Interzone 244 Jan - Feb 2013 (20 page)

The Falcon Prince is an interesting figure. Does
Arabic history boast Robin Hood-like figures, given that charity
begins at the mosque?

I’d guess nearly every culture in the world
has both trickster heroes, and every region’s history has populist
uprisings. But the Falcon Prince is fairly Western – fairly
Hollywood, even – in his genealogy. Quite a lot of Errol Flynn’s
Robin Hood and Douglas Fairbanks’ Thief of Baghdad is in there… In
general,
Throne of the Crescent Moon
does a fair amount of
balancing that sort of problematic twentieth century Orientalist
culture with more “authentic” (wince) influences. Harryhausen was a
big influence on my monsters, for instance.

God is referenced frequently in dialogue
throughout
Throne of the Crescent Moon
,
but no one in the book actually performs an act of worship. Was
this deliberate, and if so, why?

The religion in the Crescent Moon Kingdoms –
while obviously modelled in large part on medieval Islam – is
tinged by an almost Protestant notion of man’s private relationship
with God. So I guess I’d argue that the book is full of moments of
worship – but that these manifest as silent prayers and spoken
commonplaces rather than as public ritual.

Most fantasies end with the status quo
re-established, yet
Throne of the Crescent
Moon
ends with a regime change. Was this a dig at the
consolatory nature of much fantasy?

Yes! The “restoration of the rightful heir”
plot that drives so much fantasy depends heavily on a tacit
celebration of hereditary, monarchical power. I wanted to at least
touch on questions of what “rightful rule” even means.

Given Islam’s troubled history on the question of
“rightful heirs” – the Shi’ites, the word Caliph itself also
meaning “deputy” – do you see this topic as an antidote to typical
Western fantasies or something intrinsic to an Arabic fantasy?

The whole novel was written with a sceptical
eye toward political power, so in that sense it was an antidote to
the prevailing mode of fantasy novel. I don’t think the Islamic
world’s history on this front is any more troubled than the
Christian world’s, but notions of hereditary power and divine right
to rule are perhaps less entrenched in the former. So there’s a
kind of ripe potential for fluidity there.

Your central characters are far from the typical
privileged fantasy heroes (even Peasant Heroes usually turn out to
have secretly had privilege all along). Was this also
deliberate?

It was absolutely deliberate. In part due to
my own class background, the socially marginalised working wizard
strikes me as a much more interesting and under-explored figure
than the wronged royal whelp or the Farmboy Who Is So Much
More.

Throne of the Crescent
Moon
ends quite decisively. What’s next for the
series?

Romances rifted and repaired. The first
appearance of the djenn – also called the fireborn, or the Thousand
and One. Answers to bloody questions about revolution and
rulership. Glimpses of Rughal-ba, the Soo Republic, and the
Warlands. The obligatory Battle of the Big Ole Fantasy Armies,
which is also a Crusades analogue and a meditation on pacifism

* * * * *

NEXUS

Ramez Naam

Angry Robot pb, 448pp, £8.99

Matthew S. Dent

Hard SF is an interesting concept for me as
a reviewer. It revels in being highly technical, and garners
further esteem from being accurate. It’s an effect doubled with
near-future SF, given that it’s more deeply grounded in present day
ideas and technologies.

So it falls to me to say that I know
precious little about the details, the nitty-gritties of
nanotechnology, upon which
Nexus
is largely predicated. But
it seems that Ramez Naam does, being a professional heavily
involved in the technology, as well as the ethics surrounding it.
So it’s safe to say that he knows what he’s talking about.

Nexus
shows us a world where a drug
can link human minds together, where bodies and minds can be
improved beyond their physical constrains, and where the primary
concern of law enforcement is stopping people exceeding the
limitations of humanity. It takes the reader on a wild ride halfway
around the world, with both practical and moral ramifications
taking centre stage.

Of course, knowing the subject matter does
not necessarily make someone a good writer, and at times the prose
is rather stilted and perfunctory. It won’t be winning any awards
for poetic storytelling, but in the almost unceasing fury of the
plot progression this fades almost to insignificance.

