Books & Zines

I’m a fan of space opera. Have been since I was a starry-eyed teen reading whatever SF I could find in my local second-hand bookshops. This inevitably included Golden Age works – van Vogt, Asimov, Pohl, E.F. Russel and more – with yellowing pages and, at least in my memory, instantly recognisable covers, usually by Chris Foss. Often via the same shops I also read various works of ‘new space opera’: Banks, Hamilton, Greenland, Sheffield, MacLeod and many others.

Coming to both epochs of space opera mixed together in one great melange meant that I had little grasp of how the latter reacted to the former, refracted through the lens of the intervening New Wave and the differing politics of generations and cultures. To me it was all science fiction. Yet whilst I liked much of what I read I enjoyed the new space opera more. A personal reaction, of course, and one reflected on two decades later. I’m just laying the groundwork for a little context, because around that same time I read an E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith book and I thought it was shit.

Last week I posted a rambling half-rant about Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy. A few months after writing the first draft of that rant I conveniently read Spiderlight, a standalone novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky, who last year firmly established himself in my mind as an author I really like. Now, Spiderlight isn’t an exceptionally interesting novel. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed it a lot, and clearly Tchaikovsky had fun writing it. But it’s not a major novel of his by any stretch of the imagination.

I do however want to point at Spiderlight and say: hey, here’s a subversive fantasy novel that has a really clear idea of what it is setting out to do. It establishes a very archetypal fantasy setting and plot in the Dungeons & Dragons vein, with Light and Dark pitted against one another, and then steadily undermines that juxtaposition by presenting hypocrisies and omissions in that metanarrative. It crescendos with a similar reveal to The First Law trilogy, presenting a singular individual driving the engine of history and suffering. And then it resolves that revelation, folding it into the theme it has meticulously explored. All that in about a sixth of the wordcount of First Law.

I’m not saying Spiderlight is a better novel. It reads very much like someone’s mildly satirical AD&D campaign, right down to the mismatched party of six (priest, mage, warrior, ranger, thief, monstrous spiderling) and on-the-nose sendup of fantasy tropes. It doesn’t set out to do anything nearly as ambitious as Abercrombie’s reputation-making trilogy. It’s pure fantasy fun. But it is driven by an absolute clarity about what it intends to achieve, and it does so with a satisfying conclusion that is consistent with what came before.

(I hope to write more about Tchaikovsky soon. Dogs of War and Children of Time were two of the most memorable science fiction novels I read in 2018, and I devoured this year’s Children of Ruin within days of release. He really is rather good.)

I blitzed through this entire trilogy in about five days. That’s preposterously fast. I was reading the ebook editions so it was only after the fact that I learned these are not slim volumes. Collectively we’re talking over 600,000 words of fiction. Oops? I feel bad for my partner, who did remark that she’d barely spoken to me over the weekend.

That first volume, though. Reading it for the first time I could understand how this 2006 novel came at fantasy readers out of leftfield and helped fix the concept of ‘grimdark fantasy’ in literary genre culture (or at least its corollary marketing categories). The novel still feels fresh in its playfulness and the warmth it has for certain characters, for all that they’re shitty people by and large.

The second volume I liked largely for the memorable Glokta story arc, with the siege of Dagoska providing a decent change of scene, and the entertaining shambles that is the war in Angland and its key cast. The third slice of this book – an ultimately pointless quest – serves to set up later ideas and contextualise a few setpieces, but little more. Middle novels in trilogies are awkward; fine. I was still onboard.

Then there’s the third volume.

~cracks knuckles~

Like a lot of snfal concepts the time travel conceit has been knocking around for, uh, some time now. It’s perhaps older than most, having been popularised by Wells almost 120 years ago. Even the space opera genre is forty years its junior. 

So how do you make something that has been done, time and time again, across pretty much every medium you might imagine, feel fresh? One way to answer that question is to look at pop culture, the entertainment realm of a globalised mass consumerist social sphere, which in its pathologic aversion to risk must continually devise ways to sell us the same stories we flocked to before. Pop culture in 2019 regurgitates itself endlessly, outpacing parody and much satire: another new Spiderman trilogy, PC Music, JK Rowling’s twitter account as retcon feed, another remake of an 80s franchise that nobody asked for because it’s safer than ‘a new IP’, an endless procession of copy-pasted retro-futurist aesthetics. 

