Archive
Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson
book
The eternal question is of identity. Who are we, both as individuals and societies? The conventional answer is we are the sum of our experiences. Ignoring the old nature/nurture debate, lives are shaped by the choices we make and the consequences that affect us. An individual can have every conceivable genetic advantage but, if in a moment of drunken stupidity, our potential superman drives and crashes into a tree, every physical and intellectual advantage can be lost. Societies can also crash as selfishness and greed prevail over more altruistic policies to promote the common good. We only have to look around at the current debate over climate change. If everyone improved the efficiency of their homes and modified their behaviour to minimise emissions, the problem would be solved. But no-one wants to change unless they see the need in terms of their own benefit or are coerced into it. We may therefore be sleepwalking towards disaster. For those who like historical parallels, many of the theories to explain the collapse of the Mayan civilisation focus on the failure of agriculture to supply enough food to sustain the population. Yet, as the soil degraded, people kept on producing babies.
Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson is the third and presumably last novel following on Spin and Axis. From a structural point of view, it’s elegantly constructed with two narrative threads. One is based in a recognisably “human” future as society adapts to the life offered by the Hypotheticals — aliens who have drastically interfered with Earth’s development for no obvious reason. The second starts some ten thousand years further into the future and then moves forward. Here we see some interesting posthuman speculation as hive-mind societies have emerged, with groups of individuals linking their emotional and intellectual functions into a consensual whole. The boundary lines between an individual and the group mind therefore blur as the mass of “human” thoughts and feelings are mediated through massive computer systems. All this would work well if the zeitgeist for each community remains rational or emotionally balanced. But, with everyone linked together, it’s entirely possible a society might unknowingly slip into irrationality or a single emotional state. Once this happens, there might be wars or a society might simply give up and die.
Robert Charles Wilson communing with nature, hypothetically speaking
Meanwhile, the Hypotheticals remain enigmatic. Both human and posthuman cultures start off no closer to any real understanding of what the aliens are nor what they want out of their interaction with humanity. In the future Vox culture, there’s a religious structure to the group mind’s belief as it runs an analogy to the current Christian belief in an end time when the survivors will be assimilated by the Hypotheticals and move on to a higher state of being. Vox is therefore moving through the worlds, collecting individuals thought to be the key to communicating with the Hypotheticals and ensuring uplift. Two individuals survive from Axis, Turk Findley and Isaac Dvali, and are a link between the human and posthuman times. A third is a personality construct grafted on to the mind of a linked posthuman. Thanks to them, we come to understand much of what has happened and, more importantly, Dvali is finally able to solve the enigma of the Hypotheticals.
In a sense, Vortex matches the Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon in which humanity evolves from individuals through natural selection and genetic engineering to a supermind of individuals linked by telepathy, and we watch as a supernova destroys the Last Men’s refuge. As in all books on a galactic scale, Vortex gives us the chance to watch the end of our universe and so gain a better perspective on how the choices we make shape our future. In this, it flirts with theories of the multiverse and suggests we could, whether consciously or unconsciously, produce different futures.
This explains the reason for the twin-narrative structure. In the “human” future, a young man is brought into a US State facility which assesses mental and physical competence. If the individual is not a danger to him/herself and others, there are community resources to assist this individual cope in the world outside. If there are problems, the individual may be referred on to state facilities for treatment and rehabilitation. This young man is of interest both because of where he has been working and because he’s been writing a future history. This could be a mere science fiction story, or it could be a form of communication from the future. This gives the psychologist Sandra Cole an interesting case to evaluate. Yet, from the outset, it’s obvious this man is a pawn. There’s the unusual interest of the police officer Bose, and why should her manager, Dr Congreve, suddenly reassign this patient to another doctor for evaluation? So begin the twin stories as Sandra and Bose try to protect the young man from some drug suppliers who believe he can identify them, while our future trio struggle to survive in an increasingly hostile environment. The alternating chapters are carefully structured to leave modest cliffhangers which gives the whole a real page-turning boost — Robert Charles Wilson is always highly readable.
So, overall, Vortex is one of the better science fiction novels so far this year. In this, I admit my view is coloured by my ability to remember what happened in the first two volumes. It’s entirely possible this might not read so well as a standalone. I’m therefore in the usual mode of recommending this without reservation if you’ve already read Spin and Axis. Otherwise I suggest you read the aforementioned pair before you come to Vortex. That way, you will know who two of the key players are and what the Hypotheticals have been seen to do.
For reviews of other books by Robert Charles Wilson, see:
Burning Paradise
Julian Comstock.
