Reviews and Comments

I tried hard to finish this book. I got to eighty per cent. But in the end I gave up because I just didn’t care about how it ended. Plutoshine defies expectations, but not in a good way.

Which is a shame, because on paper the story sounded really interesting: a project to commence terraforming Pluto by building a giant space mirror that focuses the energy of the distant sun, and the possibility of finding indigenous life beneath the frozen oceans.

The book has been described by some as ‘Hard SF’ but it’s not. There is some authentic scientific detail scattered through the narrative but it’s real focus is on a dysfunctional family living in the first human settlement on Pluto and what happened to leave Clavius, the father and the settlement’s founder, in a coma and the youngest child – Nou – traumatized and unable to speak. Again, this sounds promising as a narrative, but the truth about what happened to Clavius and Nou is strung out through the book in a series of flashbacks. And these flashbacks are separated by too many present day scenes that do nothing or go nowhere.

Some stuff does happen in the narrative present, but the reactions of the characters to those events are almost universally passive and lacking in any common logic. We learn, for example, that there had been an official enquiry into whatever caused Clavius to go into a coma. I’m not sure what that enquiry did because, as on of the characters notes, ‘no one – no one – thought to stop and reconstruct what happened to traumatize Clavius’s kid into a kid-shaped shell?’

Then early on in the construction of the space mirror, there’s an incident which almost results in death and destruction. Some think it may be the work of a saboteur, because there is a political movement that believes Pluto and other planetary bodies should be left in their natural state. You’d think after such an incident that some of the characters might try to find out if it was actually sabotage, and who the saboteur might be. But, no. Life returns to normal and they get on with the project in between parties and other scenes that add local colour but not much else. It’s only when the next part of the project goes wrong in a way that could kill everyone on Pluto that they try to do something about it. Luckily this disaster is averted and a saboteur is caught. There may be more saboteurs but there’s no investigation to confirm that and we’re told the planetary police will take six months to get there. They never arrive and are barely mentioned again. Then another sabotage event occurs and no investigation takes place. They just ‘tighten security’. By that point I was rooting for the saboteurs to kill them all.

It’s impossible to talk about The Second Sleep without SPOILERS, so stop now if you intend to read the book.

The book starts as described. Fairfax is making his way on an old mare through the rain-soaked English countryside to officiate at the funeral of the priest of Exmoor village. We think we’re in 1468 CE but throughout the first chapter, little facts crop up that seem out of step with that time period, with the result that at chapter end we realise we are in the future.

Our civilisation crashed in or around 2022 and was followed by two centuries of ‘dark ages’ after which humanity managed to rebuild a semblance of civilisation, though it is one where the church rules with an iron-hand, having declared the cataclysm of 2022 the end times foretold in the Book of Revelations and as a result outlawed the technology of the ancients which brought down God’s punishment. The time of the cataclysm was renamed as the year 666 (for the number of the beast), which means the book is set some eight hundred years after the fall.

Under the church’s rule, progress beyond what can be reckoned to be a 17th century level of technology has stalled. But the dead priest, Father Lacy, was not as devout as might be expected and has made a study of the ancients. His library is filled with proscribed texts and artefacts, and he met his death while investigating an ancient site on a hilltop near the village. His funeral is interrupted by a stranger who proclaims Father Lacy’s death to be anything but accidental, and a series of events culminating in a dreadful storm cuts off the only road out of the village, which means Fairfax’s departure is delayed and his own curiosity about the ancients is awakened by Lacy’s books and the mystery surrounding the priest’s death.

Harris is an accomplished writer and the prose is evocative of the times and places while cracking along at a good pace, and I’ll certainly be reading more of his works. The book is full of well-drawn detail about the privations of the village folk, living in dire poverty and the life the church seems happy to consign them to. Even the language they speak has been constrained to the sum total of words used in the King James version of the bible, which means that even those people who study the ancient and more advanced civilisation struggle to explain their findings because they just don’t have the vocabulary. It reminded me of Orwellian NewSpeak, designed to constrain thought by reducing language to the most basic level.

The book culminates in a highly illegal dig at the site where Lacy died, which promises to uncover knowledge of the ancients that might transform society. And it’s at that point that the book failed to live up to my expectations. The ending felt rushed and - despite the promising build up - we are left with a simple thriller about who killed Lacy while the more interesting elements of the novel are unfulfilled.

