Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Rudyard Kipling's short story "The Butterfly That Stamped" is a simple meditation on the intersection of ambitious wishes and overweening power, couched in the familiar form of a fairy tale. Jon Courtenay Grimwood's next novel Stamping Butterflies tells a similar story, filtered through post-Gitmo sensibilities and a North Africa we can almost recognise.

Three stories twist and turn their way around each other: Marrakech 1977, North Africa the day after tomorrow, and an artificial Chinese empire in the far future.

Moz is a Marrakech street kid who falls in with a faded rock star, while struggling to survive the cruel gangland world. It's a world where he has few choices, and those he makes will come back to haunt him again and again. Prisoner Zero is a broken man, drug-addled and possessed by visions of numbers and hearing the voice of the darkness. He's also a failed assassin, whose shot missed the President, in American custody on an Italian island. Realpolitik means he's going to die, but in a shit-coated cell (reminiscent of Geoffrey Rush's Sade in "Quills") he's scrawling out equations that could mean the stars. Somewhere in the future, somewhere in space, an emperor is waiting for his assassin. He's tired of living, tired of being the embodiment of the wishes that make the shells inhabitable. Meanwhile, the alien AI that inhabits the the 2023 shells of the Dyson sphere that is his home is also waiting, waiting for the emperor to make a choice that will allow it to change everything...

Three stories where the actors map out the same trajectories again and again, drawn in dreams and in the voices of the night. These are trajectories that could lead to death - or to a new life away from the old horrors.

This is a story which shows the small changes that build histories. The spirit of the alien sphere knows that it's constructed China will fail and fall, and through Prisoner Zero is aiming to build a new tomorrow on the ruins of today. In earlier novels Grimwood has shown the results of changes, in his alternate futures. Here he begins to build a new tomorrow, showing hope in the heart of our darkest fears.

A wonderful, moving story. Recommended - this is Grimwood at his best.

I've been a Varley fan for a long time. It was short fiction that grabbed me first, I remember reading "Retrograde Summer" in a Carr Year's Best anthology, in a camp-site somewhere in Brittany, feeling the sun warm me through and through, while I read a story of love and change in the broiling heat of Mercury. There and then I fell in love with Varley's Heinleinesque Eight Worlds.

It's good to come back to Varley in this, The John Varley Reader, a 30^th anniversary retrospective of his short works. Sprinkled with Eight Worlds stories, the main attraction here is not so much the stories (though there are five previously uncollected works here - including an Anna Louise Bach story rescued from Last Dangerous Visions), as it is Varley's extensive introductions. They form a short autobiography that takes you from his high school days, through the Haight-Ashbury of the Summer of Love, to the present day. It's a life shaped by word and writing (and Shelties).

So what's here. Like any "best of" collection you'll probably find yourself wondering why some of your favourite stories like "in The Bowl" or "The Black Hole Passes" have been left out, but there's enough here to keep you interested. You'll find little masterpieces like "beatnik Bayou" (one of an occasional stories that explores the earlier lives of characters from his first novel, The Ophiuchi Hotline), alongside pieces that skirt the boundaries between genres, including the award-winning dark "Press Enter" and Le Guin-flavoured "The Persistence of Vision".

If you've not read any Varley this is an excellent place to start. If you're a long-time fan you'll find the glimpse of an author's life fascinating.

[Warning: do not read this book unless you've read the previous three Ringworld novels.]

Larry Niven's SF travelogues return with Ringworld's Children, the latest instalment in the sprawling Ringworld saga. Pulling pack from the sprawling structure of previous volumes, Children is much more tightly plotted, with a tighter focus and a forward thrust that allows you to forget Niven's frequent use of Deus Ex Machina to extract his characters from regular cliffhangers.

After all the tribulations of the first three books, the Ringworld has been saved, but at a price: it's no longer a secret. The edges of the system are the scene of a slow motion war, as the major powers attempt to =gain control of the Ringworld's valuable secrets. Trapped on the surface of the ring, Louis Wu and a rag tag bag of compatriots must use all their guile to find an end to the war, and a chance for the ring's many hominid species to join the interstellar community on their own terms.

This is a novel with many locations, saved only by the existence of teleportation devices, superhuman Protectors, and anti-matter weaponry. Yet while we rush over the Ringworld system there's a sense that Niven has written a novel more for the many fanboys who have critiqued his physics and engineering - this is a last visit to a favourite hangout, and a chance to show that all the bugs have been removed and all the wrinkles have been ironed out. It's an approach that has led to compromises in Niven's storytelling. Characters end up in situations designed to illuminate one of these earlier flaws, and then are used to come up with an explanation or a fix. It's a band-aid approach to story-telling that leaves you wanting more sense-of-wonder, and less nuts-and-bolts...

One major quibble that results from the novel's "fix-it" approach is Niven's treatment of Louis Wu. In order to solve a specific problem, Wu is forced by authorial fiat to do something significantly out of character - and then Niven manages to use a powerful macguffin from a previous book to restore the status quo. It's almost as if Niven has put too much of his own nature into Wu, and couldn't bear to see the changes that would have resulted (rightly) from his precipitate actions.

One for the completist only.

[One wonders how proposed the Ringworld TV series will pan out...]

There are many guilty pleasures in this life, and one of the best has to be reading Mick Farren. There's really no one else who mixes pulp fiction with a rock'n'roll charm in quite the same way. It's no wonder that he's drifted into the dark, gothic world of the vampire novel - though, as always, giving it something indefinably Farren.

The Time Of Feasting is the first novel in an ongoing series of novels about the 1000 year-old vampire Renquist, and his dealings with the complex net of relationships that are a vampire nest and the even more complex task of living in a human world. Farren's vampires are a mix of Catholic conspiracy theories and Von Danikenesque alien intervention in prehistoric Earth, all tossed up with a dose of Lovecraft and a dash of pulp thriller. It's a heady, almost addictive mix, with a fast pace and a definite beat.

The modern world, New York. Renquist's nest is fractured, as a recently turned Goth rock star tries to seize control. It's a difficult time for the nest, as the eponymous Time of Feasting has arrived. No longer able to subsist on stolen blood bags, the vampires need to feed on living human blood. Normally that's the cue for a holiday in Cambodia (or whatever trouble spot has the highest body count), but this time Renquist has a plan for riding things out in the heart of the city. It's a plan that's unlikely to work, with the young vampires leaving a trail of death, and an ex-priest and a cynical cop ready to shine the bright light of day on the vampire nest. Not even the armadillos will help Renquist now...

This is pulp fiction at its most unpretentious, poking fun at several different genres while keeping the reader on the edge of their seat. Renquist is the ideal outsider, and his struggles to return order to his life power Farren's dynamic prose.

A fun read, if a tad blood-thirsty at times...

(and as an aside - Mick Farren is blogging...)