Real Steel (2011)
So you can understand my review of Real Steel, I need to explain a little about my reaction to one of the film genres. Well, perhaps genre is too strong a word. Subtype might be better. Let’s take the Hollywood view of most men. They are born emotionally stunted and, without the help of women, they are almost completely helpless except in the sex department. In that one area, male dominance is usually preserved. Now let’s cut to the chase. Sex usually produces children and, in that emotional area, man’s normal stuntedness is elevated to complete dysfunctionality. Put in simple terms, your normally inarticulate and pathetic human being falls to pieces when confronted by a mirror image of himself. Now we have the refinement which is the subject of this review. Man produces offspring. Man cannot cope with responsibility. Man runs off into the wild blue yonder. Years later, Mom dies and, guess what, there’s no-one else to look after junior. That requires us to sit through endless mush as father and son bond and, according to the script, both emerge better human beings. My reaction to this subtype of film? I find them vomit-inducing. Although I have yet to actually vomit in a cinema — I’m fundamentally too polite for such excessive behaviour — I leave feeling ill and urgently in need of alcohol to calm my shattered sensibilities.
Hugh Jackman and Evangeline Lilly test out their product placement skills
Well Real Steel is not just mawkishly sentimental. The director, Shawn Levy has, with the help of scriptwriter John Gatkins (borrowing from a short story by Richard Matheson which aired as an episode in The Twilight Zone in 1963), produced a real work of art. This is not just sentimental. Far from it. This takes sentimentality and amplifies it, and then reinforces it, and then makes it into a club and beats you over the head with it. Indeed, this film does for sentimentality what Ed Wood so valiantly did for science fiction. Namely, puts something on the screen that’s hilariously over the top in its attempts to manipulate the audience and so actually quite entertaining. Believe me when I tell you — I never expected to be able to write a review calling a father/son bonding film “entertaining”.
So here we go with what’s supposed to be the plot. In the not so distant future (it’s supposed to be science fiction, after all) human boxing has been replaced by robots panel-beating each other on the way to the great scrapyard in the sky. Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) was one of the last human boxers and, at his best, he was able to go twelve rounds with the contender for world champion. In the next fight, his opponent became world champion and was undefeated for three years, i.e. this good-looking hunk was a real fighter and almost the Cinderella Man (aka James Braddock channelled by Russell Crowe). But he ended up a loser in every sense of the word. Abandoning every shred of intelligence, he consigned himself to the scrapheap of life, living from moment to moment, no longer concerned he was a dead man walking.
Meanwhile, his son Max (Dakota Goyo) grows to the age of eleven. When the court officials contact Charlie, he’s at rock bottom, owing money to two sharks and without a robot left to fight with. Fortunately, his sister-in-law Debra (Hope Davis) and her husband Marvin (James Rebhorn) are rich, so Charlie sells his right to custody of the boy to them for $100,000 (half up front) which gives him enough to buy another robot. There’s just one catch. He has to look after the boy for the summer. Charlie does have a woman who loves him. This is the daughter of his ex-coach Bailey Tallet (Evangeline Lilly) who looks a little lost trying to keep the old gym going. This new, old robot gets decapitated and the father-son combo find an even older robot in a scrapyard (where else). It cleans up good and it shows it’s got empathy (they call it a shadow ability to match the exact movements of whatever it’s watching). Needless to say, the boy and this inarticulate metal hunk bond almost immediately. This gives him a father substitute while his human equivalent follows the script. Now the old punchy underdog begins to win matches. He works his way up the rankings. Even dead-from-the-neck-upward Dad gets interested enough to teach him how to box, human-style. Max names “him” Atom. When Atom beats a world-ranking robot, uppity son challenges the unbeaten world champion. Unfortunately, Dad is then beaten to a pulp by a bad-tempered creditor. Dad responds to this set-back by returning the boy to his Uncle and Aunt.
Dakota Goyo acting the role of a young boy in search of a father
However, after a monosyllabic discussion with Bailey, largely in subhuman grunts prefaced by a little mutual grooming, he decides to return to fight for his son (both literally and metaphorically). Incidentally, the world champion’s handlers are blackmailed by public opinion into giving the no-hope robot a shot at the title. Those of you who’ve seen the Cinderella Man will be following this plot with interest — arrogant champion, disliked by the public, fights underdog. However, the actual outcome follows the first Rocky, with our plucky robot emerging the People’s Champion. What makes all this really exciting is that, when the remote control fails, Charlie has to show the robot how to fight the champion. Yes, that’s right. Our magic robot can not only stand and take a beating that no other robot of steel could take without buckling, he can also keep both eyes firmly on Charlie and follow his every move. That way, Charlie gets back his self-respect as a fighter, wins the affection of his son by being a noble loser all over again, and confesses his love for Bailey who’s travelled all the way to New York just to watch the fight. There are other twists and turns that nail the sentimentality to the highest flagpole in the land but, by then, we’re just cheering Charlie and his magic robot on as they fight for the world title.
Atom, the robot with the heart of a lion
It’s a good ensemble piece with lots of familiar faces popping into view every now and again. Dakota Goyo is another of these precocious children who can just stand in front of a camera and not look embarrassed, while Hugh Jackman does quite well to keep a straight face while playing a good-hearted but essentially stupid man. The motion capture on the robots is impressive and the fights are pleasingly naturalistic. Put all this together and, as a Hollywood version of how fathers should try to win over their sons, it’s quite an amusing romp. As science fiction, it’s a complete failure. There’s no prospect we could build such sophisticated machines, even including an impressive verbal interface as well as complex joystick operations. Effectively, these are fully or semi-autonomous machines, with their complex electronics protected by apparently invulnerable metal sheeting reinforced with carbon-fibre or equivalent light-weight plating. It would cost billions of dollars to develop such machines and they could never take over human boxing in such a short time. It’s just not technically or economically feasible. So, shut down your critical faculties and prepare for the ride. Real Steel is a straight-line, fast-paced ride to sentimentality overload.
