The Sam Gunn Omnibus by Ben Bova

Tor Books, 704 pp; $29.95 HBK (US RRP); ISBN 978-0765316172; pub. Feb 2007

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As the title suggests, the The Sam Gunn Omnibus is a fix-up novel that collects all of Ben Bova’s stories about the eponymous hero, written for and published in the US science fiction magazines of the late 1980s and early ’90s.

So, who is Sam Gunn? He’s the boom-bust entrepreneur incarnate, an embodiment of laissez faire capitalism in space exploration who names spaceships after free-market economists and sees a profit in every problem, large or small. He’s also a reincarnated Huck Finn in a space suit; a tireless braggart and womaniser; the natural enemy of rules, regulations and corporate methodology. If it wasn’t for his redeeming habit of helping out his friends en route to his next pile of riches, you’d have to hate him on principle – and most people already do.

And that’s as far as it goes for character development. Gunn is an avatar, a plot device through which Bova explores and exploits the solar system using scientifically plausible methods that governments and corporations have so far refused to use, for various reasons. As such, these tales of the first businesses, hotels and habitats in orbit should be hugely relevant in this era of nascent space tourism operations, inspiring grandiose dreams of a brighter bolder future for our species.

And they might still have been, if the stage wasn’t hogged by the overbearing and improbable Gunn. The other characters are no better - a roster of crude geopolitical stereotypes and caricatures - and it is probably the attitudes implicit in these characterisations that most clearly date these stories as relics of a bygone era. The life of Sam Gunn reads like an apologia for greed and misogyny, and even readers sympathetic with Bova’s yearnings for the human race to escape the gravity well may find themselves tiring of the same successful-underdog plot continually reiterated against a slightly different backdrop.

Perhaps I’ve just missed the point, even though Bova’s introduction suggests that there is no point to miss. As pure escapist wish-fulfilment, the Omnibus succeeds, but the reader in search of true sensawunda may wish to search elsewhere.

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[This review was originally published in Interzone some time early in 2007; the precise issue number currently escapes me. It is offered in lieu of more substantial and original content during this particularly busy week.]

(a.k.a. “We like it when statistical analysis results in us receiving serendipitous recommendations for books by people we know and like”.)

Congratulations, Farah!

[ Having heard a good chunk of Farah's proposed taxonomy via Brian Stableford at last year's Masterclass, I can say with certainty that this will be a book well worth reading for anyone who likes to dissassemble their reading matter and find out what makes it tick. So maybe you should order a copy, hmm? ]

I expect many of you will have already noticed that the guys at SF Signal were short of more erudite commentators, and hence decided to ask me to contribute to their new “Mind Meld” feature. The question was:

“From your point of view, how has the proliferation of online book reviews affected the publishing world?”

The responses are very interesting, actually - quite harmonious in many respects, though with everyone playing their own little melodic riffs on the theme. Go take a look, leave some comments over there.

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While we’re on the subject of the effect of the web on genre fiction, here’s an intriguing thinking-out-loud post from Jeremiah Tolbert, who’s wondering where he should be submitting to build up his short fiction career:

“For a while, I decided that I would only submit my work to places that would take electronic submissions. I was making so little off of the sales that I did make that it wasn’t worth the cost of postage and envelopes. I haven’t decided whether I should change that policy yet or not, honestly. So many ‘zines do take electronic submissions now. Which don’t? F&SF, Asimov’s, and Analog. The so-called “Big Three.”

I’m kind of curious to see if I can build a reputation for myself without appearing in those markets. They don’t pay that much better than anyone else, and their circulation isn’t spectacular (although it may be better than just about everyone except Escape Pod). It’s kind of weird, but for the purposes of building an audience, I think making reprint sales to Escape Pod might be the best thing I can do for myself.

That’s a very weird situation, and really represents the state of the industry.”

The man has a point. Your thoughts?

Well, the Readercon panel on book reviews seems to have generated a lot of dicussion around the issue … kind of the inverse of the Eastercon panel, which took place after the worst of the smoke had cleared from that particular salvo.

But here’s the inestimable Paul Kincaid, hitting the nail on the head and describing my own standpoint on how and why I review books almost exactly:

“My own credo is simple. A review should be honest (any reviewer who allows her opinion to be swayed by friendship, bribery, peer pressure or whatever, is not worth reading), defensible (I don’t mind if people disagree with my judgement, I am quite used to being the only critic to hold a certain position, pro or con, on any particular book, but I want to be sure the readers can see why I reached that particular judgement), and, so far as I am able, well written (a review is also an entertainment, the reader should be rewarded for taking the time to read the piece). This credo, it should be noted, is an aspiration; I have no idea how close I ever get to achieving it.

Notice I say nothing about reviews being good or bad, positive or negative. It is part of the honesty of a review that if you don’t think a book is any good you have to say so. It is also part of the honesty of a review to recognise that very very few books are entirely wonderful or entirely terrible, and the job of a reviewer is to identify and note that balance. Because of that I do not believe I write positive reviews, or negative reviews – but I hope I write honest reviews.”

