Tag Archives: Science Fiction

The Year of Intelligent Tigers

Books, Doctor Who, Speculative Fiction, , , ,

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Kate Orman’s The Year of Intelligent Tigers is the book every Eighth Doctor Adventure wanted to be.

Every era of Doctor Who has its own stereotype. The Terrance Dicks/Barry Letts template includes UNIT, the Master, 1970s earth, chases, and Venusian Aikido. Hinchcliffe/Holmes stories are horror pastiches starring charismatic master villains; Saward-era stories are violent, cynical tales with a surfeit of tough guys and mercenaries. The EDA stereotype has an alien planet (usually a human colony) inhabited by a couple of squabbling factions, whose mistrust of the TARDIS crew hinders the possibly amnesiac Doctor’s efforts to save everybody from some hitherto-unsuspected threat (usually a forgettable alien monster).

The Year of Intelligent Tigers is about a human colony inhabited by a couple of squabbling factions (humans and Tigers), whose mistrust of the TARDIS crew hinders the amnesiac Doctor’s efforts to save everybody from the hitherto-unsuspected threat of an apocalyptic hurricane season. It’s the ur-EDA! But done with so much more skill it seems to have descended from some distant galaxy to let the children boogie. YoIT (YOIT! Great acronym!) is almost hard to review; I’m tempted to spend 1000 words just listing all the ordinary things YoIT gets right that other EDAs missed. But that would be unfair to a book that’s pretty incredible on its own terms. YoIT’s not a tie-in that rises to the level of an ordinary novel. It’s a smart, exciting, elegant science fiction novel in its own right, something you could give to anyone who loves SF whether or not they care about Doctor Who.

Continue reading The Year of Intelligent Tigers →

Links to Things

Books, Music, Speculative Fiction,
  • This is my new favorite quote of the week:

    Being able to write is a remarkable gift. There’s none better, if you can also think.

    –Edward M. Bernstein

  • Paul Witcover reviews The Secret History of Science Fiction, and has some interesting observations about the difference between SF as practiced by genre writers and SF in mainstream literary writing.

    Speculative fiction writers are apt to treat the subjects of their speculations as if they were real, no matter how outlandish and unlikely; thus, speculative fiction of the highest quality often has a unique reality to it. It employs the tools of mimetic fiction to ground and particularize its flights of fancy, whether they be technological or magical. It takes them literally. It concretizes metaphors. But when mainstream writers venture into speculative fiction, it’s all too often either a day at the playground, during which they feel free to cast aside the mimetic conventions they normally hold to in regard to plot, character, setting, etc., or a trip to the Olde Curiosity Shoppe, where they can pick and choose among exotic settings, objects, atmospheres, etc. to use as symbols and such in their own stories, which remain highly mimetic in a traditional sense. I don’t mean to suggest that this distinction holds for every story published by a mainstream or speculative fiction writer, only that it expresses something true and important about the unique quality of speculative fiction.

    (I don’t think the latter approach is wrong or inferior, but I’m glad it’s not the only approach to speculative fiction.)

  • Wow, Joss Whedon fans are delicate. (I especially like the guy who compares a show getting cancelled to someone’s best friend dying: “Show some respect for the recently departed, or at least show some respect for the recently departed’s grieving friends.”)

  • Douglas Wolk says “The Death of Mistakes Means the Death of Rock.” (via)

  • Mightygodking posts a great short SF story. (via)

Doctor Who: Managra

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Interviewed for a Doctor Who Magazine article years after Virgin Books published his Doctor Who novel Managra, Stephen Marley recalled being “excited about what the series almost was”¦ I thought the point was to consider what it would be like were it done properly.” And, lo, the traditionalists were heard to mutter “how dare he!” On the other hand, this was exactly the point of these books as far as I’m concerned, so I’m pretty much Marley’s ideal reader.

Marley thought the Missing Adventures “went too far in terms of ‘period’ feel.” Still, Managra fits the mold of the early Tom Baker seasons produced by Philip Hinchcliffe: a gothic horror adventure centered around a charismatic madman rather than a “monster.” The difference is ambition. Managra is epic: a big world with a big story reaching back through time and the Doctor’s life, but comprehensibly human on the character level.

Doctor Who was conceived to take people from our familiar world into strange new environments, anywhere in time and space. The 1990s-2000s approach sees the primary purpose of the series as bringing time and space into a familiar world. New worlds are deemphasized; in books like The Janus Conjunction or The Infinity Race, or in the new television series, they’re spaces just large enough to contain a plot for the Doctor to foil. The inhabitants have no lives outside their purpose in the Doctor’s story.