Rule 34 by Charles Stross
Many years ago, I used to play with expert systems and “artificial intelligence” applying the work done by Professor Donald Michie in Edinburgh. I was saddened by his death in 2007. His contribution to the art of simulating intelligence in machines was groundbreaking. It’s therefore appropriate we should return to Edinburgh for this latest outing by Charles Stross. Following on in the same “world” first seen in Halting State, we’re back in Scotland’s capital city with new shenanigans in the future uses and abuses of machine intelligence.
Rule 34 gives us an amusingly clever version of future reality. If we overlook the currently insoluble problem of a natural language ability in machines (ignoring Siri in the Apple iPhone 4S which remains primitive word recognition software), the plot is an extrapolation from the current Bayesian statistical approach to establishing the probability that the knowledge you hold is true or false. In your spam filter, for example, it learns whether it has correctly identified unwanted mail. As a bridge into the criminal law and policing, which is the core of this novel, Bayes’ Theorem recently received a fail grade from the English Court of Appeal in a murder case. An “expert” persuaded a jury of guilt based on the probability a pair of Nike trainers in the defendant’s possession left the shoeprint found at the murder scene. The conviction has been quashed. So much for the application of science in courts or perhaps the use of statistics isn’t scientific enough to be accepted by lawyers. Not entirely changing the subject, Turing Tests are held quite frequently and informed human observers are reasonably reliable in identifying the machines. But innocent individuals, interacting through chat rooms and IM systems, can be more easily fooled by today’s machines.
Charles Stross with a message for the world
Well, Charles Stross has us move forward a year or so in technological terms and suggests three developments of interest. The first is in market trading so that money may be moved around in different ways at short notice to maximise returns. I like the idea of corporatising small states like the current tax havens. Who needs them to be legitimate countries, anyway? The second is in the ability to fabricate a multitude of different “things”, some of them useful, others sinful, from downloaded designs. The third is in the use of stimuli to induce behavioural change. Think of it as being a way of nudging you into buying a product or forming a particular opinion. If you do begin to see a pattern in what’s going on around you, the most likely explanation is going to be coincidence.
This has Charles Stross playing the same game of Scottish accents as Iain Banks in The Bridge as we navigate carefully through the multiple layers of culture in Edinburgh society. It’s interesting to watch the vocabulary change and, tuning in your ears, hear the different accents. Frankly, I’m never really sure the process is very effective and the result on a page must represent something of a challenge for American readers. Nevertheless, there’s a pleasing jauntiness to much of this murder mystery as our only faintly motivated Detective Inspector Liz Kavanaugh contrives to solve the various cases on her radar (with a few helpful nudges and winks if you know what I mean). In this endeavour, she’s aided by her moderately loyal Rule 34 Squad, hindered by Chief Inspector Dixon, and treated as a threat by Detective Chief Inspector MacLeish. Perhaps her career would not have stalled if she’d been a worshipper of Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom, civilisation, justice and strength. Alternatively, perhaps it’s just as well she was shunted into the backwater that is the Rule 34 Squad because that means she may actually be at the cutting edge of detection — using computers rather than sharp knives, of course. But, thinking of Athena and wisdom leads us to the final element of subtext in the novel. The nature and role of ethics in our modern world is deeply frustrating. In philosophical terms, there’s never been a greater need for more people to be aware of the tool box of methods available to analyse the extent to which our behaviour is, or is not, ethical. Yet, you see the word “ethics” bandied around as if everyone understands it as a form of common sense. It’s not considered something to be studied. Rather we can somehow intuitively know whether what we’re doing is ethical. Never has a word been so abused as “ethics”. In Rule 34, Stross challenges us to consider the extent to which ethics is, or should be, a potential restraint on what we think or do. In purely objective terms, our intelligence might suggest particular behaviour will produce better outcomes. Utilitarianism in action, as it were. But we may hesitate to ignore the ethical or other rule-based systems if the behaviour will lead to disapproval or, even, personal penalties. What price are we prepared to pay to obtain the results we desire?
Like Halting State, Rule 34 is good fun. Although we do get a bit more infodumping explanations in the later stages, the overall effect is light and airy. It’s also a good puzzle to work out who everyone is and what they are up to. The murders, successful and merely attempted, are also suitably gruesome. After all, if this is a story about technology on the rampage, we’d better have machines intimately involved in the manner of each of the early deaths. Rule 34 is definitely worth picking up and you should make time to read it.
There’s terrific jacket artwork for the US edition from Alberto Seveso.
For the other reviews of books by Charles Stross, see:
The Apocalypse Codex
The Fuller Memorandum
Neptune’s Brood
The Revolution Business
Rule 34
The Trade of Queens
Wireless.
