Cryptic : The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

A mammoth collection of scifi short stories by the prolific Jack McDevitt. McDevitt has an old-fashioned manner and his stories remind me strongly of the tales from the 50s and 60s that I grew up reading – this is not a bad thing.

Not every story is a corker, but most are good and some are downright excellent. My one complaint is that they tend to be rather constant in tone and style, I finished the book yesterday and the stories are all starting to blend together in my head.

Recommended if you like this sort of thing

Oceanic By Greg Egan

Another collection of Scifi short stories, this time by Greg Egan. Egan is a programmer, and his stories are hard-as-diamond tales of artificial life, strange physical frontiers behind every atom, and clear-eyed researchers heroically hunched over keyboards in darkened rooms. Great stuff, and this collection really shows his ferocious imagination and range as a writer. The title story (full text here) in particular is a very well done piece that packs a lot of depth into a few pages.

Highly recommended

By China Miéville

There has been a brutal murder, and it is up to the suitably jaded but dogged Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad to investigate. But this case is different than most in the city of Besźel, as the crime was possibly somewhere else both close by and impossibly far away – Ul Qoma.

Besźel and Ul Qoma are two cities that occupy the same geographical location, literally intermingled in all senses except by the behaviour of their citizens. Some blocks and streets are totally in Besźel, some totally in Ul Quma, but many are "crosshatched" – belonging to both cities although under different names.

The inhabitants of each city are conditioned from birth to never interact with anything in the other city, carefully averting their gaze and ignoring ("unseeing") as much as possible the sights and sounds coming from the foreigners around them. Driving on crosshatched roads is a pretty hairy experience. Strict rules penalise anyone breaching the imaginary boundary between the two locations. In fact the crime of “breaching” is much worse than the murder Borlú is trying to solve – transgressors are quickly dragged off by mysterious figures, never to be seen again.

Solving this crime will take Borlú into the seedy underbelly of Besźel, where gangs nationalists opposed to even the slight contact between the cities struggle violently with unificationists who want to end the separation. But could the answer lie in Ul Qoma, a city with an underbelly of its own?

China Miéville showed a Dickens-esque ear for language in his excellent fantasy novels, and here he puts it to great use writing what is a great whodunit police procedural set in a slightly strange place. The City and The City is a genre piece, but the genre is gritty crime novel rather than fantasy and the book follows all the usual rules and doesn't cheat by introducing new rules at the last minute although, of course, misleading clues abound. There is very few good whodunit/fantasy crossovers and this is by far the best I have come across.

Reading around the Internet, I see that people have taken the split (or joined, depending on how you look at it) city as a metaphor for all sorts of things. Does unseeing represent class distinctions, racial separation, a method or Orwellian control, or something totally different? Miéville isn’t going to provide the answers in the book – the best allegories are those where no one has any idea what you are getting at, or even if you are getting at anything at all.

Highly recommended

A book by Iain M. Banks set in his nigh-utopian “culture” society that features a strangely named misfit with a unique skill who gets manipulated into performing a mission of great danger and importance. Who could have guessed?

In this case, the weirdo is Jernau Morat Gurgeh, who is very,very good at games. So good that he the perfect choice to travel outside of the Culture to the Empire of Azad to play the greatest game he has encountered. The game is simply called Azad, and is based on (or forms the basis for) the tenets of the Empire’s society. Those that play the game well gain power, prestige, and government posts, even the emperor is selected this way. Those that play and lose fare badly. Azad (the game) is fantastically complex, so much so that actions that take place on the room-sized boards are supposed to represent the core philosophies of the players, making it a fantastically useful HR tool. Anyone who wants to get anywhere in Azad society devotes their lives to the study and practice of the game.

Although Jernau is only supposed to be the token Culture participant, he finds that his alien playing style confounds the natives and he does better than anyone predicted, although at a cost to his somewhat fragile psyche. Eventually, as he learns more about the game and Azad society in general (linked as they are), Jernau comes to believe he could go all the way to the final and play for the empire itself.

