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Aurealis #47 (February 2012) – review

Issue #47 is the latest in the new, electronic incarnation of the Aurealis magazine. This month is the first instalment since the “reboot” that has a price tag attached to it, but at $2.99 I don’t think anyone will be complaining.

There were two stories in this edition. The Sacrifice by Jenny Blackford harkens back to a retelling of ancient Greek myth, focusing on the escape of Jason (of Jason and the Argonauts fame) from Kolkhis. The story is mostly told from the point of view of Medea, the virginal princess that helps Jason escape from her father. The introduction tells the main part of the story – the willingness of Medea to (somewhat brutally) sacrifice her young brother to help Jason escape. The story was well written and an enjoyable read. I would have hated to live in ancient Greece – the gods just couldn’t leave people alone! Having said that, in this instance the gods merely fanned the flames of infatuation – it took a human being to think of a truly horrific course of action to escape a seemingly impossible situation, and use love to justify it all.

The second story was Breaking the Wire by Jason Nahrung. I quite enjoy Mr Nahrung’s tales of outback horror – his Smoking, Waiting for the Dawn was one of my favourite tales told in the now sadly defunct Terra Incognita Speculative Fiction podcast. Breaking the Wire didn’t disappoint, a tale that takes that age old practice of farmers maintaining their fence lines and adds a werewolf twist to it all. I loved the characters and the atmosphere was fantastically built. As has been my previous experience, I was left wishing there was something by Mr Nahrung set in the same kind of world but in a longer format. But speaking of Mr Nahrung and longer form work, I see that he has a book coming out soon from Twelfth Planet Press. Look forward to that as well.

As well as Carissa’s Weblog providing a round up of some of the more interesting articles around on the web in the area of Australian speculative fiction, this month’s edition also contained an editorial pondering the question of whether speculative fiction readers really are more tech savvy than the rest of the reading population. There was also a very interesting piece on the use of the multi-book series by speculative fiction writers by Crisetta MacLeod.

I’m enjoying the stories in Aurealis. I also receive the monthly email update, in which I won a book last month, so I certainly can’t complain about that. Next edition will include The Descent of Traag by Matt Bissett-Johnson and Thirty Minutes for New Hell by Rick Kennett.

This work by Mark Webb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License.

Asimov’s Science Fiction – February 2012 – review

Murder Born by Robert Reed was the novella length story in this month’s edition. It had an interesting premise – someone invents a device that instantaneously executes a condemned murderer by completely erasing them at the subatomic level. As an unanticipated side effect, when the device is used the victims of the executionee instantaneously come back to life.

At first I didn’t think I was going to like this story (from the introduction I thought it was going to be a bit preachy), but then suddenly I found myself still awake at 1:00 in the morning desperately ignoring the part of my brain telling me I was going to pay at work the next day, just so I could finish it off. I liked the writing style, and the plot really held me through to the end.

The Voodoo Project by Kristine Kathryn Rusch was another story I quite enjoyed in this issue. I thought Ms Rusch did a great job of sketching out the shadowy world of Rebekah, an operative for some kind of clandestine organisation who has the ability to see the future and the past, as well as the present. Sufficient detail was provided to give a good sense of ambience for such a short story. I also thought the character’s voice was strong and consistent.

I also enjoyed The People of Pele by Ken Liu, which described the reality for interstellar colonists isolated from Earth by relativity and the inability to travel faster than the speed of light. Strong writing and a hopeful message.

This month also had stories by:

Hive Mind Man by Rudy Rucker & Eileen Gunn
Observations on a Clock by D. Thomas Minton
Going Home by Bruce McAllister & Barry Malzberg

And poetry by:

Submicro-Text Message 3V45129XZ: To My A.I. Valentine by Kendall Evans and David C. Kopaska
future history by Joe Haldeman
The Atom’s Lattice Could Such Beauty Yield by William John Watkins

This work by Mark Webb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License.

Asimov’s Science Fiction – January 2012 – review

The novella in this month’s edition, In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns by Elizabeth Bear is a police procedural at its core, with Police Sub-Inspector Ferron investigating a baffling murder in India. Ms Bear describes an interesting future world where ubiquitous high speed connectiveness has lead to a very distributed workforce, where people in certain types of jobs (like police detectives) don’t gather in a physical location but connect to their workplace entirely virtually. It is a world of environmental damage and power shortages which make physical travel more difficult, but enhanced communications technology and wearable computing makes the virtual world much richer.