For the record, Rule 34 was shortlisted for the 2012 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
Brilliant Legacy or Shining Inheritance or Chanranhan Yusan — episodes 29 to 33
This is a spoiler-rich discussion of what happens in these episodes so do not read this post if you want the experience of watching the serial unfold onscreen. Further, these episode numbers are based on the terrestrial broadcasts I have seen and not on downloaded or DVD episodes. It’s possible that these numbers do not match your experience.
Well, here we are at the seaside and Buttons Park Jun-Se (Bae Soo-Bin) makes his big pitch for love. He’s already declared he can’t stand by and be a “brother”. He wants it all and, to seal the deal, he walks himself and the three other interested parties up to the top of a cliff (just in case there’s a desire to try a lemming-style suicide leap) and offers Cinders Ko Eun-seong (Han Hyo-Joo) a share in running his expanding food empire with a cruise restaurant on the horizon. This puts a distinct crimp in the good humour previously enjoyed by the Brat Seon Woo-Hwan (Lee Seung-Ki). Buttons then marches them back down the hill to a caravan park where he’s booked them into two caravans — but the Brat is back in everyone’s good books when he remembers Cinders is allergic to clams. He’s an observant little Brat after all. The Ugly Sister Yu Seung-Mi’s (Moon Chae-Won) makes a vague gesture at a peace offering but is roundly rejected.
Cinders (Han Hyo-Joo) and the Brat (Lee Seung-Ki) kiss on the bridge
Granny Jang Suk-Ja (Ban Hyo-Jeong) has a bad headache and is amused when she learns all four are by the seaside. Sharing a caravan with the Ugly Sister is too much so Cinders walks out into the night. Equally, the Brat was not inclined to sleep alongside Buttons so is lying on a bench outside. He follows. Then the Ugly Sister wakes and now the cat is among the pigeons. On a romantic bridge, the Brat finally kisses Cinders who, by the way, has decided to wear the necklace he gave her. She then pushes him away. To cut a long story short, everyone is now depressed. They make their pitch for the contract, then the Ugly Sister collapses from “fatigue” and has the Brat drive her home. Buttons drives Cinders home but he’s even more hang dog. In a later confrontation with the Brat, Buttons hits the Brat twice and tells him he will only hurt Cinders unless he clarifies the relationship with the Ugly Sister. This man has a great future as a relationship counsellor.
Han Ye-Won and Yu Ji-In for once not the comic relief in hospital
Interestingly, the Evil Stepmother Paek Seong-hee (Kim Mi-Suk) is almost honest with Director Park Tae Soo (Choi Jung Woo) but then switches gear and tells him the Brat fancies Cinders. What will happen, she asks if the Brat marries the heiress. She’s out to incite Park to depose Granny. Meanwhile, the loyal retainer Pyo Seong-Cheol (Lee Seung-Hyeong) is digging into the past for Granny. He’s got interesting news that seems to confirm what the Evil Stepmother said about paying off the creditors, but he’s gonna keep on digging until he gets to the bottom of it all. Some servants are really useful.
The Brat now returns the necklace lost at Granny’s house and tells Cinders he’s seen a young piano player wearing something similar. Unfortunately he’s still caught up in the story it’s his sidekick’s cousin and not Ko Eun-Woo (Yeon Jun-Seok). The Brat now has an epiphany as he delivers a single serving of soup to a poor couple. He finally appreciates how fixated he was by money. Working for and among the peasants is good for the rich boy’ soul.
Granny and Director Park have a row. He’s upset she sidestepped him on the bid. Meanwhile the Evil Stepmother is out spreading rumours about Granny giving the ownership of the company away. After Waster Daughter-in-law Oh Yeong-Ran (Yu Ji-In) manages to cook a great evening meal, Granny congratulates her and then collapses. This prompts a telephone call to the Brat who was just about to introduce Cinders to her brother. Funny how these things happen in Korean drama when the scriptwriters want to make fake drama. Now we’re coming into the final section of the race and Granny is out for the count. It will be down to our heroes to save the day. It doesn’t start well with three loud voices (Daft Granddaughter Seon Woo-Jeong (Han Ye-Won), Waster Daughter-in-law and Director Park) telling Cinders to leave the hospital. She loiters tearfully outside and then hears the Brat berating the loyal retainer for not telling the family Granny has early stage symptoms of Alzheimer’s. The loyal retainer shoots back that, seeing the way the family was treating her when they thought she was “normal”, how would they have responded if they had thought her mad.
