Transition

Things have been a bit quiet here on the Stuff By Dan front; it's been an absurdly busy month (with another absurd month or two ahead), and the latest book I have read has those badly-sized chapters that mean I have a choice of about 5-10 minutes of reading, or 40 minute of reading. For me, 20 minutes is about the ideal chapter length, since it means I get a fair bit read each evening before bed, but not so much that I'm awake all night reading, or falling asleep before the chapter ends.

Also, I was reading two books simultaneously. But more on that in the next post.

I've just finished Transition, by Iain Banks (oddly, not Iain M Banks). It's that very difficult breed of novel, a Multiverse novel.

A big problem with science fiction is making all the worlds your characters visit feel like real, and distinct worlds. It's why I avoid running space opera roleplaying games; I never feel it's really possibly to evoke the sense of a real world when it's a different planet you're visiting every session. Multiverses are even harder, as it's a different world in a different universe that is being visited. Banks, on the other hand, is a masterful world builder, so he can get away with these sorts of shenanigans.

Transition gets around this by having the transitions between universes being only possible between similar universes; in fact, the characters can only transition into bodies and minds similar to their own; and it's only their mind that transitions. It's often hard to tell which universe any particular part of the story is taking place in; our Earth is frequently visited, as is Calbefraques, the version of Earth where the ability to transition was discovered. Each different version of Earth has branched from ours at some time in the past, and there are infinities of possible earths between each of these universes, corresponding, presumably, to every branching possible outcome of every event in the Earth's history.

Once you get past the very Science Fictional setting, the story is more a spy thriller than a Sci Fi novel. The main protagonist, Temudjin Oh, is a Transitionary, one of the rare breed who can transition between Universes. He is an agent for l'Expedience, aka. The Concern, and organisation based on Calbefraques, which has the duty of sending its Transitionaries to different realities, and making butterfly-effect changes to a single person's life that end up changing that world in a big way. Things naturally get more complicated as conspiracies are unveiled and motives revealed, and it marches to an exciting, if somewhat small-scale, conclusion.

I'm yet to find a Banks novel that I'm disappointed by when I get to the end. Admittedly, I wasn't able to really start reading Feersum Endjinn, but the others are great. Transition never feels quite on the scale of Banks' other Science Fiction; novels like The Algebraist and his Culture novels overwhelm the imagination with the sheer scale of things. No-one can write an interstellar war like Banks. Transition is smaller, more personal, and deals with the intrigues between a small group of people who know each other quite well.

So, it's worth a read, but if you haven't read Banks, I'd start somewhere else in his corpus.

Should be watched...

Gotta love logic

This evening Atty decided he was scared of his skeleton pajamas, since they might attract skeleton ghosts. I informed him that his dogs (he has a small army of plush dogs) would protect him. It reminded me of a similar incident with Dante a while back.

"Daddy, I can't sleep - I'm scared of ghosts"
"D, you know that there's no such thing as ghosts - they're not real"
"But I'm scared of them"
"Don't worry, Brown Bear and your other bears will protect you" (Where Atty has dogs, Dante has bears)
"But they're just toys, Daddy, they're not real"
"That's OK, ghosts aren't real either, which means that your bears can protect you against them"

Dante thinks for a moment, and nods, satisfied, and lies down to go to sleep. Gotta love a kids that's willing to accept logical arguments.

The New Space Opera

The New Space Opera is a collection of short stories by a range of authors, showing the breadth and depth of writing that falls into the "New Space Opera" sub-genre.

It's something I realise I've been reading a lot of in recent years. It's Space Opera, but written in the wake of the Information Revolution; which has transformed how Sci Fi writers envision the future. Notably missing from this collection are two of my favourite authors, Stross and Banks.

There are some great stories in this collection; some will stick with me for ages, and some are the kind where I'll forget the story, but the ideas will be integrated into my brain, and I'll probably read them in the future and wonder why the technologies all seem so familiar.

Some of the high points: Dan Simmons' Muse of Fire melted my brain; Walter Jon Williams' Send them Flowers felt like a Beat Generation road trip in a parallel universe; Alastair Reynolds' Minya's Flowers was food for thought. Note for further investigation: do all good modern Sci Fi authors have names ending in 's'?

