TELEKIN by Andrew Millson

A boy who is a telepath and can communicate with the “fatties” once known as the Fat-ah, and, before the arrival of humankind, the only sentient species on the blood-red planet of Sanguis. Now they are raised for meat on fatty farms. But a few still exist out in the wild – ironically saved from extinction by those who take pleasure in hunting them.

This is real Sci Fi. Read it. It is a stunning story. Now I am waiting for the sequel – there must be one, set on this same unforgettable world. And please, Andrew, make the sequel longer!

Click on the image for the Kindle link.

THE PLOT TO SAVE SOCRATES by Paul Levinson

Those of us who love Time Travel (I mean the genre, but the real thing, with a time machine which, at the click of a button whisks you backwards or forwards through Time with a capital T) have been having a lean time of it lately.

I even thought of writing one myself (on the “if you want a job done properly” principle) and got as far as mapping out a story in which I brought Time Travel and Past Lives together, my heroine sorting out problems she had gone through, was still going through (!), in previous lives, but only she, of course, knows that she and they are in a very real sense the same person.

An interesting idea, but I never came up with a good plot and – well, you know, it’s somewhere among my files …

Paul Levinson, unlike me, comes up not only with a great, attention-grabbing idea, but a plot that carries the reader along like a river – or should I say the river of time – in flood, with multiple sub-plots swirling around – I’m getting carried away here myself.

Back to reality. And by that I mean real time. Which in this case is AD 2042, in New York – at the bottom of the first page, page 13. Athens AD 2042, in the top half of the first page, is not real time at all. You will understand that by the time you finish the book and turn back for another glance at the first page as I usually do.

Sierra, a doctoral student specialising in some rather recherché aspect of ancient Athens, I had no trouble at all in identifying with. By the second page I was hooked. And it is on the second page (no messing about here) that Thomas O’Leary, one of her supervisors, hands her a five-page fragment of a hitherto unknown Socratic dialogue.

Naturally, she is sceptical. She is a scholar; Plato is notoriously easy to imitate and there have been other hoaxes.

But when, later, at home, after a hot shower, she curls up on the sofa and reads it through, then in astonishment reads it through again, she knows this is something unique. A visitor to Socrates in his prison during the final hours before he drinks the fatal hemlock (and presumably after the departure of Critias) tries to persuade Socrates to leave and accompany him to life and freedom.

How is this different from Critias’ persuasion?

Well, this visitor, Andros, is a time-traveller, and has with him a mindless clone of Socrates that can be left there dead in Socrates’ place when they leave.

Socrates declines the offer. End of fragment.

But that weekend Thomas O’Leary disappears. And searching for him, Sierra finds herself caught up in the plot to save Socrates.

All perfect, classic SF Time Travel.

But what about the theory? For some reasonable scientific (or at any rate pseudo-scientific) theorising is what distinguishes SF (Science Fiction) from SF (Speculative Fantasy).

Heron, an Alexandrian inventor, who turns out to be (to have been) a traveller from the far future and the inventor of these “chairs”  which carry one through Time, tells Alcibiades that Heraclitus was “one of the greatest thinkers of all time”. (Yes, Alcibiades is in the story, too – he and Sierra fall head over heels and make love at various times – and I mean various different times. You see why I identify with her?)

“Heraclitus recognised that you can never step into the same river, exactly the same river, twice, because new water is always flowing. And yet we are right in thinking there is a reality to the river Maeander, a reality which endures, and makes the river Maeander distinct from any other river, such as the river Cayster. So the river always changes, yet stays the same, has continuity – both are true. [...]

“And what is true of rivers, of all existence, is also true of time itself, because time is part of existence,” Heron continued. “I, and others throughout history, have recognised that essential point. And if that is so, then travel from one time to another should be possible, even easy, since, even though time always moves, it also stays the same – stands still, is the same time.”

And as the book moves on, and events have begun to influence the past, to change history, Sierra begins to realise that what they are in fact doing is bringing into being alternative universes, not changing the history of the one she grew up in, the one that existed before she was handed that fragment of dialogue.