Result. Paul Kincaid is one of my newly-inherited reviews team at Interzone, which - given his pedigree and experience - is quite bizarre, because by rights he should be the person editing me. Though I doubt he wants the administrative headaches that come with the post - another indicator of his native common sense!

He and I (and others) are keen to see what comes from Jonathan’s plans for Son of Scalpel, too. This debate - for better or for worse - probably has a good few years mileage in it yet.

Unless both he and I are very much mistaken, Warren Ellis has spotted a website that seems to be the start of a viral transreal marketing push for the forthcoming movie based on Alan Moore’s classic graphic novel, Watchmen.

The blurb on the otherwise unpopulated TheVeidtMethod.com frontpage looks almost word-for-word identical to some of the promotional materials featured in the original book.

Much as I did with V For Vendetta, I shall be avoiding this movie when it comes out - simply because it won’t be as good as the book, and I can’t be bothered to pay money for what I know will be a let-down.

Plenty of people will do, though - and will subsequently wail and gnash their teeth over Hollywood’s cheapening of something they loved. Martin McGrath has a message for those people, this part of which I particularly agreed with:

“The fan’s desire to see their favourite novels “faithfully” adapted is either (a) a sign of the failure of their imagination or (b) a sign of their general stupidity. It’s a cliché but, even in this era of WETA and ILM, the mind’s eye is still a more effective special effects generator than anything the cinema will produce – and that’s not just in terms of creating big spaceships and giant explosions – but in terms of creating mood and depth and emotional connection. Nothing is going to deliver the sensation you got from reading the book you love and watching an adaptation can only confuse your impressions of the story with its representation on the screen.”

Wise words. I think I’ll just reread the book.

Of course it’s a Clute review - look at the evidence:

“Inside the world of a Gibson novel, under the terrible Symmes sun that brands from within the skins we used to wear, readers and utterands tend to express a kind of meat-puppet digitalis, like marathon dancers unable to stop until the music kills them.”

One of a kind reviews one of a kind. I love the smell of genre in the morning.

It looks like Penguin are going to use cyberspace to promote the man who coined the phrase (but doesn’t like to talk about it), too. [Cheers, Ariel.]

“Dark Space” by Marianne de Pierres (Book 1 of The Sentients of Orion)

Orbit Books, May 2007; 432pp, UK PBK; ISBN-13: 978-1841494289

Reviewed by Paul Raven

WARNING: This critique can be considered to contain ’spoilers’.

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The strapline reads “Dark space is not really dark. Neither is it empty.” Twisting this to refer to the book itself, it’s half right: Dark Space is certainly not empty. It is, however, very dark. Unflinchingly so; it’s a complex and exciting novel, almost devoid of cheap sentiment and comfortable vindication. It’s not a cheerful read, but it is a very rewarding one.One of the established modes of science fiction is the story that asks “what if this carries on?” With Dark Space, de Pierres is performing a variation of that mode, which we might choose to describe as “what if this happened again?” Having created a world that draws heavily on the politics (and to some extent the language and other trappings) of the Italian city-states of the Renaissance, de Pierres is able to examine societies and interpersonal relationships from feminist and Marxist angles without seemingly having any particular axe to grind other than that of general progressiveness – though a more coherent agenda promises to reveal itself over the course of the series.

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If you want to read my entire critique of de Pierres’ “Dark Space”, you’ll need to pop over to T3A Space, of course. I know, I’m such a tease …

Charles Stross - The Jennifer Morgue - Golden Gryphon Press, November 2006 (US), ISBN 1930846452

Charles Stross is probably best known for his singularity-flavoured science fiction, exemplified by the fix-up novel Accelerando (which netted its author an award from the World Transhumanist Association, as well as nominations for more conventional sfnal plaudits). However, he’s unafraid to trek off into different pastures, as The Jennifer Morgue demonstrates - there are sf tropes, plus fantastic and Lovecraftian horror elements, all wrapped up in another genre tradition that Stross has openly expressed his affection for - the classic British spy thriller.

Naturally, Stross being Stross, there-s more than a soupcon of dry humour involved. So we have as our hero one Bob Howard, who is employed as a computer expert (read as “hacker”) by The Laundry, a branch of the British Secret Service devoted to keeping a lid on multidimensional manifestations.

You see, magic is just mathematics, which means that the age of ubiquitous computing has made it very easy for some naive or stupid coder to accidentally invoke a hungry daemon or vengeful demigod, simply by trying to number-crunch the wrong formula. To paraphrase Bob, he’s no necromancer himself, but “he does countermeasures”. Basically, he’s a clean-up artist.

Or at least he used to be - right up until his employers saddled him with some active duty fieldwork, psychically entangled him with a demonically-possessed mermaid-in-mufti, and dispatched him to the Caribbean with instructions to infiltrate the machinations of a megalomaniac corporate uber-villain, complete with gun-toting goons, an immense yacht-fortress and a foul-tempered fluffy white cat.

If that sounds a little obvious, it’s supposed to. In many ways, The Jennifer Morgue is a work of metafiction - a playful, knowing and openly self-confessed deconstruction of James Bond novel and movie plots, mocking them and revelling in them at the same time. Each supporting character is a gag or cliché in his or her own right; for example, Pinky and Brains, a pair of exceptionally camp and gadget-obsessed tech support operatives who furnish Bob with the requisite tools for the task.