The Player of Games is one of Bank’s more approachable books, not having any of the stylistic or structural gimmicks of some of the other Culture novels. The story is pretty straight forward (there is a twist, but it is fairly transparent) but told in the usual imaginative style. The Azad are vividly described, seeing them through the eyes of somebody both living amongst them and playing against them is an interesting literary device. The book’s main point that games are a window into the soul of a society is well realized, if maybe a little heavy handed. But you know what you are getting yourself into when you pick up an Iain M Bank’s book, I suspect he types with concrete gloves.

Recommended if you like this sort of thing.
        

Hyperion

by Dan Simmons

After years of hearing “Hyperion is the bestest book evar!”, I finally managed to read it. And frankly, it is pretty good.

Set in the far future where humanity has created The Hegemony of Man, a culture that spans many planets thanks to portals (“farcasters”) that have openings many light-years apart. But there are some (the “Ousters”) who live in fleets of deep space vessels around the edges of the Hegemony. As the story opens, the Ousters have launched an attack on the planet Hyperion, not part of the Hegemony proper but under its control and a vital part of many hidden plans. Against this backdrop 7 pilgrims are thrown together on a religious quest to the Time Tombs, mysterious structures on a remote part of Hyperion haunted by an even more mysterious (and murderous) creature – the Shrike.

Trying to summarize all of Hyperion’s tortured plot-lines would be fruitless – there is a lot going on. But the frame story mainly concerns the difficult pilgrimage across the planet. The pilgrims initially do not know each other and the bulk of the book is made up of each pilgrim telling their own story to the others in their own words as they travel. It turns out that far from being totally random each pilgrim has a reason for wanting to go to the Time Tombs and some even wish to meet the Shrike. But are they all telling the truth?

Hyperion is basically review-bait – filled with pretentious literary allusions, most of which probably went over my head. Its structure borrows from Chaucer, but it is also clearly influenced in a big way by the poetry of Keats, but to say more would be to spoil things. If nothing else it forced me to spend an hour or two on Wikipedia trying to educate myself. The stories are all told in different styles, and information is cleverly conveyed so that by the end of the book the reader thinks they have a good understanding on the way in which the universe works.

That said, Hyperion has one massive flaw. By the last chapter we have heard all the stories and now expect to see how they all turn out. But instead the book ends right as the pilgrims start their final walk down the valley to the Time Tombs. This is rather a slap in the face to the reader – I felt cheated and resolved not to buy the sequel just to spite the author.

The Fall of Hyperion

by Dan Simmons

Ok, obviously I failed in my resolve – but in my defense I found it at a secondhand book store so the author gets nothing from my purchase.

The Fall of Hyperion starts where the previous book so rudely left us but switches gear completely, focusing on what is happening back in the Hegemony as what they thought would be an easy defense of the far-flung planet turns into a fight for survival. The Hegemony is politically fractured, and different groups are scheming for mysterious ends. The CEO of the Hegemony has her own plan involving the pilgrims but she is not the only one.

The Fall of Hyperion sets itself a mammoth task of tying up all the loose ends of Hyperion while telling a fairly convoluted story itself. It is to Dan Simmons’ credit that it pretty much succeeds, although it does get somewhat incoherent at times. The huge audacity of the explanation for some of the strange goings on is almost worth the price of admission itself, most books that try something similar just spin out of control but The Fall of Hyperion comes as close as any to drawing everything together satisfactorily.

The writing in both books is good, and the story moves along at a good pace. The way that certain events and even assumptions about the Hegemony itself are portrayed different depending on the point of view of whichever character the book is following at the moment is particularly well done. There are a few unrealistic points – it seems that just about everyone in the far future has a working knowledge of Keats’ poetry, but they don’t mar an excellent series.

Highly recommended if you like this sort of thing but for goodness sake make sure you obtain both books and read them in order. Hyperion doesn’t have an ending, and The Fall of Hyperion makes no concessions to readers who haven’t read the first book.