“Write a lot. Finish one story and start another. Don’t keep rewriting and polishing something if it isn’t setting the world on fire: start something new instead and consider the earlier story a learning experience.”
“Write a lot. Finish one story and start another. Don’t keep rewriting and polishing something if it isn’t setting the world on fire: start something new instead and consider the earlier story a learning experience.”
(Slow Bullets, by Alastair Reynolds; Tachyon, 2015, 190 pp., $14.95)
reviewed by Zeke Teflon
(mild spoilers to follow)
Before starting on the review proper, I should mention that, despite its page count, this is a novella, not a novel: I’d estimate that it only runs to about 47,000 words. To stretch this to novel size, the publisher used a not especially space-economical font (looks like Times Roman), fairly large type (looks like 12-point), wide margins, both headers and footers (which reduces the number of lines per page), and wide leading (space between lines — looks like 16 points). Put this in a more standard format with a more economical font, and it’d probably run to about 120 or 125 pages.
The story itself opens with its narrator and lead character, Scur, being tortured by a war criminal, Orvin, on a battlefield, after a ceasefire has been declared. The story then quickly jumps to Scur awakening on a malfunctioning prison ship, the Caprice, orbiting an ice-bound planet. As she quickly discovers, the ship is filled with three classes of people, in addition to its small crew:, it contains war criminals and ordinary soldiers from both sides of the conflict, including Orvin, and a complement of civilian passengers. Once awake, Scur and Prad, a crew member and engineer, quickly discover that they’re cut off from the rest of the human-inhabited worlds and that they’ve been in orbit for at least several centuries.
Shortly after, the most significant problem with the ship’s malfunctions surfaces: it’s very gradually losing long-term memory, and there’s nothing that can be done to arrest the problem. So, what to do? One of the solutions is to begin physically engraving portions of the remaining knowledge into the physical surfaces of the ship.
At that point, the central conflict of Slow Bullets arises: the two sets of soldiers and war criminals hold to two varying versions of “The Book.” The two Books share common stories and characters, but parts of the Books differ considerably. They both contain good and bad ideas, good and bad commands — love your brother, but murder nonbelievers, etc. — and there’s little to distinguish true believers in either version: they’re both vicious fanatics. In other words, the less literally their adherents take the Books, the better, more humane people they are.
But what to do about the Books and those carving passages from them into Caprice’s walls? Without giving anything away, I’ll just say that I very much endorse Reynolds’ implied solution.
I also endorse his implied solution to past wrongs: forgive, forget, and work together to make a better world. And if you can’t forgive and forget, part company.
This takes us roughly halfway through Slow Bullets. Read it if you want to see how these conflicts work out.
There are problems with the book, though. One is the characterization. The primary character and narrator, Scur, is one-dimensional — always angry, extremely so. Thus it’s hard to buy her eventual, partial evolution. The secondary characters are little more than names, including the only other real character, Prad, who is so passive it’s again hard to buy.
Another problem is the introduction of malevolent, inconceivably advanced aliens, aliens so advanced that “language can’t describe” them. This is a problem because there’s no need for them. They serve a function in the text, but there are other obvious ways to fulfill that purpose without introducing this gratuitous, fantastical element. (The physical results would be different, but the essential moral/philosophical questions would remain the same, and the tale would be more plausible.)
Despite these problems, the virtues of Slow Bullets — the quality of the writing, the page-turner plot, Reynolds’ treatment of big issues — outweigh its defects.
Recommended.
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Zeke Teflon is the author of Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia. He’s currently working on the sequel and an unrelated sci-fi novel.
(On the Steel Breeze, by Alastair Reynolds. Tor, 2014, 483 pp., $26.95)
reviewed by Zeke Teflon
Alastair Reynolds has a great imagination, as witness the setting in this sequel to Blue Remembered Earth. In Steel Breeze, you’ll find masterful descriptions of triplicate clones identical down to neural structure, uplifted elephants (“Tantors”), “holoships” (usually referred to as “generation ships” or “arks”) traveling at sublight speed, excavation of an early space age artifact (Venera 9) on Venus, an artist colony in the interior of the Saturnian satellite Hyperion (structurally, probably the weirdest moon in the solar system), mysterious BIO’s (Big Intelligent Objects) orbiting a nearby habitable planet, life extension to centuries, suspended animation, aquatic humans colonizing the seas, and antagonistic, near-all-controlling AI’s (“artilects”).
In other words, this is space opera on a grand scale. And its technological projections are plausible. Reynolds gets the science right.
