February, Borehamwood
It's been an odd couple of months. Mixed good and bad: a decent enough second-hand bookshop has opened in town - allowing me to track down a few holes in my collection, but the publisher of the Net magazine I've been writing for has decided to run off with all the profits, without paying any of his freelancers - including the editor.
Ho hum. At least I've had time to read a lot of books, and build my World Wide Web pages. That, and marvel at the new IBM adverts. Not so much adverts for IBM, more for technology: Les vieux by the Seine, who want bigger disks, the Net-surfing nuns...
There's a Hard Rain...
Sometimes I wonder if Bruce Sterling has a wire in the back of my head. Each time I pick up on of his novels or collections, it feels like I'm in Charlie Stross' Watford flat, having one of those conversations that ends up as a novel outline. Heavy Weather was like that, only more so. And on a wet February night, after the warmest and wettest January recorded, I wonder if 2031 is really that far away... The heavy weather seems to be here already...
They say that near future hard Sf is the hardest to write, and I can see why. My day job is as a research engineer in a laboratory developing the telcommunications systems of tomorrow, and in the evenings I freelance as a computer journalist specialising in the Internet. Heavy Weather, for all its tornado hunting trappings, is a novel about the effects of advanced communication technologies on the world, and how to survive them. These are the tools I build and use every day of the week, and it's a future I can see coming. All the technologies that Sterling writes about are on the drawing board or in the lab. Is it 2031, or is it the day after tomorrow?
Sterling's seen the future, and it's broken. Digital money, virtually free communications, virtual phones: all foretelling the end of organised society, freeing the people from the state, but shattering the social contract. All that's left is what you can hack - your skills, your hobbies. The Storm Troupers hack tornadoes, and they know that the big one is coming. Threading their way through greenhouse America, home of structure hits (disorganised urban terrorism), refugee crises and advanced technologies, they wait for the ultimate tornado, knowing that it will either kill them or change them.
Sterling is good at travelogue: Schismatrix, Islands In The Net, The Artificial Kid - nearly every novel he's written. Heavy Weather is no different, more focused on Sterling's native Texas, perhaps, but travelogue nonetheless. As the Troupers chase twisters, we follow them across the American midwest, seeing the results of civilisation's on-going phase digital change. Dystopia, perhaps, after Islands In The Net's Utopia. But, whilst Islands' Utopia had flaws, Weather's Dystopia has hope. Sterling is, at heart, an optimist. Perhaps, if brokengenes can be repaired, if cities can be reborn, the perhaps we can fix the future...
There are only a few books that have given me a taste of what tomorrow may really be like. John Brunner's thematic quartet was first, with the Shockwave Rider the best of the bunch. Then there was Brin's Earth, if you can overlook the pocket black hole machine and the deus in machinam ending. Vinge's True Names comes close, and Gibson and Stephenson are allegorical guides. Sterling's short stories and novels, as well as his non-fiction, have been recent additions to the list.
If the Singularity doesn't sneak up on us, and change everything, then Heavy Weather is one of Sterling's roadmaps to tomorrow...
Recent Reads
Green Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson: The Mars trilogy progresses, along with the terraforming. Robinson is using Mars as a focus of his Utopian yearnings, and the struggles of the Greens and the Reds, as they try to shape the world and themselves, map onto the Earth of the 1990s, and the threat of our ongoing terraforming efforts. The forthcoming Blue Mars is awaited...
Green Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson: Not the Mars trilogy, precursor perhaps, aim possibly. This is Mars post terraforming, a world newly alive, where the cliffs of Olympus Mons challenge a dispartate group of climbers, and shake an ex-politician into a new appreciation of his home. Highly recommended (and if you find the Tor Doubles edition, it comes backed with Arthur C. Clarke's wonderful A Meeting With Medusa).
Grailblazers, Tom Holt: Pratchett doesn't do much for me, but Holt is much more to my taste. Pratchett puts modern characters into mythical situations, whilst Holt puts the mythical into the modern. Grailblazers is Arthurian myth in head-long collision with Major's Britain, and all the while in the background lurks the dark, brooding, evil figure of Father Christmas.
Faust Among Equals, Tom Holt: Okay, I confess, I've been on a Tom Holt trip, warped myth is something that appeals to my warped sense of humor. Marlowe's Faust is a classic tale, whilst Faust Among Equals is, err, rather different. 'Lucky George' Faust has escaped at last from theme park Hell (now renamed EuroBosch), and on he's on the run. Is the Milk Marketing Board behind it all? Will Helen Of Troy bankrupt another kidnapper? And how do you evict an entire continent?
Mysterium, Robert Charles Wilson: Robert Charles Wilson is one of those writers I buy on sight. He has an unusual talent, a means of combining two sub-genres and giving them a spin into something new and strange. Mysterium is the strange child that results from Wilson directing the mating between gnosticism and parallel worlds. Recommended.
Burning Bright, Melissa Scott: When VGSF launched its paperback line in the 80s, one of their first titles was Melissa Scott's Five-Twelfths of Heaven. Since then I've been picking her books up as quickly as possible. Burning Bright is her latest, a tale of politics and gaming on a world that lies between cold-warring empires. Not perhaps Scott at her best, but certainly a lot better than most current Sf.
Web Of Angels, John M. Ford: Back into the archives for an out-of-print first novel. Web of Angels is literate proto-cyberpunk (as is to be expected fom the erudite Mr Ford). Shakespearean tragedy across a networked universe reminiscent of Schutarikul's Inquest and Brunner's Shockwave Rider. Madness and love: who can ask for more?
Teach Yourself HTML Web Publishing in 7 Days, Laura Lemay: This is the (at the moment) indispensible guide to self-publishing on the Internet. If you have ever fancied weaving your own corner of the World Wide Web, then this is the book for you. Of course, if you haven't, then it's complete techno-weenie gooble-de-gook, but these are the breaks... If you've got the tech, then take a look at what I've done on the Net - where you'll probably find this piece...
Mailbits and Sundry Spotted Acnestoids
I went to see Stargate the other day, only to be confronted by the ultimate Tuckerisation. Was it really our very own Mr Langford who'd discovered the eponymous device, and did this mean that the filmmakers' research had included a copy of The Space Eater. Enquiring minds want to know...
Tanya: The Awakeners. This was the first Tepper I read. I still think it's the best. Somehow each time I finish one of her books I feel quite disppointed. Wild Cards is rather fun - though I do recommend tracking down Howard Waldrop's notes for "Thirty Minutes Over Broadway" - that man does so much work...
Maureen: It seems that the X-Files is starting to do what I feared all along: Turn into Dr Who. The last episode I watched was an intriguing remake of The Green Death. At least it's becoming Pertwee era Dr Who. Will Sculley be seconded to UNIT? Oh well, at least Babylon 5 has returned, and I can carry on working out who is betraying who, and what is really happening....
"That's All Folks…"
Simon Bisson
http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~simon/