Ban Hyo-Jeong as Granny at bay in the EGM
The serial now descends into hopeless melodrama as Granny surfaces then passes back into a week-long coma. Various people come and go, asking desperate questions about Granny’s health and fighting over whether there should be an early challenge to the will. In the end, the Brat sneaks Cinders into the ward. They both weep all over the blankets (as if the humidifier was not throwing out enough moisture into the room). She’s followed by the Brat who wails even longer and louder telling Granny how he came to cause his father’s death. In the morning, our pair are sleeping by the bedside as Granny wakes up. Hard to tell whether Granny is pleased with this development — the tea cosy she’s forced to wear just makes her look silly rather than wise. Independently, our love birds now clear the decks for real action. The Brat finally tells the Ugly Sister she’s never cut the mustard and, anyway, he thinks she’s lying through her teeth about Cinders. He gives her chapter and verse about past events as evidence. Meanwhile, Cinders is finally rejecting Buttons and his offer of shared glory in a new restaurant venture. More importantly, Cinders also rejects a tearful Ugly Sister who begs for help in getting back into the Brat’s good books.
Bae Soo-Bin as Buttons deciding how to vote
We then have a drunken Buttons unloading his sadness on to the shoulders of Dead Dad Ko Pyeong-Joong (Jeon In-Taek). It’s wholly consistent with the rest of the absurdity in this serial that he never once gives sufficient details to enable Dead Dad to identify Cinders. This is one of the worst moments in the serial so far. How can two drunken men fail to mention the key girl by name?
The conspirators of Evil Stepmother and Director Park then reach the climax of their planning with the extraordinary general meeting to oust Granny. Cinders and the Brat get all the loyal staff to agree to a pay cut and rush to the meeting with proxy forms signed. Meanwhile, the Ugly Sister has discovered the false accounting and tries to blackmail Buttons into voting Granny out. It’s either Granny out or she’ll blow the whistle on his father’s false accounting and send him to jail. At last, she’s living up to her mother’s high expectation of evilness. When it comes to the vote, Buttons abstains and Granny triumphs.
For all the reviews, see:
Brilliant Legacy or Shining Inheritance or Chanranhan Yusan — episodes 1 to 4;
Brilliant Legacy or Shining Inheritance or Chanranhan Yusan — episodes 5 to 9;
Brilliant Legacy or Shining Inheritance or Chanranhan Yusan — episodes 10 to 14;
Brilliant Legacy or Shining Inheritance or Chanranhan Yusan — episodes 15 to 20;
Brilliant Legacy or Shining Inheritance or Chanranhan Yusan — episodes 21 to 24;
Brilliant Legacy or Shining Inheritance or Chanranhan Yusan — episodes 25 to 28;
Brilliant Legacy or Shining Inheritance or Chanranhan Yusan — episodes 29 to 33.
School Days With a Pig or Buta ga ita kyôshitsu (2008)
There’s often a chasm between what it may say in a book and the practical reality it describes. In my own case, I studied law and believed I had some small level of expertise when I went into a solicitor’s office to begin my training. Within days, I realised I hadn’t the remotest idea what was happening. Fortunately, my boss was an expert. Even though only a few years older than me, he’d managed to pack in a lot of experience. We both survived and, remarkably, forty-four years later, he’s still practising. I’m the lazy one. I’ve retired. I say all this because, having just seen School Days With a Pig or Buta ga ita kyôshitsu, I wish I’d had a teacher like Mr Hoshi (Satoshi Tsumabuki). Well, that’s my first reaction, anyway.
Mr Hoshi is a new teacher and he’s full of innovative ideas for teaching his class of students about life. The first day of a new school year in what I take to be a first teaching post, he walks into the room carrying a small pig. He announces the class will look after the pig for the year and then eat it. You can imagine the surprise on the faces of the twenty-six youngsters. They are city children, although one does have a father who was a farmer and now cooks in a market stall. None of them have ever seen a “food animal” before. They are overcome by curiosity. They gather round the desk where the pig stands and, hesitantly at first, begin to stroke it.
Satoshi Tsumabuki as Mr Hoshi introduces the pig
This is a bonding process whereby an animal passes through the species barrier and becomes a pet. The children are motivated to build a sty in the playground. They learn to muck out. More importantly, they discover its favourite foods and where it likes to be scratched. When a major storm comes one night, parents drive them to the school to protect it (sorry, her). When she falls sick, a vet is called. They give her a name. But, lurking in the back of everyone’s minds, is the nagging worry as to the fate of their new friend. Will she become meat for them to eat or will she have early retirement to a new place of leisure?
As an aside, Principal Takahara (Mieko Harada) is very supportive of her new teacher, defending him against complaints from a few parents who feel their children are too young for this life lesson. She even turns up on Christmas Day to see how the pig is doing. Whereas Vice Principal Nishina (Ren Ohsugi) is the usual prophet of doom, never convinced this approach to teaching can ever have a good outcome.
Everything moves along briskly with a dispassionate, almost documentary style of direction from Yetsu Maeda. If there is a false moment, it’s the section of the film where heavy rain sets in and we’re asked to watch each child in turn worry about the pig out in the school yard. This is almost pure bathos. Otherwise, the manner of the direction captures this as a real-world event. Indeed, it all happened in 2002 and was novelised by Yasushi Kuroda with a screenplay by Hirotoshi Kobayashi. The director’s choice ignores the fact the original events triggered some controversy. His version keeps everything within the immediate community with no suggestion the story was picked up by the local or national news media.
