Review: Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Review: Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro

a review by Rich Horton

It's not often we get a new SF novel by a Nobel Laureate who has already written SF! But here is Klara and the Sun, Sir Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel since he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. And Ishiguro's two previous novels were SF or Fantasy -- The Buried Giant (2015) is a quasi-Arthurian Fantasy, and Never Let Me Go (2004) is science fiction about clones. I loved The Buried Giant, but I have not yet read Never Let Me Go.

What did I think about Klara and the Sun? Well -- it's a bit complicated. I loved it, from one angle. (I hope the right angle.) But from another angle -- my SF reader angle -- I was disappointed. I'll discuss that later, but I'll suggest here that on its own terms -- doing what the novel, I assume, wants to do -- Klara and the Sun is a very successful novel, dealing with some interesting technological issues, portraying its non-human narrator convincingly and in a affecting fashion, and featuring a powerful and moving, even wrenching, story. Really, it is a fable, a fable about what it is to be human. (Its themes seem to resonate strongly with those of Never Let Me Go.)

But viewed purely as science fiction, it doesn't quite work. It fails to present its two primary technological innovations in convincing future context, it fails to truly interrogate the technological -- and even social -- basis and effects of either the Artificial Friends or the "lifting" process (I'll get to those in a bit.) An SF reader wants to see this -- wants to see the world that produces these changes, and how that world is thus changed, and also, crucially, wants to see the characters confront this. Ishiguro, here, doesn't care -- that's not his story, not his theme. In Science Fictional terms, the story is "thin", or as I like to put it, it is not "through-composed". That is -- the novum, or novae -- the new elements -- are largely isolated. Great SF takes its novae and examines their pasts (how they came to be), their presents (how the ramifications of any given novum spread through their world", and their futures -- how people react, how the future changes because of the novae, how dystopic novae are challenged. All this is great. It is also rare. Lots of SF half-asses this -- to take an easy example, how about Star Trek? How about the transporter? This kind of tech would be radically usable, in numerous ways -- but in Star Trek, it is used in only one simple way.

So -- I see this, and I see that Klara and the Sun does not fulfill this SFnal objective. And to me, in the context of this novel, that doesn't matter. Because it is working in one direction, making one (very important) point -- and in that sense it succeeds.

(I'm going to make a reference to a pretty obscure Scottish SF writer, J. T. McIntosh. His futures had a similarly lightly sketched future setting, almost always, even when set on other planets, oddly Earthlike, and Fifties-like -- and he claimed he did this on purpose, to concentrate on his single SF concept. Ishiguro can write rings around McIntosh, but his strategy here (and, I think, in Never Let Me Go (but NOT in The Buried Giant)) is similar.)

The novel opens with Klara, an Artificial Friend, in a store which sells AFs. Her voice is established from the beginning -- she is very naive, and interprets what she sees -- and she sees a lot -- without benefit of teaching. She encounters a number of potential owners -- teenagers, and we quickly gather that one girl, who is clearly ill, is going to be her owner. But Klara's time at the store is unexpectedly long -- the girl (Josie) doesn't come back as quickly as Klara thinks, and indeed Klara purposely discomfits another potential buyer because she too has chosen Josie. Soon Klara's friend Rosa is sold, and some newer, better, models are introduced ... but then Josie returns. In the meantime, Klara's devotion to the Sun is established (AFs are solar powered) and her hatred of pollution, and in particular of a construction machine that she calls the Cootings Machine (because that is the name printed on it) which belches smoke while it is operating.

Klara moves to Josie's house, of course, which is in a rural area distant from the city where Klara's shop was. Josie lives with her Mother, Chrissie Arthur, whom Klara calls The Mother. Chrissie is divorced, and eventually we gather that her marriage foundered partly because of the death of Josie's older sister Sal; and perhaps also because The Father (Paul) lost his job -- in a curious turn of phrase he says he was "substituted." The next door neighbors are another single mother, Helen, and her son Rick, who has been Josie's best friend from a young age. We also learn that Josie is "lifted" -- she has been genetically altered for, primarily, greater intelligence. Rick is not lifted, but he seems clever anyway -- and he also has to care for his rather rackety mother. More slowly, we gather that "lifting" comes with risks, and Josie's illness is apparently a side effect (as was the illness that killed her sister.) All this knowledge comes to us through Klara's naive filter, as do our observations of the interactions of Josie during her (rare) meetings with other lifted children. Over time, Klara becomes obsessed with the idea that if she only asks, the Sun will make a special effort to cure Josie, even as Josie's condition worsens. 