The problems with this adventure novel have to do with the characters, plot, and its lack of political, social, economic, cultural, psychological, and ethical interest. It simply doesn’t explore any of these matters. The closest it comes is implying the obvious: that species extinction is an atrocity and that burning fossil fuels is a very bad idea.
The plot problem is that the plot pivots on supposedly smart people doing something very stupid: those in charge of generation ships en route to a nearby star’s habitable planet burning most of their fuel during acceleration, in order to shave a few decades off travel time, with no obvious reason for doing so, and with no plan for slowing down enough to go into orbit around the planet rather than shoot past it. (It requires as much energy to decelerate as it does to accelerate.) This is staggeringly stupid.
And the characters are simply uninteresting. The central characters are two of the three Chiku Akinya clones, with virtually the entire novel narrated from their points of view; and at the end of nearly 500 pages you feel as if you have no idea who they are. You never get inside their heads. Not because they’re mysterious, but because they’re one dimensional. They apparently have no insecurities, sexual desires, jealousies, self-insight, sense of humor, or indeed any of the other traits that make characters individual and memorable.
This novel is essentially a giant pinball machine filled with flashing lights, parts moving in all directions–and nothing more.
Not recommended.
(Reynolds has written both very good and very bad novels–mostly good. Those I’d most recommend are Revelation Space, Chasm City, Century Rain, and The Prefect [preferably to be read in that order]. Those I’d recommend avoiding are Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap, Diamond Dogs, Terminal World, and Blue Remembered Earth.)
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Zeke Teflon is the author of Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia. He’s currently working on the sequel.
What exactly does “anarchist science fiction” mean? Stories written by anarchists? Stories with anarchist characters? Stories with anarchist settings? Stories that make anarchist political and social points? Stories with an “anarchist sensibility” (whatever that is)? Stories that anarchists will simply enjoy? All of the above? Who knows…..
Because of this, I’ve taken a somewhat expansive approach and have included a number of non-anarchist political sci-fi novels in this list simply because I think anarchists would enjoy them. They comprise maybe a third of the total. I’ve added brief comments about books I’ve read recently and those that particularly stand out in memory. I’m still adding to the list, which is far from complete – it’s simply a list of books I’ve read and that I recommend. (I’ve included a couple that I don’t particularly like, but included anyway because they are specifically anarchist or part of a series; in the comments preceding or following the titles, I’ve noted them.)
If you notice that any of your anarchist sci-fi favorites are missing from this list, please leave a comment mentioning them.
Here’s the list — the links go to reviews on this site.
(Note: friends in the life sciences tell me that Bacigalupi is quite inaccurate in some biological specifics, that he’s every bit as inaccurate here as he is in portraying climate change in the Southwest in his otherwise very good The Water Knife (2015). Yes, these are cautionary tales, but gross inaccuracy is gross inaccuracy, and it tends to undercut the cautionary message. Still, these are both so well written and entertaining that I highly recommend them.)
Iain M. Banks
The following are Banks’ “Culture” novels–space opera on a grand scale. While set in the same universe, all work as stand-alone novels. All are set in a galaxy-spanning, far-future anarchist and atheist society, and all feature strong, believable characters (including AIs), complicated ethical dilemmas, and frequent dark humor. Of them, the two best are probably Player of Games and Surface Detail, and the weakest is probably The Hydrogen Sonata.
Another of Banks’ sci-fi novels worth your time is
L.X. Beckett
Christopher Brown
John Brunner
Several of Brunner’s other sci-fi novels are also enjoyable, particularly Shockwave Rider (1975) and The Crucible of Time (1983). (But don’t pick up one of Brunner’s novels at random and expect a good read — his output was very uneven.)
Danvers has also written another anarchist sci-fi novel, The Watch (2003), a time travel novel set in Richmond, Virginia, featuring Peter Kropotkin as the primary character. It provides an accurate portrayal of Kropotkin and his ideas, but isn’t particularly engaging, in part because Danvers presents Kropotkin (in line with his actual character) as quite saintly and unconflicted, which isn’t a great prescription for the primary character in a novel.
Cory Doctorow
Many of Doctorow’s other sci-fi works are also enjoyable reads. One I’d recommend is The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (2011). As well, his Boing Boing blog routinely has a lot of interesting stuff.
Omar El Akkad
Mick Farren
(These are Farren’s two best sci-fi novels, and the only two I’d unreservedly recommend.)
Harry Harrison
Robert Heinlein
Ursula Le Guin
Of Le Guin’s many other novels, the one I’d most recommend is The Lathe of Heaven (1971), which holds up well nearly half a century after it appeared.
