BOOKS - 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Having seemingly, and unconsciously, avoided sci fi novels since the death of Iain M. Banks, I found myself reading a work on which he seems to bear a significant influence on.

Another one, in fact.

In fact, I find myself thinking that the work is almost a prequel to Banks' "Culture" universe, with early forms of terraformed planets, terrarium spaceships with evocative names, and a form of AI that has developed well beyond Turing Test levels.

I'm probably a mile out with this assessment, but then again I'm hardly Clive James when it comes to criticism.

The story involves terraforming artist Swan being involved in an apparent accident on her adoptive home of Mercury when her city - which rolls around permanetly out of the scorching sun - suffers an apparent projectile strike that nearly claimed her life; and left her cancerous and wandering tunnels to survive in the company of a new acquaintance, the lanky Wahram, native of Saturn's moon Titan.

As she investigates the incident from one end of the solar system to the other, it becomes clear that the incident on Mercury was no accident, and only intelligences of the very highest order could have arranged the attack, but who? We also see her on Earth, attempting to re-introduce extinct animals to the North American landmass from "space ark" terraria to a flooded, struggling planet where most folk capable of doing so have long since left.

It is a far easier read than Banks' work, and although not possessing the incredible span of his imagination, it is easier to grasp the spaceborne society of the novel. It also acts as a fascinatingly deep study of sexuality and body modification; males and females as we know them are not the dominant genders with many people choosing to have the genitals of both, or neither. DNA from other species, both alien and not so, are also combined with human with varying degrees of taboo.

The world of 2312 is one where people can sing like birds, and have experience sex as a male and a female simultaneously.

John Wyndham - The Outward Urge

As a follow up to what I said of Asimov, and the similar "clunk-tech" sci fi writing of the 50s, I find myself writing about John Wayndham's - "The Outward Urge" - a novel essentially compirisng four novellas linked down through a family's timeline about how a putative conquest of space might work. It's another sci fi novel
I'm reading in my breaks to get myself away from the soul destroying work environment.

It is written in collaboration with a proper scientist of the time (says the blurb, although the Lucas Parkes mentioned turns out to be a pseudonym for Wyndham himself for stylistic reasons) and purports to be a serious exploration of how the nuts and bolts, and politics, of space exploration might develop through time, seen through the eyes of Britain in 1959.

"Don't expect another Day of the Triffids" warns the back cover write up, and indeed, nothing could be further from the walking plants action stingathon of that classic work. This book is a dry as dust, stiff upper lip hard sci fi work, a work of girders and inflatable domes, grind, toil, and cold war missiles.

It is a hard read. Not because of anything technical, or high concept language or anything like that, but because frankly it is so very boring. The characters are cardboard cut outs of heroic english conventionality given to the gin and pipe smoking cliches of the time, the peril isn't very exciting; and the book seems to read like a less imaginative version of Arthur C. Clarke early works written ten years earlier.

But it isn't just the writing style that's the problem. The idea that Britain would be building massive space stations in the 90s, and later landing on the moon in competition with the Russians and the Americans, must have seemed ludicrous, if patriotic, even in the late 1950s as Sputnik and Explorer were already bleeping their way through near space. The idea that space would be used essentially as a launch site for nukes might have reflected the worries of the time, but the missiles themselves, which as described sound like space borne steam engines, seem like something from Verne and a bit low tech even for HG Wells.

I wish us Brits were up there in Space, but this far fetched piece of speculation must have seemed so dated even then. It also goes to prove that what I said about living the low tech imagination of 50s sci fi, does not always hold true!