The children and the pig
It’s told as quite an intimate story of choices. Perhaps before their time, these children are asked to decide the fate of their friend. The two set-piece debates they hold have a freshness about them. Apparently, they were given only hints and suggestions of what to say so that the words would mainly be their own. Everyone of the twenty-six has enough screen time so we can see them all as separate people-in-the-making. In a way, it’s quite chastening to see how sophisticated they are. Perhaps all children have that same innocent directness about them. . . It all comes over as emotionally honest. As we move towards the conclusion, two other classes in the school offer to take over the care of the pig. More of the teaching staff feel they have a stake in the outcome. At the end, there’s a further life lesson for the children to learn. In a democracy, having an even number of voters can lead to a tie. In such cases, it falls to an “outsider” to cast the deciding vote (or impose a solution, depending on your point of view). Thus, since Mr Hoshi set the moral problem for the children, he must finally make the decision for them. That’s going to leave thirteen of his children unhappy and, depending on the decision, also affect the two other classes that have offered their services.
In a way, Mr Hoshi’s decision doesn’t matter. The strength of the film lies in the remarkably natural behaviour of the children on screen and the obvious sincerity of Satoshi Tsumabuki as Mr Hoshi. They, and the different sized pigs that show growth from a thin creature to a meaty porker, manage the difficult trick of being believable. Their debates are open and accessible. Indeed, anyone wavering on a decision whether to remain a carnivore or join the ranks of the vegetarian movement should watch this. It slips the issues under your nose with great subtlety yet leaves it to you to make the final decision. Returning to my original view of Mr Hoshi, I now think he’s showing one side of life to children who are a little too young. Perhaps we are entitled to some illusions on moral issues such as what to eat. However, even though I might depart from him on his choice of issue, I still think educators owe it to their students to disabuse them of the notion that book learning is useful in itself. People only earn money when they find a way to exploit what they know. That often means unlearning much of what was previously taught. Such life lessons are invaluable to the young.
Dancing With Bears by Michael Swanwick
There’s a well-entrenched tendency to think genre fiction should always take itself seriously. Traditionally, this means spaceships navigate the cosmos, while mages wave their magic wands, and horror stuff happens to innocent victims (often pulchritudinous in the early pulps). There’s rarely time to crack a smile as worlds have to be saved from who-knows-what threats, while fates worse-than-death dance attendance on those well-endowed girls. Except, occasionally, humour did rear its head as in the work of Henry Kuttner and William Tenn. In a world infected by fear of nuclear destruction during the Cold War, we used to look forward to anything that would break the mould and give us a chance to laugh.
Today, the vast majority of authors churn out millions of words that range from the humourless to extreme grim. The assumption is that modern sensibilities prefer their entertainment to come wrapped in danger with the risk factors high. Just as people queue up to ride the latest white-knuckle extravaganza in an adventure theme park, so we want our fiction full of tension in full page-turning suspense mode. Well, every now and again, I like to sit back and enjoy a book that makes me smile. As a true carnivore, I can and do eat semi-raw steak as a main course, but the delights of bonnes bouches, those tasty little morsels you can pop in your mouth to produce one of those taste explosions. . . They really bring a smile of appreciation to the lips. It’s the skill of the chef to produce something so unexpectedly exquisite. It’s a rare delight (pun intended given the earlier reference to steak) to be savoured.
Michael Swanwick, hairy without being unduly ursine (dancing ability unknown)
All of which brings us to Dancing With Bears (Night Shade Books, 2011) by Michael Swanwick. This is the first novel featuring Darger and Surplus. Previously, their appearances have been confined to shorter lengths in “The Dog Said Bow-Wow”, “The Little Cat Laughed to See Such Sport”, and “Girls and Boys Come Out to Play”. The second little cat in Paris is the lightest of the conflations, while the first adventure in London is slightly more substantial. The third is the least satisfying. Our series characters are conmen who wish to amass wealth with the least possible effort. To this end, they dangle temptation in the way of the rich and, through both direction and misdirection, encourage the movement of wealth in their direction. Except, they are beset by misfortune and, despite their best efforts, often escape with little more than their lives. Such is always the way when our heroes must continue to their next adventure in no better state than as they started.
In this case, they’ve managed to attach themselves to a caravan taking virgins, specially trained in the theoretical side of perfect love-making, as a gift from Byzantium to the Duke of Muscovy, the current ruler of Russia. This would be the ideal berth except the women have been programmed to die if touched by any man other than the Duke. That’s a fairly good deterrent to any physical contact in its own right, but it’s reinforced by the presence of some gene-modified guards. They’re not very bright but, as Neanderthals, they can rip any inconvenient man to pieces without breaking sweat. These Pearls include Zeosophia who’s also trained as a spy. It will be her job to bend as many Russians to the Byzantium cause as possible. On the way, the caravan picks up a slightly less than innocent young man and a strannik, a religious pilgrim with a hidden agenda.
