Books of the Month - three pieces of speculative fiction

I have been bitten by the reading bug lately and this is the second book of the month post in a row featuring three novels. This time all three are speculative fiction (as discussed previously). 

I'm going to review them in the order I read them. The first book was another pick up from TK Maxx. 

The Power - Naomi Alderman

This book was published in 2016 and imagines what would happen if women suddenly developed the power to conduct electricity (the Power), establishing them as the dominant gender. It's framed through being written as a fictionalised history written by a man in a future civilisation, 5,000 years hence. Throughout the books are drawings of archaeological discoveries dating from the time period being written about.

The framing includes advice from an editor that it seems far-fetched that men were ever the dominant sex. There's also a rather patronising suggestion that the fictional author considers publishing it under a female name to avoid it being categorised as women's literature. I wondered if the real author had been on the receiving end of similar sentiments.

The book follows several female characters who either develop the Power of have it awakened in them. All the characters are in some way oppressed, abused or overshadowed by men, and the Power enables them to break free. There is also one male character who is chronicling the impact the Power has on various societies and it's really through his eyes that the shift becomes noticeable, as he finds it increasingly unsafe to be in the presence of women.

I was interested in the development of a women-centred and led religion, evolving rapidly out of Catholicism, which echoed the growth of populist movements in organised religions that sometimes outflank the established ecclesiastical structures. It felt believable to me, because new religious movements can take root and spread very quickly - and would be much more robust if they were linked to a sudden societal change like the emergence of the Power. There is, however, a natural explanation for the sudden emergence of the Power, although details are kept to a minimum. 

There's a bit of gore and violent vignettes, including some sexual violence. There are some loose threads that are left frayed at the end of the book. But overall, there are plenty of points that made me think about gender politics, and the reversal of power dynamics was sometimes amusing, sometimes frightening. The unwillingness of the female editor in 5,000 years time to accept the idea that women aren't just naturally aggressive, for example, made me smile. 

Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut

I bought this book in a deal at HMV because I had never read it and it appears on most lists of classic books one should read. I knew it was about the wartime firebombing of Dresden. I assumed it would be a straight up war book. I was wrong. 

This is the second Kurt Vonnegut book that I've read. A few years back I read Breakfast of Champions. I didn't like that much, and, truthfully, although I can see why this is considered a classic novel, I didn't like this book much either. I think it's just that I don't get on with Vonnegut's style. 

Having said that there are moments and throwaway lines in this book that are almost instantly memorable. There is a very early comment that foreshadows the destruction to come when the narrator says that Dresden post-war must have "tons of human bone meal in the ground". 

There is another cynically comical comment about a woman who "Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops." With lines like that, I feel I really should have liked the book more!

The main character in the book is called Billy Pilgrim. The plot device is that he has been abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. He now experiences all of time all at once, which is a side-effect of travelling on a flying saucer. So his recollections of the war, being captured, being incarcerated in a converted abattoir (Slaughterhouse Five) that ironically protects him from the firebombing, and being involved in the grim clean up operation in Dresden afterwards, are mixed up with his life after the war, his family, his capture by aliens and subsequent captivity in a zoo amusing Tralfamadorians, and so on. 

I think it was that fantastical aspect that I found difficult. On reflection, it did distract from the absolute horror of what happened in Dresden. The vivid description of pulling bodies from the rubble afterwards ('opening up a corpse mine') and there being too many dead people to deal with other than incinerate them perhaps needed leavening with the alien abduction and Billy's happier post-war experiences. 

It might all be meant to indicate that Billy has gone mad as a result of his wartime experiences. But it's played with a straight bat - although, I guess, madness seems real to the person experiencing it. It may just be that it's Vonnegut's way of processing what he witnessed in Dresden and he needs to make this fantastical to deal with the fact that the worst bits of the story actually happened. 

There was some interesting commentary on the American poor, which I will save for another post. And the idea of experiencing time in a concurrent way rather than as causal consecutive moments felt very up to date - covering similar ground to some of the chapters in Existential Physics, which was my Book of the Month back in June. Not bad, considering Vonnegut published this in 1969.

The Boys from Brazil - Ira Levin

The other book in the HMV deal, and the second book by Ira Levin I have read this year. I reviewed The Stepford Wives last month. As with Stepford, I knew the basic premise of this story - Nazis in South America have perfected cloning and are seeking to restore the Third Reich.

What I didn't expect - the same as with Stepford - was to get quite so gripped by the story. The slow reveal of what is going on happens for both the main character, ageing Nazi-hunter Yakov Liebermann, and for the reader. The scene where Liebermann encounters his second teenaged clone was incredibly well done, and I really got a sense of the world slipping sideways for the character as he tried to process what he was seeing. 

Because the book was published in 1976, the science behind cloning has to be explained - even the word 'clone' has to be explained. I suspect this was cutting edge knowledge at the time of publication - but I was intrigued by how even then there was speculation that some governments had already been cloning larger mammals and maybe even humans. I remember the fuss in the late 1990s about Dolly the Sheep who was announced as the first sheep to be successfully cloned. So it was interesting to read characters speculating about it twenty years earlier. 