Pop culture permeates our existence, and the way it eats itself and is continually reborn is not solely the preserve of creators and corporate owners. The products of popular culture also command our attention and propagate in the form of memes. Images structure jokes by way of their source and are shared online at lightning speed. Quotes become soundbites, their deployment a game between those in the know. Pseudoprivate languages form within communities and between friends, a series of shared signifiers of personal significance, but which might as easily be recognised by an outsider as leave a loved one bemused. Contemporary popular culture is, after all, a battleground; not of ideology but of franchises warring for attention, for eyeballs, for ad dollars and disposable income. 

A part of me is inescapably, incorrigibly fond of aquatic monster stories. It’s the same part of me that’s drawn to cinematic creature features. Coupled with childhood affection for gigantic dinosaurs and childhood exposure to endless photos from my parents’ scuba diving trips, this fondness is why I enjoy literary junk food like Peter Benchley’s The Beast, a follow-up to Jaws starring a gigantic man-eating squid, and Deep Rising, an extremely 1990s action-horror flick starring a bunch of scenery-chewing stereotypes and a panoply of gigantic man-eating tentacle monsters. 

This melange of bad taste lead me to a copy of Steve Alten’s The Meg, the 1997 novel behind, uhhh, Last Summer’s Soonest To Be Forgotten Cheap Blockbuster. And holy crap, it’s bad. 

In the first chapter of her book Eddo-Lodge recounts a story from 1919, seven months after the end of the First World War. In Liverpool, where post-war employment opportunities were scarce, a hundred black factory workers lost their jobs without warning. White workers refused to work with them. The same month “a Caribbean man was stabbed in the face by two white men after an argument over a cigarette”. Street fights and police raids of black homes followed, culminating in the tragic death of a twenty-four-year-old seaman called Charles Wootton. A white mob threw him into the water and, as he attempted to swim to safety, he was pelted by bricks until he sank. In the following days, white mobs marched the streets of Liverpool. 

Later in that same chapter we read of Guy Bailey, a nineteen-year-old Jamaican man. In 1963 a local youth worker arranged a job interview for him with the Bristol bus service, having first confirmed that jobs were available and that Bailey possessed the necessary qualifications. On arrival, as Bailey recounted in a BBC interview almost fifty years later, he heard the Bristol Omnibus Company’s receptionist tell the manager “your two o’clock appointment is here. But he’s black.” The manager’s response was “Tell him we have no vacancies here.” 

In ‘Embers of War’, predecessor to ‘Fleet of Knives’, we were introduced to the decommissioned intelligent warship Trouble Dog, which in a former life had been complicit in the destruction of the sentient jungle-world of Pelapatarn. This orbital strike ended the Conglomeration-Outwarder war, perhaps preventing hundreds of thousands of human deaths at the cost of a genocide of planetary proportions. Following this, Trouble Dog renounced its former ties to the Conglomeration navy and joined the House of Reclamation, an organisation devoting its considerable resources to rescue operations throughout human-colonised space. In its journey toward redemption Trouble Dog is joined by Captain Sal Konstanz, a member of the defeated Outwarders who helped rescue some of the few human survivors from Pelapatarn. 

The shadow of Pelapatarn hung heavily over ‘Embers of War’, a space opera expressly concerned with redemption. Trouble Dog muses on its role at Pelapatarn, a time before it imagines it possessed a conscience; about what it is to grieve; about how it is still at heart a warship and what that truth speaks to; and whether its self-reinvention as an instrument to save lives can ever be enough. The Dog’s counterpart in that novel is Ona Sudak, a poet who – it is later revealed – is better known to humanity as Annelida Deal, the Conglomeration officer who ordered the attack on Pelapatarn. Sudak too grapples with her conscience, but for her the question differs. Was what she ordered justified? Were the Conglomeration lives she saved worth the price that Pelapatarn paid?