Upon their arrival in Moscow, Surplus poses as the Ambassador and Darger goes underground, eventually finding a nice warm place to curl up and read. The Duke proves something of an anomaly and all the key decision-making seems to be done through Chortenko, a sociopath who rules through the usual mixture of blackmail and intimidation. Naturally, he sends one of his minions to find Darger. This is Pepsicolova, a dedicated informant until her supply of enhanced cigarettes is threatened. Thereafter, she’s a dangerously homicidal free agent who, together with a man in charge of a loose cannon, manages to save most of Moscow from burning to the ground.
This is a story of a new revolution in a future Moscow where the world is struggling to recover from an assortment of plagues and outbreaks of violence from intelligent machines. As you might suspect, this makes the basic situation inherently chaotic and we are left to watch as the flapping of butterfly wings in Baikonur brings a perfect storm to the streets and underworld of Moscow. Think of it as fantasy meets science fiction in a post-apocalyse setting. In a way, Surplus and Darger are irrelevant. They come with a grand scheme to con the Duke, but find themselves caught up in events too momentous to be controlled. Their only hopes, as everything spirals out of control, are to stay alive long enough to find something valuable and portable to carry away with them from the wreckage.
Although this is a novel built up from multiple set-pieces, it’s really only an amuse-bouche: a refined sampler to show off the chef’s skills. There are some genuinely delightful moments, everything being held together by a mixture of sheer writing bravado and a sequence of sometimes bizarre coincidences to drive the plot forward. This is for anyone who wants a change of pace from the more usual stolid plots and pedestrian writing. Dancing With Bears sings of wit and joyful exuberance — bears are included but their involvement in fights is optional. I enjoyed every minute!
For the record, this book has been nominated as one of the 2012 John W Campbell Memorial Award Finalists.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Eighth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois
The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-eighth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois is a big anthology of thirty-three stories and novellas. With a lot to mention, I’ll forego the usual introduction.
“A History of Terraforming” by Robert Reed is a melancholic story that reflects on the inherent intellectual and emotional weaknesses that bedevil the human race and seem, forever, to doom it to self-destructiveness. And, yet, suppose a gentle and wise man could live long enough to impose some self-discipline on us childlike humans. Would he not only transform planets, but also the people who live on them? It’s a pleasing, albeit elegiac meditation on the dangers of hubris and the value of humility. “The Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String” by Lavie Tidhar is also somewhat sad. Although we are the sum of our memories, there’s no guarantee that the removal of unhappy memories will make us any happier. Indeed, the irony is the very notion we might have forgotten something important could make us even more unhappy.
At last, I’m able to praise a story by Allen M. Steele. He’s so often come close with the ingenuity of his plotting, but I’ve always felt his work lacked an emotional heart. “The Emperor of Mars” proves a real delight. It’s a reassuring tale of a colony faced with a worker having a serious psychotic break. Instead of reacting with intolerance, there’s a surprisingly supportive response, allowing the man to live in the world as he chooses to believe it is. “The Things” by Peter Watts is the other side of the John W Campbell, “Who Goes There?” as told by the alien “thing”. I was interested in the idea, but thought it went on too long. “The Sultan of the Clouds” by Geoffrey A. Landis is a most ingenious story about money and power in a future version of our solar system. The physical descriptions of life on Venus are fascinating and the plot itself neatly dovetailed together. On a note of frustration, I can understand why the story ended where it did, but I remain curious as to what happened next.
Gardner Dozois looking avuncular
“The Books” by Kage Baker is a post-apocalypse story of a group of travelling entertainers who also act as a repository of some human knowledge and skills. It’s an adult story with children as the protagonists which makes it slightly unusual, avoiding the sentimentality that so often blights such stories and keeping the adults of ordinary intelligence. “Re-crossing the Styx” by Ian R. Macleod is another ingenious idea about life before and after death. It might be surprising to find out how hard people might fight to maintain their existence, particularly if the right technology was available. “And Ministers of Grace” by Tad Williams (1) poses the eternal question of what we might believe if we’re left to our own devices. For too long, we’ve been surrounded by people telling us what’s right and wrong. Perhaps, if those people went away, we might discover more natural or universal laws in operation. It would be interesting to find out. “Mammoths of the Great Plains” by Eleanor Arnason is slightly tedious, chronicling the demise and resurrection of the North American Mammoth in this alternate history. “Sleeping Dogs” by Joe Haldeman is a pleasingly hard-bitten story that ruminates on the uses and abuses of power. When a ruling group controls all aspects of life, problems can disappear or people may simply forget inconvenient truths. “Jackie’s Boy” by Steven Popkes could have been a routine post-apocalypse story, but it’s saved by the relationship between the boy and the elephant. Both have serious trust issues. Nevertheless, as is always the way in stories of this kind, they reach a mutual accommodation in the face of adversity. “Chicken Little” by Cory Doctorow is compulsively intelligent in its discussion of what makes us human and how, if at all, we could change the mix to produce a better version. In this, let’s put aside the ethics of experimenting on people without their knowledge and consent. After all, farmers have been feeding us antibiotics for years. All we need for a mass clinical trial is the right person to sell the need to take the new magic pill. Then we can all find out the hard way whether the world becomes a better place. “Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain” by Woon Ha Lee is a particularly pleasing idea, elegant framed and shortly executed. Like any tasty morsel, it’s consumed in a moment, but lingers on the intellectual palate for a long time. “Return to Titan” by Stephen Baxter is an amusing gonzo science story of an exploration of Titan that literally pulls the plug on the characters’ life support system when they discover sentient life from a different universe. “Under the Moons of Venus” by Damien Broderick is Ballardian in spirit covering rather more contemporary conceptions of knowledge and science. It’s interesting but, for me, underwhelming. “SevenYears From Home” by Naomi Novik (1) sees the tried-and-tested approach of prodding a hornets nest come unstuck because, in this instance, the prodders mistook the nature of the nest. Hornets are dangerous enough but, when they can develop new abilities, everyone may be at risk. “The Peacock Cloak” by Chris Beckett takes an internalised debate on how to develop a world, and allows different facets of a creative personality to play out the options in a pocket universe. It’s an intriguing idea and, like all good ideas, it’s time-limited.