It's a short book that concludes with a discussion about the morality of killing children that might grow up to be evil. Liebermann and his anti-Nazi allies have to hope that the boys from Brazil defy their genetic heritage. The ultimate ending of the experiment is left ambiguous as to what might happen, which I quite liked for the ending. 

Book of the Month: Shards of Earth

I'm just about scraping this book of the month review into this month. But I'm pleased with myself as I bought this book in Browsers Bookshop in Porthmadog during our  break in North Wales last week and have managed to read all 533 pages of it already.

This is the first big, fat science-fiction book I've read in several years. I used to read a few a year but since my reading animus unexpectedly evaporated during the pandemic I've barely touched any fiction. Getting thoroughly absorbed in this book felt like a slight reawakening.

I picked the book up because I recognised Adrian Tchaikovsky's name. I really enjoyed his book called Children of Time, which was a deep time epic charting the evolution of a sentient race of giant spiders after a terraforming experiment goes wrong. Among other things, it changed my feelings towards spiders. The follow up book, Children of Ruin, wasn't as good although this time it was octopuses evolving into a civilisation. I already liked octopuses, but there were a couple of other issues with the book as it wove in an alien life form that complicated the storyline. 

Shards of Earth is in a different future-verse. In this story, Earth has been destroyed by an entity called an Architect which turned the planet into an abstract sculpture. Thus began a war across known space between humans and their alien allies against the Architects who could appear without warning and destroy a planet, moon, asteroid, or anywhere else where humans were trying to live. 

The story focuses on an 'Int' (short for Intermediary) called Idris who is a human who underwent radical brain surgery to try and unlock psychic communication powers. Idris and his fellow Ints were able to eventually communicate with the Architects and ask them to stop killing humans - and they did, disappearing from the universe. 

And now it seems they are back, so it's up to Idris to save the human race again. He is helped on his quest by Solace, a genetically engineered warrior woman from the Parthenon sisterhood and the crew of the spaceship he had been working on as a deep space pilot. The story is well-paced, moving quickly across several interesting locations for fights, heists and daring escapes. 

This is the first book in a trilogy called The Final Architecture (which even has its own Wikipedia page already!). However, even though it's the first of three, the story does have a conclusion and could be read as a stand alone. I am keen to find out what happens next but this book doesn't end with all the crew in peril or anything really annoying like that. 

Tchaikovsky populates this universe with some interesting, and inscrutable, alien races. I like the way he leaves some of those races ineffable and hard to understand. In a weird way that felt realistic and kept the aliens alien. 

He also captures tensions between ordinary humans who both fear and need the genetically engineered humans of the Parthenon, and the Partheni who have become a bit isolated and don't really understand ordinary humans any more. The all-female soldier army is clearly based on the Amazons of old legends, although there was a touch of the Space Marines from the Warhammer universe alongside the female Martian soldier Bobbi, in The Expanse books. There is an interesting debate at one point over the ethics of genetic engineering that captured the nuance of what might be lost by smoothing out weaknesses in the human genome, but it's kept short and doesn't derail or overshadow the story.

Another race linked to humans are the machine intelligences known as Hivers. They were created by humans but subsequently gained their autonomy. They are formed of several tiny machines that aggregate to form disparate entities before reverting back into the general swarm of tiny robots. Conceptually, they were much more interesting than the average robot or android. I felt they were the best machine characters I've read about outside of the Culture novels by Iain M Banks. 

Amidst all the chaos and dread of the return of the Architects there are also some moments of warmth and humour. One line, delivered by a Hiver character was so acidly sarcastic it actually made me laugh out loud while reading it, while there were several other interchanges that made me smile. 

So, at some point, I will be getting book two in the series and hopefully it will hook me in to read it just as quickly. Keep an eye out for a future blog post review of it!

The 1962 film verson of The Day of the Triffids

During our holiday week, we watched a number of DVDs that we had picked up cheaply in a charity shop. One of them was the film version of The Day of the Triffids released in 1962. In this review I am going to include some spoilers for both the film and the book version of The Day of the Triffids, so if you haven't seen this or read the book and you want to, then stop reading now!

The DVD cover

I am a big fan of John Wyndham's writing and have re-read The Day of the Triffids a few times. He was an elegant writer with a very lean approach to storytelling. There was no unnecessary descriptive text in his work. He got on with the action. When there is exposition in his books, he handles it all very matter-of-fact and tells the reader what the reader needs to know at that point. Sometimes there are hints of the darkness ahead - because there is always darkness ahead - but he doesn't overdo it.

This film was produced about ten years after The Day of the Triffids was first published. And they butchered the book as they turned it into a screenplay. That would be my biggest gripe about it.