The cover blurb for The Dispossessed makes it sound like a thrilling exciting narrative, filled with tension and action:

Shevek, a brilliant physicist, decides to take action. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have isolated his planet of anarchists from the rest of the civilized universe. To do this dangerous task will mean giving up his family and possibly his life—Shevek must make the unprecedented journey to the utopian mother planet, Urras, to challenge the complex structures of life and living, and ignite the fires of change.

But that's not what it is, and it's certainly not Le Guin's focus. This is clear in the way she avoids what might be the more dramatic elements of the story, or distances us from them in how they are portrayed. The story is bookended by two examples of that. The opening sees Shevek - although we don't know it's him at this stage - leaving his homeworld and causing quite a bit of upset, seen from the viewpoint of a minor character who never reappears. And the book ends abruptly with no certainty of an outcome.

The capitalist society on the planet Urras that Shevek travels to felt too much like 1950s America rather than some far flung society thousands of years in the future. Other elements of the novel such as Shevek's unfortunate sexual dalliance, the possibility of defecting from the capitalist society to a nearby communist society, and getting caught up in a riot really don't amount to much and the plot as a whole is quite thin.

What I did like about the book was Le Guin's vivid portrayal of a functioning anarchist society on Shevek's homeworld Anarres. And Shevek himself was a likeable character.

The book is more concerned with the question of whether a truly anarchist society can survive, given the generally acquisitive nature of humanity, and during the story there is an indication that even this utopia will fall foul of the general tendency for all systems of government to move towards a hierarchy of control. Shevek struggles against this tendency: "We’ve been saying, more and more often, you must work with the others, you must accept the rule of the majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive."

We never know if Shevek achieves what the cover blurb says. There's not much indication that the capitalist society will change because of him, though the anarchist society may survive if they take the example of his life to heart. But with no certainty about how the story ends, all we are left with is a political thought experiment.

The Pride of Chanur is a first contact chase drama that’s told with breakneck pacing while also unfolding a complex and richly detailed piece of worldbuilding. In turn, the worldbuilding heightens our understanding of the stakes and tensions inherent in the action, and so it too propels the plot along.

Cherryh’s approach to worldbuilding in The Pride of Chanur (and in other books of hers I’ve reviewed like Heavy Time and Hellburner) is to let her fully-formed worlds show themselves to the reader through dialogue and action that primarily serve the plot. Her characters live in the world and work out what is happening based on that lived experience. They don’t discuss or explain things that are obvious to them, so we as readers need to keep on our toes. The characters’ understanding of the events unfolding around them is often limited due to their situation. And we don’t know any more than they do (and usually less). They work things out and we work things out alongside them, gaining our own understanding of their fictional world from their reactions to it.

Personally I love this type of speculative fiction: the sense of vertigo you have as you enter a new world and try to come to grips with how it works. And the reward you get when you read a sentence, put two and two together and realise the implications of what you’ve just read without having to be hit over the head with it.

In Heavy Time and Hellburner, the protagonists are victims of the system they live in so they have to struggle against odds to find agency and whatever redemption they can secure. Interestingly, Chanur struck me as far more dramatic and exciting, perhaps because the protagonist, ship-captain Pyanfar Chanur, has much more agency at the beginning of the novel than those other characters.

Pyanfar runs her own business as a merchant, plying trade between the planets and systems of the Compact, a loose collection of six alien species who rub along peacefully enough because there’s more profit in that than the alternative. A lesser writer might take time to build understanding of the political situation between the species and how they function together on Meetpoint Station, but Cherryh drops us right in the action. An unknown alien runs onto Pyanfar’s ship, starving and half-crazed and bearing signs of abuse, and she gives it shelter, which in turn sparks a series of events that sees her accused of theft by the acquisitive and immoral Kif, and pursued off the station after a firefight on the loading dock.

Her ship, The Pride of Chanur, is a long way from home, and Pyanfar needs to navigate to somewhere that will at least give her a fighting chance to escape her pursuers and – if possible – gain potential allies to help in the fight. But those other alien species may or may not want to help, depending on how safe they themselves feel from the threat of Kif reprisal. And then Pyanfar finds the animal they rescued is an intelligent alien: an outsider from this part of space who calls himself a ‘human’.