For instance, speaking of Alcibiades when she knows he going into danger, she says, “He is dead already, in one universe. I want to make sure he stays alive in this one.”

And wondering what Plato is doing “now”, she asks herself: What had Plato done at this time in the original history – the history of the world she had grown up in, before she had been drawn into this? Not much was known about him in those years.

All this – Herclitus and alternative universes – is metaphysics, though, not science as such. And we are given no inkling of how these “chairs” work or even might work.

A small complaint, from one who is all too willing to suspend disbelief when reading a good story. Which this is, believe me.

THE HANDMAID’S TALE by Margaret Atwood

The term “handmaid” in this tale is based upon Sarah’s handmaid Hagar, an Egyptian slave, who bore Abraham a son when Sarah seemed to be “barren”, and of course also Rachel’s handmaid Bilhah, who bore Rachel’s husband Jacob two sons.

Not based metaphorically, but literally. For this book is set in part of a not so futuristic fallen-apart USA, a society that has put into practice all the most bizarre notions of extreme fundamentalist Christianity – which if this book is anything to go by are quite as bizarre as anything fundamentalist Islam or Hinduism can come up with.

Offred is a slave (just as Hagar and Bilhah were, 3000+ years ago) in the house of one of the Commanders of the Republic of Gilead, and her principal function is, once a week, to be inseminated (yes, it is that clinical) by the Commander. She lies on her back between the open legs of the Commander’s barren wife (always “barren” – “There is no such thing as a sterile man any more, not officially. There are only women who are fruitful and women who are barren, that’s the law.”) so that it seems it really is his wife who conceives, if anyone does. And if a baby comes of it, it will be the wife’s baby. Surrogate motherhood carried to, I suppose logical, extremes.

The only means of escape she has is in her own bare little room on her own bare little bed, where she can “step sideways out of my own time” (she has no books, is not allowed to read or write) and remember and dream of another time, the time before all this began. “Though this is time, nor am I out of it.”

Hell indeed.

Because they all remember the time before, though no one dares mention it. Except one friend of hers, Moira, when they were in training to be handmaids. An old friend – they had been at university together – who subsequently attempted to escape to Canada and sanity.

The punishment for all such “sins” is death by hanging from the Wall. Such sins as doubt and disbelief, and “Gender Treachery” – guess what that is.

A brilliant novel full of unforgettable moments and images. How about this. Remember, Offred is a university educated woman living in a world where women (all women) are inferior beings whose only function is to wait on men and bear children.

I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe such stories are only stories have a better chance.

If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.

It isn’t a story I’m telling.

It’s also a story I’m telling in my head, as I go along.

Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else.

Even when there is no one.

At this point the writer, Margaret Atwood, imagines her own personal Hell. I am there with her.

Click here for a fascinating article on the book by Margaret Atwood herself.

THE WINDS OF DUNE by Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson

I read all six of Frank Herbert’s original Dune sextet years ago (those of you who know me will have guessed they were favourites of my grandmother’s and became favourites of mine) but this is the first time I’ve read one of the sequels written by Frank’s son Brian Herbert and his collaborator, Kevin J. Anderson.

Had I been avoiding them? Been a bit suspicious? Perhaps. But much of my reading is serendipitous – I pick up books wherever I go – and none of them happened to come my way. This one I found in Avignon when I was there in the summer (drawn like a moth to a flame after reading Munro’s Wrong Way Round the Church). It was on top of a stack of secon-hand books, just asking to be bought, read and cherished. I mean, look at the cover. A whole new world beckoned. And someone I could definitely identify with!

Only it wasn’t a new world. It was Dune – the Dune universe – exactly as it had been fifteen, twenty, years ago, the last time I walked there. These two don’t put a foot wrong.

In fact, this book follows on directly from the second of the original Dune trilogy, Dune Messiah. Paul Atreides, the Emperor Muad’Dib, is dead. Or missing, presumed dead, having walked out into the desert and disappeared after being blinded in an assassination attempt. He left behind him twin children – babies still – and a wife, Princess Irulan, the daughter of the previous emperor. But Irulan had been his wife in name only. His true love was the Fremen warrior maiden Chani, the mother of the twins, and she died giving birth to them.