So the future is going to be dark and mysterious and complex and textured. We may be the only civilization we ever meet, but otherwise we'll be a minor player in the vast and incomprehensible game of galactic politics. Physics is Einsteinian, but wormholes or a Many Worlds universe may let us get around that to travel the greater universe freely.

I got a lot out of The New Space Opera, even though I don't think it's necessarily the best that the genre has to offer. A lot of the tales in this compilation were really bursting at the seams of the short story format, and were clearly aching to be filled out to novel length, so that the strong characters and huge ideas has space to stretch their legs.

The Tent

The Tent, by Margaret Atwood, is a delight to read. Thirty or forty short stories - some not even stories; merely thoughts a couple of pages in length, hints and suggestions of larger stories and issues. The blurb on the back cover calls them "fictional essays", which doesn't seem quite right.

To be honest, it felt like a Dr Seuss book for grown-ups. There was the same delight in language, the twisted-about twirling dance of words, but much darker, more solemn and filled with the sadnesses and mysteries and compromises of adulthood.

The only other book of Atwood's I've read is Oryx and Crake, which is an amazing piece of science fiction*, and one that mesmerized me.

I must read more of her books; The Blind Assassin and The Handmaid's Tale are sitting on my shelves, waiting patiently.

* she claims it isn't science fiction, since the science in it is merely an extrapolation of current trends in science. Genius though she is, she's completely wrong there, confusing "Science Fiction" with "Fictional Science".

The Steep Approach to Garbadale

Iain Banks (aka. Iain M. Banks) never fails to impress. I started reading his Sci Fi a few years ago when someone said "you should read these Banks' Culture novels - they'd be your sort of thing", and whoever that kind recommender was, was exactly right. I had kind of gone off reading actual Science Fiction for a few years there, concentrating my efforts on History, Horror, and Fantasy, and Banks (and then Stross) dragged me back into the fold.

Banks writes two kinds of books, different enough that he has the slightly different pen names, with and without the M. His Science Fiction, under Iain M Banks, is mind-blisteringly* broad in scope. As I've said before, I've got a background in Math and Science, and bad Science in Sci Fi irritates me. I'm happy with logical science and different laws of physics based on currently-undiscovered scientific principles; but random laws of physics that aren't consistently applied, or stupid applications of real laws irk me. Banks is one of those authors whose physics is spot on.

But that is an aside. The Steep Approach to Garbadale isn't one of his science fiction books. It's the other kind - the well-written fiction novel. A lot of these books steer of at least a little into the fantastical of horrific, but this is a novel clearly set in our world, with real and flawed characters, and reflects on the politics of our time - or at least, our time two years ago; it sits solidly in the Bush era, and the characters reflect on and rail against US imperialism. I found it quite gripping, and on occasions hard to put down. It's a little more normal for me to not put a book down because a stupendously powerful star cruiser is about to chop up an Orbital with billions of people living on it; not being able to put down a book because Alban was about to go fishing with his cousin Sophie and oh my goodness what will transpire between them! was an unusual and pleasant feeling.

So, it's a definite worth-reading book. My problem now is that I can never quite remember which of my Banks non-sci-fi I've read and which I haven't. I've started reading one before on at least one occasion only to discover that I'd red it before. I'll have to go and work it out.

* Oddly enough, my spell-checker is happy with mind-blisteringly, but has an problem with recommender.

Singularity Sky

Singularity Sky, by Charles Stross, is the kind of book that reminds me why I read science fiction. It actually comes before Iron Sunrise, which was the first Stross book I read, and was the one that made me decide to read all his books (not there yet, but well on my way).

The setting is some time after the Singularity, when an artificial super-intelligence has scattered humanity over several thousands of light years, and the various outposts of humanity have settled on various levels of technology, depending on whether they have embraced or rejected technology.

It's a big ol' space opera, a couple of people from Earth are working in/for a backward totalitarian empire, and get involved when that empire ends up fighting a very high-tech invader. The people are well done, though some tend towards caricature. The culture clashes between the various groups are very nicely done; the technology is mind-blowing.

This one is a definite recommended read if you like your science fiction. One of the books I'll recommend down the years, and read again at some point in the future (unless Stross keeps up his current prolific rate of writing, in which case I'll just try keeping up with him).