I think we’ve lost something here. Travel between worlds enlarges Doctor Who, allowing it to move between, and colonize, new genres. Endless invasions of Earth make the universe seem smaller. Strange environments are flexible, with great scope for telling different kinds of stories (in the UNIT years, the writers feared the series might become a series of alien invasions—what we’ve seen from the last two decades of Earth-based stories). New worlds provide more space for satire, commentary (contemporary alien invasion stories usually work on the level of “pick a trend and make it evil!”), and exploration of character under unusual circumstances.

And sometimes they’re just fun.

Continue reading Doctor Who: Managra →

Unseen Academicals

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I love Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. I will admit not every volume is a classic. The early books are shallow parodies, and sometimes Pratchett translates real-world phenomena much too closely and literally into the Discworld. I’m talking here about arbitrary pop culture, rather than institutions like police or postal services that would appear in some form in any functional society even in a fantasy world. Reaper Man is an excellent short novel about Death getting laid off and finding a job as a farmhand, which sadly stepped into a broken teleporter with a tedious short novel about evil shopping carts. The Last Continent is a pointless trudge through every “Australian” cliché in the Australian Cliché Encyclopedia. Moving Pictures—set in “Holy Wood,” fergodsakes—is the one Discworld book I’ve never been able to start, let alone finish.

So I wasn’t expecting much from Unseen Academicals, which features on its (U.S.) cover a bunch of Discworld hands reaching for a (British) football. But you know what? It was actually damn good.

The actual football (a.k.a. soccer) content of Unseen Academicals is low. We do get a few “look, this is how [THING] is done on the Discworld” jokes; and, yes, the book does end with the Big Game, although luckily the most tedious bits are given as sportscaster commentary set off in easy-to-skip block quotation format. But Unseen Academicals isn’t so much about football as about everything around football. It’s about how sports ritualize and manage conflicts. Or fail to. It’s another variation on the Discworld series’s major project: taking a late medieval sword-and-sorcery world and civilizing the hell out of it. Lord Vetinari had banned football because it inspired riots among the more thuggish fans; the games, and the riots, have continued in the streets. As the book opens he’s realized that to keep the violence under control he has to bring the game into the open and tame it.

(The rest of this review may contain spoilers. I’ll put it behind a link.) Continue reading Unseen Academicals →

Vampire Science

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All I’ve been posting lately have been Interactive Fiction Competition reviews, which have a limited audience. So I’m posting this book review I had on hand. Which is about a Doctor Who novel, and therefore also has a limited audience, albeit a completely different limited audience. Sorry.

When, in Kate Orman and Jonathan Blum’s Vampire Science, a villain sneeringly refers to Sam as “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” it’s hard to remember that in 1997 most people thought of Buffy as a crappy Paul Reubens movie. Vampire Science slipped in at the beginning of a vampire tsunami. Anne Rice started it; Buffy and Laurel K. Hamilton built momentum; today the healthiest marketing category in SF is “paranormal romance,” the genre of hot love between vampires, lycanthropes, and assorted psychics.

Vampires usually represent one (or both) of two things: disease and sex. “Disease” is the older metaphor. For the longest time, how disease got around was a mystery. So a town had some mysterious deaths, and people dug up a corpse for some reason, and it seemed very well preserved. And it looked like the fingernails had grown, and weren’t those canines longer?  So they staked the thing. Problem solved! This school of vampirism’s most famous representative is Nosferatu’s ratlike Count Orlok.

The other strand of the mythology portrays vampirism as… ah, intimate contact (a phrase which describes both subtext and text). These vampires are hypnotically glamourous. Usually literally. It’s most famously represented by the novel Nosferatu plagiarized: Dracula. Jonathan Harker hardly has time to unpack before he’s surrounded by lovely women with interesting dental work, and I’ve never seen a version of this story in which Lucy and Mina’s trysts with the Count aren’t sexualized.

Over the past couple of decades an army of stories forcibly evolved modern vampires from seductive psychopaths into the heroines’ boyfriends. Sex has won the Vampire Metaphor War. What’s remarkable about Vampire Science, then, is that Orman and Blum found something else to do with their vampires. Continue reading Vampire Science →

Mistborn: Not Quite Awful

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So how many aspects of good writing can you hack out of a Big Fat Fantasy and still have something I’m willing to read through—or at least skim through—to the end? Thanks to Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy, I now know the answer: almost all of them.