“Amaryllis” by Carrie Vaughn flirts with sentimentality and just about emerges unscathed in a heart-warming tale of fisherfolk, their quotas and a desire for children. “Seven Cities of Gold” by David Moles is a rather melancholic story about the intellectual and emotional journey all thinking people should take when confronted by the reality of war. When you realise the blood of the dead is on the hand of leaders on all sides of the conflict, the best you can do, assuming you survive, is to get as far away from the madness as possible. “Again and Again and Again” by Rachel Swirsky is short and hilarious. It should be required reading for all those contemplating parenthood. “Elegy for a Young Elk” by Hannu Rajaniemi is a completely entrancing fantasy masquerading as science fiction. The ideas are fascinating and thrown into the melting pot so casually, you almost miss their cleverness before they are gone. “Libertarian Russia” by Michael Swanwick asks what we really mean by freedom. Perhaps it’s an absence of rules or maybe it’s an absence of people to enforce rules, or could it be a rejection of contemporary values and systems like money? “The Night Train” by Lavie Tidhar is an OTT story about how far human evolution might go as a crime boss and bodyguard take a short trip by train from one exotic city to another. This has a willful exuberance about it, as if there are no envelopes left to be pushed.
“My Father’s Singularity” by Brenda Cooper is ostensibly science fiction but really about the gulf that separates parents and their children. Every father has dreams for his children’s future but, when they grow up and move away, reality collides with the dreams and something has to give way. “The Starship Mechanic” by Jay Lake and Ken Scholes paraphrases the Biblical suggestion, “physician heal thyself” to refer to an alien mechanic who, as a book buff, doesn’t quite polish floors with hairless cats, but comes close. “Sleepover” by Alastair Reynolds is a classic example of the “big idea” story. What if our world is nothing but a simulation requiring massive processing power to keep it working. The more complex the world and the greater the number of people, the slower the “machine” would run. In such a case, we might all have to stop thinking for a while. There’s no-one better than Reynolds at this kind of story. “The Taste of the Night” by Pat Cadigan (2) walks the think line between sanity and insanity, tumour and a new ability to see the world (or perhaps, even, a new world).
“Blind Cat Dance” by Alexander Jablokov sees the idea of editing an animal’s consciousness applied to human relationships. We don’t need to see those we dislike. Equally, in our own relationship with food, we can edit out the inconvenient animal parts and leave only the meat. It’s all in the eye of the beholder. “The Shipmaker” by Aliette de Bodard shows us how we might produce starships in a distant future even though nothing might quicken without the help of a surrogate mother. In-fall” by Ted Kosmatka shows how even the threat of not dying and so denying martyrdom may not be sufficient to prise the names of co-conspirators from a fanatic’s lips. “Chimbwi” by Jim Hawkins confirms that, culturally, there’s a border to cross when you arrive in a country as a refugee with nothing. Even so, journeys don’t always end where you expect. Finally, we come back to Robert Reed, Ouroboros style, in “Dead Man’s Run” which is a nice mystery with a clever idea, but it unnecessarily prolongs the literal chase to the whodunnit solution.
In a book of more than 700 pages, it would be a miracle in convergence of taste if a reader found every word coming through an editor to be of the highest quality. The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-eighth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois is no exception. Critical sensibilities are highly personal. That said, there are only a few stories I found weaker than hoped for. In a book of this length, no-one can ask for anything more and, with some spectacular successes to find, I unhesitatingly recommend this. It has won the 2012 Locus Award for Best Anthology.
(1) First appeared in Warriors edited by George R R Martin and Gardner Dozois.
(2) First appeared in Is Anybody Out There? edited by Nick Gevers and Marty Halpern.
For other anthologies edited by Gardner Dozois, see
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection
The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection
The Year’s Best Science Fiction Thirtieth Annual Collection
and as a tag team with George R R Martin:
Old Mars
Songs of the Dying Earth: Stories in Honor of Jack Vance
Songs of Love and Death
Warriors
Thinking about books 