Now the vast empire consisting of thousands of worlds is ruled over by Paul’s sixteen-year-old sister Alia. But that is not a normal sixteen. Alia, like her brother Paul, has “other memory”, can remember subjectively the lives of hundreds of women who came before her. As can members of the Bene Geserit sisterhood, of course, only Alia was born like that, which makes her, in the eyes of the Bene Geserit, an abomination. They want her dead.

The old Padishah Emperor Shaddam Corrino, whom Paul overthrew, believes the time is ripe for him to make a come-back. He too wants the Regent Alia dead.

How will Alia cope with all this? Jessica, Paul and Alia’s mother, travels to Dune from her home on Caladan to find out, as well as to be present at Paul’s ‘funeral’ ceremony. And to see what is happening about the twins, her grandchildren. Would they be safer on Caladan?

There are so many strands running through this tale that I can’t possibly mention them all. Anyway, I don’t wish to spoil it for you. But I loved it – especially the sections where Jessica tells Irulan and Gurney Halleck about Paul’s boyhood and his visit to Ix and his subsequent adventures with his friend Bronso, the same Bronso of Ix who is now being hunted relentlessly by Alia and the ghola Duncan Idaho. Why? Read it and see.

But don’t read it if you haven’t already read the six original novels by Frank Herbert himself! You must read them first!

As for me, I was going to get hold of the sequel to this sequel – The Throne of Dune – but I have just discovered that it has been cancelled – a tragedy! Let’s hope they uncancel it asap! In the meantime I’ll re-read Children of Dune, the third volume in the original trilogy – I am completely engrossed in the period when Alia was Regent – then start reading all the other books which Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have set in the fabulous Dune universe.

Here is an interview with the two of them made when they started on the series of sequels. They are talking about Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune, which Frank called “Dune 7″ and left comprehensive notes for. After Children of Dune I guess I’ll begin with those – and review them on this site.

VIRTUAL GIRL by Amy Thomson

And the Program was made Flesh …

I have read books, lots of books, about robots – all the Isaac Asimov robot stories for a start, including the final volumes of the great Foundation series – and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the virtually perfect film Bladerunner – but I have never come across a story of a robot that so moved me, or a robot – an android – a gynoid – I so wholly identified with.

As my fellow-reviewer on MedievalMysteries.com, M.B Gilbride, says on his blog “This is one book I would love to have written.” Actually, it was him who drew my attention to it. I had never come across Amy Thomson before, a real gap in my education!

The story is set in the fairly near future, at a time when any form of A.I. has been proscribed, although, of course, at certain universities such as MIT research goes on regardless. But Arnold, the son a of a super-rich industrialist, exaggerates, and is sent down.

When the book opens, he is living like a bum. His father refuses to have him in the house unless he gives up his research and his dreams and agrees to take his natural place as his father’s heir and successor. In a rented garage, he builds his masterpiece: a robot called Maggie, programmed to be the perfect companion. And I do not mean sex partner. On the contrary, although she is a woman, perfect in every detail, she has not been programmed for sex. Does not understand it. Our Arnold is a bit of a prude.

The description of her first faltering steps when he downloads her into her body, and the incident of sensory overload the first time he takes her out in the street, have no equal in SF so far as I am aware. And it is the fact that she has to deal with the sensory overload herself, reprogram herself to deal with the problem, that starts her on the road to autonomy. Freedom.

I am not going to tell you what happens, just that it is one of those books that keeps getting better and better and better. By page 150, you are open-mouthed. By page 200, you know you have never read anything loike this before.

Read it. Please.

Then, of course, I wanted to know: who is Amy Thomson and what else has she written? And a friend of mine I mentioned her to had a copy of Storyteller. I haven’t started it yet, but it looks exactly my cup of tea. Here’s the cover. You see what I mean?