Through the action we learn more about Pyanfar and her crew – all of them female Hani (cat-like and bipedal) – and about the Chanur House they belong to, the political infighting between the Hani Houses that is commonplace, and the fact that Pyanfar’s actions out in space may leave her own House open to damaging challenge. We also learn more about the human’s kidnap and torture by the Kif and the status of the other species that form the Compact. All of this plays out against a deadly game of cat and mouse between Pyanfar’s ship and the Kif following her, each move escalating the tension as innocents pay for Pyanfar’s actions and supposed allies become enemies. Nothing is ‘over-explained’. Again and again we draw our own conclusions on actions or statements based on our evolving understanding of Pyanfar’s universe. This is a novel that rewards you close attention.

The resolution is everything you could hope it would be: exciting, fast-paced, high stakes and deeply satisfying. With a hint of more to be resolved in future volumes. Highly recommended.

Hellburner is a direct sequel to Heavy Time and, according to Cherryh, these are the only two books that need to be read in order, which says something about how she's constructed the whole Company Wars saga with multiple entry points into the narrative.

Cherryh takes the same approach as Heavy Time, which I think bears out the general theme of the little guy trying hard to piece together what the hell is going on while at the mercy of people and systems far more powerful than they are. It's told in very close third person POV, which can be hard going at times, but it gives a good sense of the characters being trapped and fighting to survive.

The hints and revelations they do manage to uncover point to an extraordinarily detailed set of machinations, powerplays and political maneuverings around the success or otherwise of the Hellburner project. Every bit as richly detailed as the world of the belters and the company in Heavy Time.

Hellburner itself is a prototype ship designed to give Earth an edge in the ongoing war with the Union and Cyteen (as recounted elsewhere in the series). And again, Cherryh never has a character explaining how the ship and all the new technology work. In keeping with her general approach, everyone 'in novel' knows this stuff and what the hell is going on, so why explain it? That leaves the reader to piece everything together, which may not be to everyone's taste, but I certainly enjoyed it.

I could say more about the actual plot, but it would probably seem quite bare in the recounting. What really makes Hellburner a gripping read is the skill of Cherryh in taking us inside the lives of her characters and her world.

The Klondike days of asteroid mining are long over and it's getting harder to make a living with the government and corporations slapping regulations over routes, assays, claims, flight certification. A lot of it the name of safety, but really it's all about Earth controlling the Belt and easing the freelancers out.

This might sound like something out of the Expanse, but it’s the premise for CJ Cherryh’s Heavy Time, the first prequel to her Hugo-winning Downbelow Station which - together with over twenty other Alliance-Union novels - charts a story of humanity’s future that spans multiple worlds and centuries of time.

James SA Corey acknowledged the debt the Expanse owes to Cherryh’s books in a recent Twitter exchange:

Are you a fan of CJ Cherryh? I’ve started reading her stuff and wondered if maybe she was an influence of yours. Spacers, stationers, and belters; interesting similarities there.

— Curlygec (@Curlygec) January 27, 2022

Yup.

— James S.A. Corey (@JamesSACorey) January 27, 2022

And it’s easy to see the DNA of this book in The Expanse.

As a prequel, I suspect the set up for Heavy Time benefited from the research and worldbuilding Cherryh did while writing Downbelow Station, and the novel could have suffered from that legacy, leaning on that detail at the expense of plot and character. But in fact the opposite is true. Our knowledge is built out of the lived experience and the personal histories of the characters thrown together when two freelancers – Bird and Ben – rescue a fellow freelancer from a wrecked vessel far away from the usual spacelanes. What seems like a tragic accident turns out to be something much more sinister with all three spacers at odds with each other and the company which is trying to control the narrative and supress the truth.

Bird is an old-timer, playing the freelance game long enough to have watched the company slowly erode the rights and profits of belters and he’s seen how bad things get when the freelancers try to push back. Ben is a product of the company system. He thinks he’s smart enough to play them at their own game. Dekker is hopelessly lost, a rookie freelancer traumatised by the accident but desperate to find justice for his dead partner. And then there’s Meg and Sal, both with chequered pasts and links to subversive elements, who see Bird and Ben as potential meal tickets until things start getting very political and the whole situation spirals out of control.