I admired the skill with which this (slightly concerning) world was brought to life. The main character, Ferron, was very relatable. The main plot device was serviceable and held the story together well.

I thought the concept of a “socweb score” (where you can see how effective in social situations everyone around you is) was an interesting part of Friendlessness by Eric Del Carlo. Perhaps something like that is the natural end point with the modern obsession with social media. Professional friends for the rich was an interesting consequence for such a trend. The ability to “see” these scores in real time was interesting given the recent news of Google’s upcoming Google Goggles – perhaps people knowing electronically how anti-social I am is closer than I think…

Also in this month’s edition was:

Bruce Springsteen by Paul McAuley
Recyclable Material by Katherine Marzinsky
Maiden Voyage by Jack McDevitt
The War is Over and Everyone Wins by Zachary Jernigan
The Burst by C. W. Johnson
Train Delays on the South Central Line by Fiona Moore
Seeing Oneself by Robert Frazier

This work by Mark Webb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License.

The Silver Wind by Nina Allan – review

This is not a book I would have come across myself. I read it as a result of it being the subject of one of my favourite podcasts, The Writer and the Critic, this month (February 2012). And my experience of reading it reinforces my belief in the benefits of stretching my reading circle – it was fantastic.

I try not to put spoilers in my reviews, and this review is no exception. However, I would say that reading this book completely fresh with no pre-conceptions at all was a very intriguing experience (I didn’t even read the back cover). I would recommend approaching the collection in that kind of innocent state, and even the brief descriptions I give here might be considered too much. Consider yourself warned!

There are four connected longer stories in the collection, followed by a shorter fifth story in the form of an afterword. The collection is based around an extremely interesting central idea of time and time travel. It explores this theme in lots of different forms, from timepieces (watches, clocks etc) through to different time streams and alternate realities.

In the first story in the collection, Time’s Chariot, we meet Martin Newland, a young man coping with the loss of a loved one and the depressingly slow disintegration of his family. There are almost no fantastical elements to this short story at all – it explores characters, renders geography beautifully and has a fantastic feel to the way Martin’s passion for time and watch making is ignited, but there isn’t anything I could really call strongly supernatural. But I almost came to think of this story as a control story – the “normal” one that I would compare the increasingly strange events throughout the rest of the collection to.

The second story, My Brother’s Keeper, slowly reveals to also be from Martin Newland’s perspective, but this is a younger Newland in an entirely different setting. Details of the world are different and there is a much stronger supernatural element, with ghosts and seeming magic abounding, all seen through the accepting eyes of the child version of Martin. Characters have the same names as the original story but have radically different relationships. Reading the first two stories back to back gives a sense of disconnection, of drifting away from the “real” world to somewhere more fantastic.

In the third story, The Silver Wind, Martin Newland again narrates for us, but this time in an older incarnation (still relatively young). The world is recognisably different, and I got more of a science fiction feel from it as we start to get a more scientific alternate universe explanations to describe the differences. Character relationships have again changed, with former siblings now friends, some characters dead, new characters introduced.

In the fourth story, Rewind, the narration splits between Martin again (this time a much older version) and Miranda, his tentative love interest. In this story, the reader has the benefit of knowledge gained from the first three stories and the story has almost the feel of a mystery or puzzle, as you wait for the characters to start putting the pieces together.

Jumping around not only between different alternate realities, but also to different stages of life of the different incarnations of Martin (from boy to middle aged man) also gave a better rounded sense of the core of the character (even though it was a slightly different version of Martin each time). This was true to a lesser extent to the other characters as well. It allowed the exploration of different facets of the characters, allowing you to see the answer to the question “if the circumstances of their life was different, in what ways would a person be different and what would remain the same”

While the four stories so far are mostly told from Martin Newland’s point of view, another character threads his way through all the stories – a somewhat mysterious genius dwarf named Andrew Owens (or Owen Andrews or the Circus Man) who seems to have much more knowledge than the other characters and seems to understand, at least partially, what is going on and how to navigate these alternate realities.

The fifth story, Timelines: An Afterword, was interesting. It was not told from Martin Newland’s point of view, indeed Martin does not show up at all. It seemed to be almost a meta story, with a slightly autobiographical feel as a writer navigates her own family issues and begins to envision a character, Andrew – a brilliant physicist about to make a startling discovery about time. The last part tells the beginning of Andrew’s story, a loop around to perhaps the events that kick off the other stories.