WHIPPING STAR and THE DOSADI EXPERIMENT by Frank Herbert

In Frank Herbert’s great classic Dune series the known universe is vast, with millions (billions?) of inhabited planets, but they are all inhabited by humans, descendants of and variations on the original Terrans – the prototype: us. The same author’s Dosadi universe is totally different. Here various sentient species have encountered each other and reached an accord. the Con Sentiency, a kind of United Sentients, by which they manage to live, if not together, then side by side, in peace. (Unlike the all-human – all-too-human! – Dune universe, which is continually riven by wars in which whole planets are destroyed.)

What makes this peaceful co-existence possible – and essential – is the existence of “jumpdoors”, instant teleportation from any part of the universe to any other part. These jumpdoors are operated by “Calebans”, who introduced them to the universe and are the only ones who know how they work. But the Calebans – there were never more than a few of them – are disappearing. Or “being disappeared”. Either way, there is only one left, and she … What is a Caleban, you may be wondering.

Frank Herbert had an imagination quite out of this world, and this is perhaps his weirdest whim. The one Caleban left is called Fanny Mae – seriously – and she is the manifestation of a star – a sun. And what she manifests as is an enormous beach ball.

There, I’ve said it.

But that is not all. This Caleban is under contract to the richest woman in the universe, a real bitch called Mliss Abnethe, a contract it – I mean she – will not, cannot, break, although Mliss Abnethe is having her gradually flogged – yes, flogged – to death.

Enter Jorj X. McKie, of BuSab, the interstellar Bureau of Sabotage. The normal function of this bureau (as I understand it) is to sabotage any attempts to hog power and upset the balance of power between sentient species.

He has a problem even communicating with the intangible (but floggable?) Fanny Mae, whose weird English betrays utterly alien thought forms. And when she dies – and she can take perhaps ten more floggings before what she calls “discontinuity” sets in – not only will there be no more jumpdoors, but all who have ever used one will die on the spot. Most of the population of the universe.

Needless to say, Jorj manages to save the day, because in the sequel, The Dosadi Experiment, Fanny Mae “owes him” and she pays off the debt.

Whipping Star is a like long short story or novella in that it has no chapter divisions, no sub-plots. The Dosadi Experiment is, on the contrary, a full-length novel and at the head of each chapter is a thought-provoking “quotation” just as there is throughout the Dune series. Can I pause a moment here to quote a couple of them? (Remember this novel was published in 1977.)

Does a populace have informed consent when a ruling minority acts in secret to ignite a war, doing this to justify the existence of the minority’s military forces?

Does a population have informed consent when that population is not taught the inner workings of its monetary system, and then is drawn, all unknowing, into economic adventurism?

Communal/managed economies have always been more destructive of their societies than those driven by greed. This is what Dosadi says: Greed sets its own limits, is self-regulating.

In The Dosadi Experiment, the Gowachin, a highly secretive frog-like people, have set up a prison planet which has been rendered inaccessible to the rest of the universe by a Caleban. On this planet – which has now been in existence for many generations – 850 million beings are imprisoned in an area of only 40 square kilometres. An enormous concentration camp. Outside this area, the rest of the planet is empty apart from a few escapees surviving as best they can.

And the purpose of this planet, this experiment? You will see when you read it, because I’m in a hury and this post has gone on long enough. Suffice it to say that when word of the atrocity comes to BuSab it is Jorj X. McKie who travels to Dosadi (teleported there by Fanny Mae); that he meets the love of his life; and that the experiments involve, among other things, the exchange of bodies, bestowing virtual immortality on the Gowachin movers and shakers.

I first read these two books some years ago and have just re-read them. I enjoyed them even more the second time, and that is saying something.

LOST VOICES by Sarah Porter

A strange, haunting tale of abused children and of the mermaids those children – all of them girls – become when their lives among humans come to a tragic full stop.

Our heroine is Luce, the daughter of an itinerant mechanic and thief, who travels around with him in his van until his sudden death by drowning. Alone now in the world, she has to go and live with an uncle in Alaska, a drunk who starves her and beats her and finally attempts to rape her on a cliff-top when she is helping him home from the local bar. He fails only because he is so drunk, but leaves her there on the icy ground and staggers off into the distance.