Ken Macleod
The first four novels are set in the same universe, but are not parts of a series. The next three are a loose trilogy.
Paul J. McAuley
Antiauthoritarian but not anarchist, these two novels comprise McAuley’s “Quiet War” series. They’re set in the medium-distant future following ecological collapse on Earth, and concern the brutal aggression of the authoritarian empires that emerged from the chaos against the in-some-ways anarchistic “Outers” who have colonized the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. There are two later novels set in the same universe, In the Mouth of the Whale (2012) and Evening’s Empires (2013). These are largely stand-alone novels. In the Mouth of the Whale is best avoided (very slow reading), but Evening’s Empires is a pretty decent apolitical quest/revenge tale.
Many of McAuley’s other science fiction novels are worth reading. Two that come to mind are Pasquale’s Angel and White Devils.
Morgan’s most recent sci-fi novel, Thin Air (2018), is worth a read. It’s less political than the Altered Carbon series, though its tone is similar.
Claire North
Nicholas P. Oakley
Eliot Peper
Marge Piercy
Mike Resnick
The “Revelation Space” novels comprise a fairly loose series set on and around a far future world featuring direct electronic democracy, human-machine integration, uplifted animals, class stratification, and orbiting habitats with a vast array of social structures. All of the books in the series work as stand-alone novels.
One of the sequels, The Prefect (2007), is worth reading sheerly for its entertainment value, as is the recent Elysium Fire (2018). It features the same cast of characters as The Prefect, and is a tightly written tale of murder, mystery, and revenge.
A number of readers have suggested including Robinson’s Mars Trilogy novels here (Red Mars [1992]; Green Mars [1993]; Blue Mars [1996]). I haven’t done so simply because this is a list of anarchist and anarchist-related novels that I would recommend, and I’m not a fan of those books. The two Robinson novels I would recommend (neither related to anarchism) are Galileo’s Dream (2009) and Aurora (2015). Those interested in possible political developments in China might also want to check out his Red Moon (2018).
The “ware” books comprise a very funny short tetralogy (written before the average sci-fi novel bloated to 700 pages) set in part against the backdrop of a sympathetically portrayed anarchist mechanoid society on the moon. The first two books in particular are gems.
Rucker is also a great short story writer: many of his tales are both mind-bogglingly strange and brimming with laugh-out-loud, sometimes-crude humor. His Complete Stories (2012) runs to over a thousand pages, and perhaps his two best non-“ware” humorous novels (it’s hard to pick) are The Sex Sphere (1983) and Master of Space and Time (1984).
C.J. Sansom
Norman Spinrad
Many of Spinrad’s other antiauthoritarian sci-fi novels, such as Greenhouse Summer (1999) and He Walked Among Us (2009), both of which concern the ecological crisis, are also worth reading, as is his recent oft-times humorous political genre bender (sci-fi/fantasy) The People’s Police (2017). Getting somewhat away from sci-fi, Mind Game (1980) is Spinrad’s insightful treatment of a barely disguised Church of Scientology, and probably the best novel about cults ever written.
Charles Stross
Stross’s work is antiauthoritarian, though anarchism is treated overtly only in Neptune’s Brood. Almost all of his other books, particularly Halting State (2007), Rule 34 (2011), and nearly all of the Laundry Files novels are excellent reads.
Of the Strugatskys’ many other sci-fi novels, the two I’d most recommend are their two most popular: Roadside Picnic (1971) and Hard To Be a God (1964). Both are more coherent and much more entertaining than the two novels listed above, which are primarily of political interest. (I’d recommend the older translations of both books: the recent translations read poorly due almost certainly to excessive literalism. The older versions of the Strugatsky’s works read much more smoothly than the newer, too literal translations, and are much more enjoyable.)
The quality of Turner’s science fiction novels (he was also a literary novelist) was uneven, but mostly good and sometimes great. Drowning Towers and Brain Child are by far his best books. His final two sci-fi novels, Genetic Soldier (1994) and Down There in Darkness (1999) are decidedly subpar, with the latter being downright awful. (I suspect Turner’s publisher patched together fragments of an incomplete novel.) All of Turner’s other sci-fi novels (plus one short story collection, A Pursuit of Miracles [1990]) are well worth a read.
T.C. Weber
Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea
For those who’ve read and enjoyed The Illuminatus Trilogy, I’d also recommend Wilson’s Schroedinger’s Cat Trilogy (1979).
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Zeke Teflon, who compiled this list, is the author of Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia, which takes place in part in an anarchist community. He’s currently working on the sequel in his copious free time.
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