Heavy Time is a masterclass both in demonstrating how to unfold detailed worldbuiding with the lightest of touches as well as how character propels plot.

In 1984, I read Vernor Vinge's Peace War when it was serialised in Analog Magazine. Years later elements of that story still stayed with me and - since this was the age of e-books - I decided to read it again. For obscure reasons, the novel and its follow up Marooned in Realtime were not available on any platform I cared to search, including Gollancz's own SF Gateway site (although his Zones of Thought series was readily available).

I would have given up, but it niggled at me, so I finally bit the bullet and bought a dead tree copy - the compendium Across Realtime. I'm glad I did.

Like the best science fiction, Across Realtime riffs off a simple idea: the bobbles. These are shiny spheres that are created by a bobble generator. They can be any size (depending on the power available) and they can last for any period of time, from milliseconds to millenia. Inside the bobble, time stops. Complete and perfect stasis. The exterior of the bobble is indestructible. Drop it into the sun and the contents remain intact (until or unless the bobble bursts, of course).

The fact that even the bobble creators are unaware of some of the bobbles' more amazing properties leads to some excellent turnarounds in the first book The Peace War, but in both books, the existence of bobble technology is only a starting point. The books extrapolate on many different practical applications for the bobbles, which drive the narrative and action in unexpected directions.

The Peace War focuses on the period 5o years after bobble technology emerged and those who owned it - the Peacers - bobbled every government and military installation on the planet and declared themselves rules 'for the good of all others'. In effect it's a not-so-benevolent dictatorship against which the general population begins to strain, particularly the Tinkers who dabble on the fringes of what is now forbidden technology (because the Peacers are jealous of their monopoly on the creation and control of bobbles). Marooned in Realtime jumps millions of years past the end of the first book to the last remnants of humanity attempting to rebuild civilisation at the far end of time - and the practical applications of bobbles multiply with the benefits of advanced tech to create a dizzying story of survival and conflict.

Vinge's other great strength is worldbuilding, and both novels are greatly enhanced by the fully-formed and complex worlds he has created. Written almost 40 years ago, the books stand up well as thought-provoking pieces of entertainment

As one of Alastair Reynolds's more sarcastic characters, such as Scorpio the Hyperpig - or Triumvir Ilia Volyova - might say, 'you don't read Alastair Reynolds for the breakneck, frenetic pacing.' His dialogue also tends towards the wordy. But you do read Alastair Reynolds for the jaw-dropping concepts.

In the case of Inhibitor Phase, the title promises to bring some kind of significant event - or maybe even a denouement - to this cosmic scourge, which is a huge drawcard. The Inhibitors emerged as the main protagonists of Reynolds's Revelation Space Trilogy, sort of like souped-up versions of Fred Saberhagen's Berserkers or the Doomsday Machine from the Star Trek TOS episode of the same name.

The story starts promisingly enough with an unexpected visitor to a colony in hiding from the Inhibitor machines and a tense negotiation for one of the colonists to take a trip to find a possible weapon against them. There's also a nice 'memory story' that is returned to frequently by one of the characters when they enter hypersleep, which is very entertaining (and more action-packed).

The main story then settles into a sort of 'greatest hits' tour where the ship visits places and people familiar to readers of the original trilogy and has a bit of a run in with the Inhibitors on the way. But after that, the assembled group of travellers moves to another familiar planet and the clear and present threat from the Inhibitors falls to zero, which - coupled with the aforementioned lack of pace - means the story is robbed of all tension. There are also a hell of a lot of coincidences that multiply to the point where you'd think the galaxy was no larger that a small English village. The main characters can't cough without running into an old acquaintance or a vital piece of information to help them find the maguffin that will - possibly - stop the Inhibitors.

They reach their destination and the descriptive passages get more and more detailed, slowing the plot even further until - finally - it's over. But if you thought it would deliver something definitive about the Inhibitor Phase, you'd be mistaken. This is not the end. It's not even the beginning of the end, but it may be etc. etc. There are some really fantastic ideas here. You just need to put up with the prose.