I had an interesting reaction to this last story. When I was a kid I loved the Narnia books and started, as I’m sure most people did, with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and went on to read the later books in the series. It wasn’t until a long time later when someone bought me a complete set of the books that I realised that there was a prequel, The Magician’s Nephew, that set the scene for the books that followed but used different characters to the ones I was used to reading about. Placing Timelines as an afterword and breaking from the convention of using Martin as the protagonist gave me that same sense of looping back to the beginning of something I had thought complete.

I don’t think I would have got anywhere near the same experience from reading the stories separately. I found the most impact from the interplay between the stories, from comparing the details of the different realities and the different characters. They worked beautifully as a set, but interestingly I don’t think I would have given any of the individual stories on their own anywhere near as much praise. There is very little in the way of plot in each story, the concerns being explored are generally very personal to the characters. This kind of character driven/no plot doesn’t always appeal to me. However, I felt there was a meta-plot holding all the stories together, which made this book work very powerfully as a collection.

I found the writing style to be simple but powerful – grounded story telling that still left the reader enough space to try to piece together the differences in the worlds without having everything explained to the nth degree. I loved the description of timepieces throughout the stories – I’ve always found mechanical watches fascinating (although ironically I don’t actually wear a watch).

I wasn’t able to find an electronic copy of this book, so I ordered a paper copy online (I know – very early 2000s of me). I must say the cover is beautiful and the book very well laid out.

Overall, I unexpectedly loved this collection and would recommend it strongly. Also, now I can listen to this month’s edition of The Writer and the Critic, so I’m doubly glad to be done!

I also reviewed this book on Goodreads. View all my reviews.

This work by Mark Webb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License.

Article news – NSW Writer’s Centre 366 Days of Writing blog

To celebrate the National Year of Reading in 2012, the NSW Writer’s Centre is running an initiative to have members review 366 Australian texts, one for each day of the year. It is called the 366 Days of Writing initiative.

I recently submitted a cut down version of my original review of Power and Majesty by Tansy Rayner Roberts, which was accepted and put online as the Sunday 19th February 2012 review.

Cool.

Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat by Andrez Bergen – review

Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat by Andrez Bergen is a post-apocalypse, noir novel set in a dystopian future Melbourne, Australia. Some kind of environmental disaster has rendered most of the world uninhabitable and somehow Melbourne is the only remaining city on Earth. Why Melbourne has been spared is never fully documented, but as a result there are nearly 20,000,000 people living in a world of acid rain, food shortages and general misery (except for those lucky (read rich) few that live in “The Dome”, a sealed, climate controlled space covering the middle of the old CBD).

Floyd is a Seeker, a man forced by circumstance and enormous hospital bills for his dying wife to chase down “Deviants” and send them for Relocation. While Seekers are authorised to kill Deviants if necessary, he has managed to avoid doing so for most of his career. As the novel opens we find out that Floyd’s death-free record has come to an end, and the guilt is driving him down a self destructive road (with mild amnesia thrown in). The novel chronicles an increasingly complex series of encounters as Floyd tries to remember why he killed the Deviant and deal with an increasingly hysterical public pressure to do something about the Deviant threat once and for all.

It is an interesting premise to the book and I liked the setting. The slowly crumbling infrastructure of a decaying outer Melbourne surrounding a pristine CBD where the tram just runs back and forth between a few inner city stops for the convenience of the uber-wealthy was well described and realised. I was interested in how you could sustain a city that large (current Melbourne infrastructure would struggle with such a big influx of people) when the rest of the world doesn’t exist anymore (food production etc), which is never really explained but there are some hints through the book that perhaps the outside world isn’t exactly how Floyd thinks it is.

Mr Bergen explores some topical ideas around the use of media manipulation to twist public perceptions to gain political advantage, with comment on everything from the impact of tight editing on what the public ends up seeing through to the use of “Cops” style reality TV shows to shape world view.

The novel goes for a Bladerunner style vibe – hard boiled detective/private investigator in a harsh, urban future. The constant presence of rain also adds to this effect. Floyd is a film buff, and the story is peppered with references to specific films and using those references to help frame the story and setting. As someone only vaguely familiar with the films discussed, I found those passages that relied heavily on the references a little difficult to follow. However, I suspect someone more intimately knowledgable about the noir film genre would really enjoy that aspect of the book.

