and is important to the story: dragons in The Colour of Magic (to pick one example) are not just fairy story beasts with no explanation, but projections of a human belief in dragons and a parody of Anne McCaffrey's Pernese dragons. And I think that all these criteria hold for Liz Jensen's book as well. Time travel is essential to the plot and the humour; there are moments of genre parody, particularly of H.G. Wells; the time machine itself is analysed further (there is even some discussion of the famous grandfather paradox). In fact, the nature of the fuel which propels the time machine is the closest that My Dirty Little Book comes to having a serious point, consisting as it does of three liquids embodying the struggle of history (blood, sweat, and tears), mixed with that more comical essential lubricant, strong alcoholic spirits.

The plot of My Dirty Little Book is farcical and not particularly important, except as the means by which the humour is generated. This mainly takes the form of Charlotte's observations of the worlds of both time periods. She is a most lively storyteller, occasionally a little too keen to address the reader directly, perhaps, but certainly an individual and entertaining voice. The amoral narration and humorous twists and turns of Charlotte's exploits made me think of Harry Flashman, not a bad model for this sort of comic novel.

My rating: 8/10.