By any sane standard Mistborn is ninety percent pabulum. The prose is the written equivalent of an oatmeal-on-wonder-bread sandwich. The dialog is subtly unlike anything any human would actually say, but that’s understandable; the characters aren’t people so much as mannequins pushed around a chessboard by an army of tiny robots. The little narrative details that, in a good novel, give rise to its most memorable and vivid images are too ordinary to recall. There is humor—for a trilogy that builds to a total apocalypse, Mistborn is charmingly unwilling to sink into the kind of unrelieved bleakness that battered me into giving up on George R. R. Martin after four bloated books—but I only know it’s humor because, like a long-lost Wonder Twin, it takes the form of humor. None of it is funny.

Then there’s the underlying worldview, with which I have Issues. Continue reading Mistborn: Not Quite Awful →

British Summertime (and Paul Cornell’s Books in General)

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The cover of British Summertime.

British Summertime, Paul Cornell’s second entirely original novel, was published in 2002. Since then he’s published short stories but, aside from a novelization of a BBC webcast, no more novels. Lately he’s been writing for television and for Marvel comics. I can’t help feeling he’s come down in the world.

I’d like another book from Cornell. You will not believe that after reading this review. I ask that you take it on faith. Paul Cornell, I’ve come to realize, is one of those writers whose books I enjoy for reasons I cannot fully explain. Ask me why his books are worth my while and I’ll spend half the time on apologetic “okay, admittedlies,” “despites,” and “even thoughs.” I liked British Summertime, mostly, but all I can think to write about are my reservations, which have to do with Cornell’s obsessive sentimentality. His books drip with sentiment. Like Charles Dickens dipped in treacle. It’s both charming and irritating, in at least three ways. (Although as I’ve worked on this review I’ve come to think that “sentiment” isn’t the right word for the latter two. Maybe “unwarranted optimism.”)

Cornell’s books bask in nostalgia for a stereotype of early twentieth-century England (which seems to be the home of many Cornell characters’ speech patterns). It’s gotten worse over the years. In 1995 his Doctor Who novel Human Nature celebrated the death of Victorian values and the beginning of modernity; a dozen years later in Cornell’s television adaptation the hero learned to Do His Duty and die for his country. British Summertime, written in between, features Commander Leyton, an alternate-universe space pilot who talks like a stereotypical World War 2 RAF pilot. (Apparently this is a takoff on Dan Dare.) Leyton’s navigator is the disembodied head of a campy flapper. It’s like they walked out of the Powell and Pressburger production of Bring Me the Head of Zelda Fitzgerald.

What’s interesting is that, just while I’m reading, I’m willing to suspend disbelief in this sceptered-isle, stiff-upper-lip stuff. Continue reading British Summertime (and Paul Cornell’s Books in General) →

A Couple of Torchwood Books

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Recently a couple of Torchwood books were recommended to me on the Jade Pagoda mailing list. I’ve now read Slow Decay, and decided to review it. I’m going to begin by talking about Another Life. I read Another Life, and tried to read Border Princes, not long after they came out. This is why I’ve only now read Slow Decay.

Torchwood is strange. It has moments of genuinely good drama, sometimes, but for the most part it’s fun for reasons the producers did not intend and will never fully understand. At heart it’s a series about dumb, horny college kids who somehow got the keys to the most powerful paranormal investigations agency in Wales… basically a Battlestar Galactica-style dark reimagining of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, except instead of a talking Great Dane it has Ianto.

Continue reading A Couple of Torchwood Books →

Doctor Who Reviews: Shadowmind

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You know what’s interesting about Shadowmind? It turns out I’d never read it before. I skipped it when it came out due to a limited teenage book-buying budget and mediocre reviews. Much later I decided I wanted an obsessive-compulsively complete New Adventures collection, picked up a copy at a used bookstore… and immediately forgot about it.

You can’t blame me. By that time I was all too familiar with Christopher Bulis. Among Doctor Who fans the Bulis name is synonymous with “meh.” As I’ve mentioned before, Bulis’s trademark move is to take a really amazing, ass-kicking central concept and surgically remove the fun. I’ll bet his novels sound wonderful in outline–Space marines meet Dungeons and Dragons! A steampunk expedition to the moon! I imagine Bulis working far into the night on his outline. Sweating over it until it gleams. With sweat. Finally he holds the precious document to the light. It’s perfect. “This is the most brilliant idea I’ve had so far!” exclaims Bulis. “Now… how can I make it suck?”

Continue reading Doctor Who Reviews: Shadowmind →