It took me a while to get through the novel, with quite a few stops and starts over the last couple of weeks. With some dream like sequences (the Seeker organisation have a virtual reality style testing ground), there were a few abrupt transitions that through me off track a little. There were a few excellent sections of the book, but sometimes they didn’t seem to gel together very well. I’ve read in a few places that as a new author you should try and cut at least 10% out of your first draft to really tighten up the pace of the story. The novel could have done with some of that style of reduction through the editing process I think – some of the sections repeated ideas and concepts that had already been gotten across earlier in the book.

Floyd was depicted as a man letting his life slide out of control and that came over well. However, his motivations swung quite widely chapter to chapter and I found that this, along with some of the dialog, lent an air of incoherence that I couldn’t quite get into.

I loved the aesthetic of the artwork and chapter layout. It lent an art-deco style feel to the work which seemed very in line with the atmosphere the author was going for.

I came across this book when the author sent me an electronic copy version via email. It was free, but if you go to the publishers website (Another Sky Press) you see that anyone is able to get an electronic copy for free. They work on a “neo-patronage” model, where they provide books at cost (physical) or for free (electronic) and then ask readers to donate to the author if they like the book. An interesting model, will be interesting to see if they can sustain it. I suspect that this model requires authors to do a lot of their own promotion (hence the email from Mr Bergen), but then again authors are being asked to do that a lot now anyway!

Overall, I think this was an interesting premise reasonably executed with perhaps some tightening up required during the editing phase. But here is the real test – did I actually donate any money to the author once I’d finished the book? I’m pleased to say that I did become a neo-patron this morning. I certainly felt I was entertained enough to pay at least the same kind of money I pay for a lot of Kindle books on Amazon.

I also reviewed this book on Goodreads. View all my reviews.

This work by Mark Webb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License.

Outland – review

I caught the first episode of the new Australian series Outland on the ABC during the week. I’ve been hearing a bit about it in various podcasts and websites for a little while now, so I was keen to check it out.

The premise is that a small group of gay science fiction fans split off from their local club after a somewhat dramatic sounding confrontation (which happens off camera but apparently involved setting someone accidentally on fire, amongst other things). At the same time Max, who has missed the meeting to go on a date, is desperately trying to hide his science fiction shame from his date, Dylan.

Dylan comes up to Max’s apartment for coffee just as the ejected members of the club converge on it to have a showing of a rare 1960s show.

I normally take a few episodes to get into a show, but this was absolutely hilarious from the word go. Minor references to science fiction lore and trivia pepper the show. The characters are funny, the dialog smart and the acting excellent. I usually comment on TV shows in series blocks and I will write a better review once the series is finished, but I wanted to post on this show early on so that if anyone is reading and is a fan of science fiction, they start watching sooner rather than later.

For Australian readers, the first episode is currently up on iView. It airs at 8:30pm on Wednesday nights on ABC1, or 10:30 Thursday on ABC2.

Aurealis #46 (November 2011) – review

Issue #46 represents the latest in the new, electronic incarnation of the Aurealis magazine.

There were two stories in this edition. The first was Heaven and Earth by Greg Mellor, which uses the connection between two star crossed lovers as a thread to hold together a story documenting the evolution of the human race into a digital, perfectly connected society. I found it hard to get into the story, picking it up and putting it down quite a few times. Some of the imagery was beautifully rendered though and it was an interesting investigation of the topic of this kind of evolutionary convergence.

Love Death by Andrew J McKiernan explores the impact on a relationship where one of the participants dies but necromancy is a real option. A solid story without being spectacular.

Along with the fiction there is an interesting interview with author Felicity Pulman and an editorial on the rise of self-publishing in an electronic market. Carissa’s Weblog provides a good round up of some of the more interesting articles around on the web in the area of Australian speculative fiction.

Aurealis are also actively seeking feedback on their issues, which I think is a good idea I don’t see many magazines doing. There is an online survey for those that have read issue #46.

Now, Aurealis is still free so you can’t really complain about the price. An excellent way of keeping across the Australian speculative scene. I notice the next edition has a story by Jason Nahrung, who is an author whose work I’ve enjoyed when I come across it (Anywhere But Earth anthology and the Terra Incognita Speculative Fiction website most recently).

Analog – January/February 2012 – review

The January/February 2012 edition of Analog is one of their special double editions.