And considering that blistering pace, he
pulls off quite a lot of characterisation. The background
characters remain little more than pieces on a chessboard, but he
manages to inject real life and likability into the three leads.
Mostly this takes place in the breathing moments before the action
sequences.

So I enjoyed
Nexus
. Naam explains the
technology surprisingly well and the premise feels, at times, all
too believable. I think that’s kind of the point. The somewhat
dystopian vision of a future where scientific research into
post-humanism is limited seems all the more chilling when you can
draw parallels to present day restrictions and debates around
potentially life-saving stem cell research.

At times, though, the plot becomes simply a
vessel for the debate Naam clearly wants to promote, but I’d be
lying if I said it got in the way of my enjoyment. The epilogue is
a perfect example of this – it isn’t strictly necessary, and feels
a little out of place as part of the story, but I understand its
purpose.

Overall,
Nexus
is a very readable
book. It deals with real world ramifications of next-generation
technology in a believable, if somewhat scary, fashion. It’s
accurate without being boring, and action-packed without descending
into the trite or vapid. There is a dictionary full of reviewer
clichés mandated for this kind of situation, but actually I think
I’m just going to say that
Nexus
was rather good, and you
should read it

* *

BEDLAM

Christopher Brookmyre

Orbit hb, 376pp, £17.99

Paul F. Cockburn

Writing for
The Guardian
in May 2011,
Iain M. Banks focused on the not-infrequent phenomenon of non-SF
writers being “drawn to write what is perfectly obviously science
fiction – regardless of either their own protestations or those of
their publishers”. Banks welcomed their potential for engendering
“further dialogue” between genres. Nevertheless, he underlined the
necessity for authors to do their homework: “as with most subjects,
if you’re going to enter the dialogue it does help to know at least
a little of what you’re talking about, and it also helps, by
implication, not to dismiss everything that’s gone before as not
worth bothering with”.

Of course, Banks can claim a fairly unique
perspective on this issue. We rightfully think of him as “one of
us”, thanks to a quarter-century of ground-breaking science fiction
novels. Yet it’s easy to forget that, when
Consider Phlebas
was first published in 1987, Banks was generally viewed as a
promising young literary author, albeit with a taste for the
surreal, who already had three successful novels under his belt. He
had to prove he had something new to say.

Fellow Scottish author Christopher Brookmyre
joins the ongoing science fiction “dialogue” with significantly
more baggage; notwithstanding
Pandaemonium
, which pitted a
group of teenagers against the forces of Hell, Brookmyre is
primarily known for delivering action-packed, darkly humorous and
often quite violent crime novels. While his two most recent
Glasgow-based novels were deemed more “serious” examples of crime
fiction – inspiring the publisher to rebrand him as Chris Brookmyre
– it is interesting to note that
Bedlam
is listed alongside
the more in-your-face novels that cemented his reputation.

This is appropriate enough; the gritty
humour and energetic prose which helped Brookmyre stand out from
the Tartan Noir crowd is certainly here: we’re shown nanite clouds
that gust through ventilation systems “with missionary enthusiasm,
like a sentient fart determined to be smelled”. A character is
dismissed as “the cyborg equivalent of a Nissan Micra”, just one of
a host of late 20th/early 21st century cultural references that
successfully define its main character, a disillusioned scientist
and computer game player called Ross Baker. Given his background,
it’s entirely appropriate that many of the references are
themselves from works of science fiction; for example, when Ross
realises that an old friend has betrayed him, his response is: “You
went Lando on us?” (As in Lando Calrissian, from
The Empire
Strikes Back
.)

Present too is Brookmyre’s trademark focus on an
anti-authoritarian character, someone trying their best to survive
the repercussions of the machinations of “the establishment”.
However, on this occasion, this theme is mostly contained within a
disconnected timeline which is featured intermittently through the
novel. As a result, the book as a whole seems somewhat skewed. At
times, there’s a sense that Brookmyre is simply having too much fun
imagining what it would really be like to live and fight within
some of his all-time favourite computer games.