She falls into the sea. And regains consciousness to find she is a mermaid, immensely strong, stunningly beautiful, impervious to the cold, and possessed of a voice that lures men to their doom.

The mermaids there off the coast of Alaska have a queen, Caterina, who befriends Luce and teaches her their ways. Ways which include the destruction of ships and the drowning of humans – those repulsive creatures who once made their lives so unbearable. When they lure a ship onto the rocks, everyone on board must die, or the world will learn of their existence and men will come hunting and catching and killing them.

But Luce is unhappy with this. Perhaps the reason she alone among the mermaids has a conscience is that her own father died when the fishing-boat he had found work on was wrecked off this very coast. Were her new friends responsible? But on the other hand, they are her family now, she loves them and feels safe among them, and she has nowhere else to turn.

Then things fall apart, and Luce must grow up. Though she will never age – she is fourteen and will be fourteen for ever in a sense – she does indeed grow up fast. She has to.

Read it. Unless you have solid cement between your ears and a plastic heart you will love it, whatever your age – or sex.

Apparently there is a sequel, Waking Storms, due out in July. I can’t wait!

THE ROSE OF HARLOW by M.B.Gilbride

You need a brain to read The Rose of Harlow – don’t get it if you’re just looking for another shot of soft porn – but if you’ve got a brain and a sense of humour, then give it a shot. It is a weird masterpiece.

Apparently M.B. Gilbride first wrote it as a play, then one day found it in a drawer, read it and decided to rewrite it.

The rewrite has produced, instead of a play, a very original dramatic novella.

The story is subtitled The Misadventures of an English Rose in Mrs Thatcher’s Britain.

The reader identifies completely with Gerda, the English Rose, (anyway this reader does) as she is carried helplessly from a Teacher Training College (she is expelled) to a Realignment Office (where she is glamorised) to a Ministry (she is fired after offending the Prime Minister) to the Inner City (and hanging about, unemployed) to the Forest (and living out) to Glastonbury (and a group of feminist New-Agers) to Prison, to a Research Lab (where we see her as a mermaid – yes!) to a Doggy Club (like a nasty Bunny Club) to a cheap brothel (Upstairs at the Bunny Club), from where she – she … read it and see.

But I must mention some of the characters! Her friend Penny (the political activist), Professor Mandril (the baboon on a white charger, her first and only verray parfait gentil knyght), Father Figure (who regrets the passing of the Inquisition), Billy (the ageing SF writer for whom she models), Homo mensuralis and Homo sensibilis (both of whom wish to change her), Woolly-hat, Bowler, Skinhead (who takes her to the Harlow Rose Show on his bike, and absconds with the prize-money when she wins), Estelle de Miel, Dicky (the bird-watcher who spots her in the Forest), the Bag-lady, the Faw-Paw-String-Man, the Curate (the world is a curate’s egg), and many others.

Gilbride’s slant-eyed view of the eighties and his unique way of seeing all things through the eye of the mermaid – literary impressionism – what more can you ask? As I say, weird, but totally unforgettable.

CARNIVAL by M.B.Gilbride

At first glance this novel set in Cartagena, a port in the south-east of Spain (an alternative Spain, not quite the one you and I know and love) seems to be just another “sissy story”.

It is not, believe me.

All right, we have the feminisation of a submissive male at the hands of assorted women – and men – many, though not all, of them taking overt sadistic pleasure in what the poor thing bears (and bares); so I suppose if we must categorise, then it does belong basically to the TG/sissy genre. At the same time though, it is one of the most cross-genre/multi-genre books I have ever read – perhaps because Martin is one of the most complex characters I have ever come across in a work of fiction (or in real life!).

In fact, he is a mass of contradictions.