I don't really expect much from a 1960s monster movie. The direction was very stagey and unnatural. Sometimes that doesn't matter in a film, but this was clunky. The script was poor. Characters would say things then other characters would say things and what they said didn't necessarily seem to follow on. There was one actress who seemed to only be in the film to scream theatrically when she saw a triffid. (That annoyed me particularly because John Wyndham didn't write his female characters like that - in his books women were usually resourceful, brave, clever and funny. They didn't just stand there screaming.)

The film did some scenes well, particularly cutaway scenes on a cruise liner with everyone struck blind, passengers and crew, and the same with a passenger airplane that was doomed to crash. Those bits were suitably chilling. The rest, not so much. 

It's possible to do an adaptation that sticks to the story. The BBC version from 2009 (which I blogged about here but haven't seen since it was broadcast) was much closer to the book. This film felt like it had been adapted by someone who hadn't really read or understood the book, been given a list of principal characters and told to get on with it. 

The only part that was really close to the book was the opening scenes that established the lead character, Bill, in a hospital bed with his eyes bandaged while everyone else looks at the "meteor" lightshow, and then the following morning when he removes his dressings and discovers everyone else has gone blind. 

The triffids themselves were only mildly menacing monsters in this film. But they are meant to be only mildly menacing because they're plants. They don't run after you even though they can move. It's the ones lurking, hidden in the bushes that get you with their deadly stings. In the first third of the film, the director made good use of not showing the entire monster, just a slimy root on a stair, or a flower betraying the presence of a triffid hiding in with other greenery. But then they became slowly-advancing rubbery aggressors and it was hard to take them seriously. 

There is a great visual sequence where Bill rigs up a flame thrower and torches massed ranks of triffids being held at bay by an electric fence, which is an event that was sort of lifted from the book. It's surprisingly violent, watching the triffids burn. But the action had been so staccato up to that point that the big set piece didn't have any tension to it. The final denouement - with the discovery that seawater could be used to turn triffids into puddles of oozing slime - wasn't part of the book at all. 

Where this film really went wrong was making the triffids space aliens carried on meteors. That's not in the book. Triffids are discovered in an African rainforest and then deliberately farmed for their highly versatile oil. In fact, that's why Bill ends up in hospital having eye surgery in the book - on a visit to a triffid farm one of the plants tries to sting him and some of the venom ends up in his eyes. 

So, the triffids don't arrive on meteors. And, as a further twist, the lights in the sky aren't actually meteors at all! What's revealed in the book is that a satellite had been launched that was a weapon designed to cause blindness, and it had malfunctioned. 

The idea of space-borne weaponry was incredibly forward-thinking in 1951. It was a few years before the first orbiting satellites were launched. It's probably the scariest part of the story - and it's the bit that gets left out of adaptations!

Because the point of The Day of the Triffids is that humans are prone to exploiting very dangerous natural resources, and are very resourceful at thinking up ways to kill other humans, and if something went wrong it could get very nasty. Basically, John Wyndham's message is that we don't need an alien invasion to doom us. Humans are very capable of dooming ourselves. 

John Wyndham did write an alien invasion novel a couple of years later. The Kraken Wakes is an equally vivid story, and possibly edges The Day of the Triffids in both concept and delivery. It hasn't ever been made into a film, but given how film-makers missed the point of the triffids, maybe that's a blessing. 

7 things that really probably do not exist

The Mongolian Death Worm
The Golden Plates that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon from (sorry, Mormons, I like you, but you have to admit, the provenance is ropey and the claim that the plates had to be returned to a celestial librarian seems a little "convenient")
Thetans
Glittery vampires
The Force (ooh, controversial)
Altruistic cats
Aliens in flying saucers probing people

What would you add? (Or what of these does exist?)

Ask a theologian

Had a (small) older youth cell group tonight which was 'ask a theologian (i.e. me) any question you want'.

The questions (in no particular order):
Should we believe in aliens?
Should I go out drinking with my mates?
What is a 'doctrine'?
What about the dinosaurs?
What about the stuff Jesus said about adultery and divorce?
Why is the Old Testament about Israel and the Israelites?
How literally should we believe the Bible?
Should you be baptised before you take communion (because in another church they won't let you take communion unless you've been baptised)?
Why did people live to ridiculously old ages in the Bible?

Afterwards the general consensus was 'this was good - let's do it again'.

Omni or Xeno?

Discussing last night’s Torchwood (Episode 7 ‘Greeks bearing Gifts’) today with Matt, we noted how, after only half series so far it seems that everyone on the team is bisexual. Or ends up smooching someone of the same-sex at least.

Except that this being a sci-fi show, most of the same-sex snogging is with aliens in a human body. Or a cyberwoman in stainless steel hotpants. (What was that about? Don't get me started on the potential chafing...)

But does having it off with an alien inhabiting a human body really make a person bi or homo? The debate is whether this makes you Omnisexual (i.e. you’d shag anything) or Xenosexual (i.e. you screw aliens).