At its heart,
Bedlam
is about
world-building; how we each create worlds from our own perceptions
and perspectives, and the fascination in working out what those
worlds say about us – especially the ones we create or enjoy in
order to “escape” from our own lives. In terms of style and subject
matter, Brookmyre certainly brings something fresh to Banks’
science fiction dialogue. Yet, by focusing so much on the games’
shoot-em-up formats, and on the increasingly complex machinations
of the neo-fascist Integrity (which wishes to stop all transfers
between different game worlds, and is quite prepared to torture and
destroy in order to achieve their goal), does Brookmyre miss a real
trick?

For a few pages we’re shown a truly
horrifying world, a small idealised English village created for
people who “don’t feel right unless they’ve got something to be
afraid of and somebody to look down on”. It’s a world where unreal,
unruly teenagers are flogged; where virtual illegal immigrants are
constantly rounded up and deported, or executed. Essentially, it’s
a world for
Daily Mail
readers. “These ass-wipes would
rather live in a world where criminals are caught and punished than
a world in which there is no crime”, we’re told. “Except, of
course, there is no crime; only an illusion of it and it’s an
illusion they find bizarrely comforting”. It’s arguable that
Brookmyre would have given science fiction some more social
relevance if his hero had ended up in the
Daily Mail
world,
rather than a retro 1990s vision of the future

* *

STEAMPUNK III: STEAMPUNK REVOLUTION

Edited by Ann VanderMeer

Tachyon pb, 432pp, £13.50

Simon Marshall Jones

Mention the word “steampunk”, and inevitably
images come to mind of airships floating effortlessly through skies
filled with gleaming spires, vast iron machines belching smoke that
fills the air from horizon to horizon, and corseted Victorian
ladies, along with pith-helmeted and monocled gentlemen, replete
with handlebar moustaches, striding confidently across both the
known and unknown worlds in search of adventure and mysterious
artefacts, or battling dastardly villains going about their
nefarious deeds.

For the most part, this has stood as a handy
definition of the genre but, as
Steampunk III: Steampunk
Revolution
shows deftly and plainly, such constraints and
tropes exist simply to be stretched, broken, and remade by those
pioneers unwilling to tread the path forged by others. The tapestry
from which this collection of twenty-six stories and four essays
has been lifted is vast in both breadth and depth, and can indeed
be considered a revolution. Some would say that many of the tales
included merely skirt the very borders of what has come to be
recognised as the “correct” interpretation of steampunk, a point
well made in Amal El-Mohtar’s essay ‘Winding Down the House: Toward
a Steampunk Without Steam’, essential reading if one is to properly
deconstruct and contextualise what constitutes the genre in order
to move on from there.

And therein lies this book’s problem, from a
reviewer’s perspective at least; it is not one of either lack of
context, subtext or variety, but instead the sheer embarrassing
wealth of thematic riches, all written with equal brilliance and
facility. The difficulty in such a short review is highlighting the
most apposite exemplars out of so many. Just like the best science
fiction, steampunk expresses ideas and concepts that go beyond mere
storytelling: the potential of human destiny; the different shapes
history could have taken; how people interface with the technology
and its consequences, confronting both its marvels and its threats.
In its broadest sense, steampunk is about failures as well as
breakthroughs, with abject disasters and soaring successes both
personal and global. With every story here, boundaries have been
pushed and they’re not just testament to the inventive imagination
of the writers, but also to the breadth of the human mind in
conjuring and sculpting visions that might, if the Victorian era
had gone in another direction, have come to pass.

The whole panoply of human experience and
endeavour is here: high adventure, the exotic, royalty, love,
disappointment, sadness, elation, medical marvels, deep
friendships, overcoming the odds, global collapses. Lands the
length and breadth of Empire and beyond, peopled with revolutionary
agitators, villains, princesses in disguise, assassins, inventors,
aviatrixes, circuses, surgeons, and captains of the air. Beneath
all the wonder is something else, however: a harsh reality and
unpalatable truths.