• He is good, but definitely not virtuous. Good-natured, I suppose I mean. Wanting to help, wanting to please.
• He is tame, but at the same time wild in a way few of us ever are.
• He is timid – yes, a sissy – but with far more courage than anyone else in the book; a “man” who would lay down his life not just for a friend – he has no friends – but for a complete stranger he happens to bump into, literally, while they are both hiding from different pursuers during the Carnival Parade.
• He is a much-abused household skivvy who is also a very professional yoga and aqua-yoga instructor.
• He is as humble as a whipped dog, but with something of the super-hero deep down inside him, and he knows it.

And unlike the poor wimp Pablo (the one he bumps into when they are both hiding in terror during the Carnival procession) Martin has a dream.

This novel was apparently first published under the title Sea Change, which was appropriate (though I prefer Carnival) because Martin’s own dream is to be a mermaid.

I am not going to tell you whether his dream comes true, but I will tell you that this is a world in which mermaids exist. All right, some are girls wearing plastic tails. (I want to try that some time!) But others are girls who have been operated on, turned into mermaids. (This is a theme Gilbride seems to have a bit of a fixation with – it comes up even more dramatically in his story The Rose of Harlow.) And then there are real mermaids – yes, real mermaids. (The result of genetic engineering? Or imports from an alien aquatic world? The story does turn into something distinctly SF at certain points – which Gilbride would interpret as Speculative Fantasy. Well, I did tell you it is cross-genre.)

Another thing: I have referred to Martin here in this review always as “he”, but only because it is difficult to contrive the switch from “he” to “she” in the course of a brief review. Anyone reading the book, however, will definitely be thinking of the protagonist as feminine, as the heroine of the story, long before the author in fact makes the switch from “he” to “she” and “him” to “her”.

One for adults then, but if you are an Adult, don’t miss it!

THE SECRET OF SHAMBHALA by James Redfield

I read The Celestine Prophecy and The Tenth Insight years ago, when I was a student, but somehow missed this one. Really missed it. I mean it was published back in 1999 and I had never even heard of it. Then one day recently there it was right in front of me, on the bookshelf of a charity shop. What James Redfield would call a meaningful coincidence, because I had been discussing the concept of Shambhala (or Shangri-La) with a friend only the previous evening. (We had both of us read Silk-Roads and Shadows by Susan Schwartz – I must do a post on that wonderful book sometime! – and both of us been to India; but neither of us to Tibet, for obvious reasons.)

The Secret of Shambhala is subtitled “In Search of the Eleventh Insight” but it is in fact more an account of putting the Tenth Insight into practice. The author’s neighbour’s fourteen-year-old daughter informs him out of the blue that they “are not living the Insights“. Taken aback – he was unaware that she had read his books – he tells her it is not easy, it takes time. “But there are people living them now,” she responds. “In central Asia. The Kunlun Mountains.” And she tells him “You have to go there. It’s important. There’s something changing. You have to go there now. You have to see it.”

Naturally, one thing leads to another and off he goes to Tibet, where he learns that the people living the Insights are doing so in Shambhala. But what and where is Shambhala?

The Chinese who occupy that raped and martyred land have criss-crossed it with roads and military installations, have explored every inch of it in their helicopters. Surely there cannot be a great fertile valley somewhere among the snowy peaks that they have missed? But yes, there is, he is informed. Only it is hidden.

This is Redfield’s usual mixture of adventure and mysticism. The adventure lies in being hunted across Tibet by the Chinese and is sometimes pure James Bond, but with an ongoing moral dilemma as to how they ought to respond to Chinese terror-tactics and ethnic cleansing: yes, I mean ethnic cleansing.  “The Chinese are doing the same thing Stalin did in Manchuria,” the author’s friend Yin tells him, “importing thousands of outsiders, in this case ethnic Chinese, into Tibet to change the cultural balance and institute Chinese ways. They demand that our schools teach only the Chinese language.” And he – Yin – adds later, “Ironic, isn’t it? The culture of Tibet is totally dedicated to the spiritual life. We are arguably the most religious anywhere. And we have been attacked by the most atheistic government on Earth – that of China. It is a perfect contrast for all the world to see.”

And the mysticism? That lies in the four extensions of the prayer field, of prayer-energy, that the author must master before he can hope to gain access to Shambhala.