Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

The novel of empire was almost dead. After the Second World War, as Britain divested itself of its colonies there wasn't any place for tales of derring do in the service of the Empire. No space for Buchan, no space for Kipling. So S. M. Stirling reworked the world, and gave us a in The Peshawar Lancers a tale of the white man's burden from a world we never knew.

In the 1870s a swarm of comets devastates the Northern Hemisphere. The firestorms and tidal waves devastate Europe, and the chill that follows finishes off any chance of recovery. As darkness falls on civilisation Disraeli organises a desperate evacuation of the remnants of Britain to India. Now, over a century later, a rescendent British Empire is the recovering world's superpower.

But it's not alone. To the north the remanant Russian states worship a dark god, and rush to hasten the fall of man. To the east a new industrial power is rising, and to the west the resurgent Caliphate is flexing its muscles. This is a dangerous time. Conspiraracies and rumours of wars are rife, and the Royal Family are prime targets. An alliance with the French is on the cards, an alliance that will increase Britain's power. It's an alliance its enemies want to prevent at all costs.

Athelstane King is an army captain with a talent for languages, and a flair for the unorthodox. Drafted into a covert mission he must find out why his and his academic sister's lives are in danger - and why they seem inextricably linked to a Russian seer and the hiers of the British Empire. It's a story that gives us dramatic events, great feats and danger aplenty. Can Athelstane save the day, and his King? And why is his sister in danger? Is it something to do with the Empire's grand plan to save the world from another fall? He must go out into a 21st century of Babbage engines, airships and steam trains armed with stout friends and quick wits. What can stand in his way? He's a British officer, doing his duty for God and the Empire.

Stirling has given us a ripping yarn, firmly in the traditions of Kipling and Buchan. This is a fast and enjoyable read, a romp through a world both familiar and strange. This isn't high literature, nor does it pretend to be. It hearkens back to the penny dreadfuls, the worlds of Bulldog Drummond and Biggles, the books of Sax Rohmer and John Buchan - for Stirling has given us a classic British popular novel of the 1930s, all wrapped up as 21st century science fiction.

So how can we summarise this melange? Steampunk meets the Boy's Own Story, illuminated by Flecker and the Pre-Raphaelites? Whatever terms we use, there's one point we need to remind ourselves off: Stirling has written a classic adventure story that's both fun to read, and an interesting intellectual excercise in alternate history. And on a cold winter day, that's probably all we need to know.

A fun, light read. It's as if the penny dreadful had never died...

This is a test posting

Well, as you may have noticed, my home made LJ client actually made its first posting today.

I'm rather pleased, as this is intended to be the client component of my MMS-LJ gateway, it's also the first .NET code I've written. Currently I'm using the flat interface to LiveJournal to send hardwired messages, with the date dynamically generated to prove that I can assemble HTTP POST query strings on the fly.

The next step is to write an HTML encoder for text blocks, and use that to embed a generic text block as the event element of the postevent. That's going to be a little more complex, and will entail me learning C# regexps. But as they're ripped off from Perl, it shouldn't be too much of a learning curve.

Sean Williams and Shane Dix have reached the second volume of their latest series. While the first dealt with a fractious, balkanised human dominated galaxy of various human species that hid deep and dangerous secrets, the second sends us to a much darker universe.

The first volume, Echoes of Earth introduced us to a group of engrams, the uploaded personalities that were humanity's first interstellar explorers. It chronicled their first contact experiences with the generous Spinners and the inimical Starfish. We saw them learn to use the FTL devices left behind the Spinners, a journey which took us to the aftermath of the solar system's Spike, a devestating Vingean singularity, and the AI wars that destroyed the inner solar system and gave rise to a new post-human civilisation. As hope faded in the face of the implacable Starfish, we followed their struggles to contact and warn the remnants of humanity.

This second volume, Orphans Of Earth starts a day or so after the first closes. The few survivors of humanity are continuing to attempt to rescue the remaining engram colonies before the Starfish arrive, and to recover as many Spinner artifacts as possible. It's a disheartening struggle. Peter Alander, a flawed engram, and Caryl Heitz, the last survivor of Earth, must unite the fragile simulated personalities and struggle to rebuild, and perhaps someday fight back. But in the aftermath of a Spinner event they find a mystery: someone else is using Spinner gifts. Enemies or allies? It's a question of diplomacy versus aggression as the raggle taggle remains of the human race make a real first contact with an unexpected visitor. And it's a new start for Peter Alander, and a possibility of redemption.

Willams and Dix are writing epic space opera here, hopping all over the inhospitable local stellar group. Their story is one of an inimical galaxy, full of traps for the unwary, and of runaway technological singularities. We're dealing with the Fermi paradox again, and the prospect of a galaxy run by automated gardeners that prune civilisations as they move out into space. The reader is left a watcher in the ruins, wondering if there is any hope at all, if this is what waits in the dark between the stars.

While Orphans Of Earth may be the middle volume of a trilogy, it's a story that proceeds at a pace, from cliffhanger to cliffhanger, from mystery to mystery. The plot moves forward, driven by the inexorable force of the Starfish, and the threat of extinction. It's a story where the main characters are hanging by a thread, and total destruction is but a moment away. Williams and Dix handle the suspense effectively, cutting between scenes with a cinematic flair. There's a little confusion with a flashback subplot, but everything resolves at the end of the story - another cliff hanger leaving the reader gasping and waiting for the next book in the sequence...

There's an element of Lovecraftian horror here mixed with the hard as steel SF, especially in the climactic scenes. However, all in all, this is an excellent modern space opera, dark and brooding. Now to wait a year for volume 3.