A new serialised story was started in this edition, Triggers by Robert J. Sawyer. The premise is interesting enough – a chance event causes a set of people in a hospital to suddenly gain access to the ongoing memories of another person. One of the people impacted is the President of the United States. The story is competently executed, but as you’d imagine this first instalment is mostly set up. I’ll probably save making any review comments until the entire story is completed.

I enjoyed the style of Ninety Thousand Horses by Sean McMullen, with its steampunk sensibility and an interesting protagonist.

Project Herakles by Stephen Baxter is one of the novellas in this edition. It tells the story of an alternate history 1960s United Kingdom where a newspaper magnate orchestrates a coup. There are also slightly infeasible giants involved. Interesting premise and the writing is good, but I couldn’t seem to willingly suspend my disbelief on the giants for long enough to really get into the story.

Doctor Alien and the Spindles of Infinity by Rajnar Vajra was the other novella. I enjoyed the core story, but there were a couple of info dumping sections that I found a little distracting. Otherwise a reasonable read.

Both novellas were stories that followed on from previously published stories in Analog. Readers who have read the previous stories might get more from this issue.

Also in this month’s edition was:

Humanity by Proxy by Mark Niemann-Ross
An Interstellar Incident by Catherine Shaffer
Listen Up, Nitwits by Jack McDevitt
Faster than a Speeding Photon by Edward M. Lerner
Return of the Zombie Sea Monster by Michael F. Flynn

Debris by Jo Anderton – review

This review forms part of my contribution to the Australian Women Writers 2012 Reading Challenge.

Debris is the debut novel from Jo Anderton, a Sydney based author.

This story has an interesting premise – a world that has been built around a form of magic, the manipulation of tiny particles called pions. The resulting society is not your typical medieval high-fantasy arrangement, rather represents an alternative development path that has incorporated pions into technology to reach a more urban level of development. I’d almost classify it as having a steampunk sensibility, that mixture of cool “technology” that can do some fantastic things, but with a slightly old fashioned feel.

The main character, Tanyana, is one of the elite in this world, able to manipulate pions to an astonishing degree. She is an architect who, with a linked circle of nine assistants, is able to use pions to create buildings and monuments of astonishing scale and aesthetic. She is in the middle of creating her greatest work so far when something goes horribly wrong. From her perspective she is attacked by “angry” pions. From everyone else’s perspective she loses control. When she wakes up in the hospital she has lost her ability to see and manipulate pions, but can now see the debris that pion manipulation leaves behind. The hospital also bonds her to a silver metal substance that can morph to create a suit or crude weapons which she can use to collect the debris.

This immediately catapults her from the highest tiers of society to the lowest – the ability to see and collect debris is considered a necessary but “dirty” profession. The rest of the story documents her struggle to accept her new role amongst the have-nots and work out what happened to her.

Character development of Tanyana is strong with a realistic, if irritating at times, reaction to such a major fall from grace. The slow development makes some of the later revelations more powerful, even if you feel like yelling at Tanyana to snap out of it at times. The story focuses almost exclusively on Tanyana, so other characters are not as well developed but enough is sketched out for the purposes of the story and perhaps future novels.

The relationships Tanyana formed with those immediately around her were generally adequately developed as well, although I thought one of the more romantic relationships didn’t read as well as the others. It made the eventual resolution of that relationship have less of an emotional impact for me, but this is a minor quibble.

I found the world building interesting. Details of the world, its background and history, as well as information on how the magic works, were sketchy. I didn’t mind this – I enjoy books that fill in the background gradually as you go. If this was a stand alone book, I would have felt a little dissatisfied with the amount of detail provided by the end. As the first book in a series, I guess I’ll just need to buy the sequel to find out more!

The plot moved along at a reasonable, but not particularly fast, pace. There were a couple of points at which I did find myself thinking that Tanyana could spend a little less time moping and a little more time getting on with things, but that probably says more about me than the novel.

It should be noted that Ms Anderton has also released a free short prequel story to Debris on her website. It gives a taste of the events leading up to the start of Debris – you don’t need to have read it to enjoy Debris, but it does set the scene for what is to follow.

So, I enjoyed this novel and will be reading the next in the series, Suited, when it is released by Angry Robot later in the year. Nice writing, good core idea and a world that I am very curious to find out more about.

I also reviewed this book on Goodreads. View all my reviews.

This work by Mark Webb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License.