And the gadgets themselves, of course; Bob doesn’t get given Bond’s Aston Martin and Walther PPK, but has to make do with a two-seater Smart car and a Treo smartphone that fires silver-jacketed exorcism rounds. Bob’s innate cynicism comes through in the first-person narration, which deflects the outright silliness of the ideas into the realm of tragic comedy and farce and avoids the snake-pit of superficial spoof.

But does it work? Stross chipped into a recent resurgence of internet-based debate regarding the perennial “decline and fall of the genre” meme. In a nutshell, he suggested that one way to grow sf’s readership might be to “pitch for the Slashdot generation”, to write explicitly for an audience of intelligent and geekish outsiders who should (by rights and tradition) be sf literature’s core audience - and would be, if there was more material that flicked the right switches for them.

The Jennifer Morgue seems to encapsulate this demographic targeting, with our hero Bob providing a sympathetic lead to identify with. He hates management, ties and PowerPoint presentations; he shops online for T-shirts emblazoned with internet in-jokes; he is the socially-stunted computer nerd at your office, thrust into an unfamiliar world of deadly intrigue and occult nastiness which he sets about to hack as if it were a defective operating system.

The Jennifer Morgue is a fun book. And it’s funny too, provided you either know the Bond clichés backwards or you�re a paid-up member of the geek-and-proud subculture - probably doubly funny, should you place at the intersection of those two sets. And therein lies the flaw: The Jennifer Morgue is somewhat exclusive, in that a lot of the in-jokes and post-modernist nudges will fly straight past the average bookstore browser.

However, as a naked pitch for the I.T. crowd whose lingua franca is one of irony, knowing pastiche and a lot of acronyms, it fits the bill perfectly. Only time will tell just how hungry that audience really is for long-form written fiction. But if Stross has surmised correctly, The Jennifer Morgue’s place in the padded laptop-bags of the techno-elite is already reserved.

[This review originally published in Vector #250; reproduced here with the kind permission of the editors.]

If you’ve been waiting for me to make a post about Second Life that genuinely intersects with the world of science fiction, your moment has just arrived.

3pointD reports that a gentleman who goes by the name Dalian Hansen in SL is due to release a novel set almost entirely in Second Life, Linden Labs’ virtual world. As they provide no link to the source (it was a personal tip-off, apparently), I shall snip Dalian’s description/synopsis from the 3pointD announcement:

“Ben Tao is the avatar of a fired programmer who hacks Second Life. His goal is to profit from a false intellectual property claim. However, instead of changing the creation date for the items he has stolen, he is actually sending them back in time to the creation of the 3D world. This software exploit opens a wormhole of conflicting realities that unfold in a disjointed nightmare. Ben quickly finds himself controlled by an entity who robs him of all free will. Or is he just going insane? As the digital and real worlds merge in his mental interchange, he uncovers a secret that affects all of humanity. From this bleak future, Ben has only one chance to escape.”

Well, nothing groundbreaking there, at least from an sf-nal storytelling angle. After all, cyberspace was named in ink-and-paper fiction way back in 1984 thanks to Bill Gibson, the concept was arguably being kicked around before that, and there’s been plenty of recent (and forthcoming) novels dealing with virtual worlds and MMOs.

What’s important is that this book is set in a real, extant metaverse platform - if that synopsis is to be believed, it explicitly names Second Life as the arena of action. Whether or not that will encourage people who might not have bothered with ’some sci-fi rubbish’ to read it remains to be seen … as does Linden Labs’ reaction to having what I assume is a trademark being used in such a way.

What also remains to be seen is whether it’s any good, in novelistic terms. A swift google of the name Dalian Hansen reveals that the man behind the avatar is “[a]n internationally award winning photographer based in Asia”, and an experienced virtual business boffin to boot … but that tells us nothing of whether or not he can write for toffee.

The 3pointD report quotes Hansen as saying that:

“… preview editions will be published as a prim book in SL and as a paperback available from CafePress.com, both due July 7, with a hardcover edition available on Amazon.com as of July 27 …”

It also makes the point that neither Amazon or Cafepress have a listing for the item in question as of yet (and hence is hesitant to report the news as a definite). So I think we can assume it’s a self-publishing job … but again, that doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be any good. I get the feeling that Hansen is the type who wants to lead with virtual business methods, so maybe it’s as much a proof-of-concept as anything else.

But there’s only one way to find out for certain, and that’s to go straight to the horse’s mouth. So I shall be attempting to get in touch with Av. Hansen in SL later tonight, to see if he’d like to talk about this further.

You may or may not have noticed that today’s Strange Horizons review of Extended Play: the Elastic Book of Music was written by me.

That’s my first piece for SH, and I’m very chuffed to see it there. It’s always a proud moment to see your work appear in a new venue, especially one as respected as Strange Horizons.

Coincidentally, it was probably one of the hardest reviews to write I’ve ever done, due to the wide range of story styles and genres included in the anthology. Let me know if you think I nailed it.