A trip to the city is the fulcrum for the key revelations of the book. These turn on, first, the nature of a picture Josie has been sitting for; and, second, Klara's self-sacrificing actions to try to gain the Sun's favor for Josie. Oh, and Rick's conflicts with his mother over a chance for him to go to college (usually reserved for the lifted).

I found this all quite moving, particularly from within Klara. The novel presents the innocent Klara as (so it seems to me) truly human (because truly able to love) and yet her society does not even consider that as a possibility, and her fate is truly sad even though she is never sad. The divisions in this society are presented but not really challenged -- between the "lifted" and the non-lifted, between AFs and humans, between people like Paul who have been "substituted" (by younger "lifted" people?) and those who still have good jobs. This is one area where an SF reader expects some sort of aspiration for change (even if it must fail) -- and some sort of more direct interrogation of these divisions. And Klara and the Sun doesn't offer this -- and it doesn't matter because what matters here is, really, Klara, and our realization that she is human -- and, crucially (especially in context) she is her own self.

The prose is deliberately simple, reflecting Klara's naivete -- but it's well done, and sweet and oddly incisive at times. Rick and Josie and the Mother are also well realized characters (though at times the Mother's actions in particular seem a bit unmotivated.) There are missteps -- the means by which Klara eventually takes action against a Cootings machine is kind of silly, and way too convenient; and the setting, apparently somewhere in the US, is only sketched in -- this may have been on purpose, perhaps to emphasize that Klara knows nothing more of it; but it gives the book an unmoored feel at times. Still, the book lands, and I loved reading it, and was truly moved. 

Hugo Recommendations, 2022

 Hugo Recommendations, 2022

Hugo nominations for 2022, to be awarded at Chicon later this year, are due by March 15, which is in only a week, of course. These recommendations are incomplete, in a sense, as my reading has so far been confined to only a few novels, and to the short fiction that I reviewed for Locus. There unquestionalby worthy stories that I have so far missed. 

Novel

The Unraveling, by Benjamin Rosenbaum

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro

I really loved both these books, in somewhat different ways. The Unraveling is far future SF, with really intriguing speculation on alternate economies, different forms of human bodies, different gender definitions, and societal change. Klara and the Sun is near future SF, with frankly rather thinnish speculation -- the two SFnal ideas, Artificial Friends (androids who serve as companions for children) and genetic "lifting" for children born to families who can afford it, are both very familiar and not really fully thought through (as in, in what other ways would society change if such things could be?), but the novel is much more interested in asking what does it mean to be human, and it is very good at exploring that.

I am going to read Far From the Light of Heaven, by Tade Thompson, next -- and I will say it looks very promising!

Novella

John Kessel, "The Dark Ride", (F&SF, 1-2/20)

Ray Nayler, "A Rocket for Demetrios", (Asimov's, 1-2/20)

Kessel's "The Dark Ride" is a neat and, yes, dark story of the last days of the assassin of President McKinley, and of his remarkable trip to the Moon, and the revolution he gets involved with up there. Nayler's story is part of his alternate history in which the US recovered some amazing tech from a crashed alien ship -- it has its share of action and intrigue, and plenty of cool Science Fictional aspects, but it is mostly deeply an examination of morality and loyalty as it applies to nations.

Novelette

Fran Wilde, "Unseelie Brothers, Ltd.", (Uncanny, 5-6/21)

David Moles, "The Metric", (Asimov’s, 5-6/21)

Gregory Feeley, "The Children of the Wind", (Asimov's, 7-8/21)

Nalo Hopkinson, "Broad Dutty Water: A Sunken Story", (F&SF, 11-12/21)

Fran Wilde's story is a lovely fantasy about an aspiring dress designer who gets a chance to work for the title company, making a dress for her best friend -- cool enough (and the imagined dresses are neat) -- but also we get -- labor issues! Moles' story is very very very far future SF, about two posthuman twins on different sides of the question of how to respond to a threat to the very universe. Feeley's is one of his long series (soon to be a novel, I trust) about an attempt to colonize Neptune (or its area) -- this one tells of a crucial riot/revolution arising from the rift between the Earthborn passengers and their children. Hopkinson's piece is set in the Caribbean, after climate change has radically altered life for everyone, but it's actually rather optimistic (as I wrote: "there are aspects here that seem almost utopian, from the technologically mediated green growing practices to printed ultralight planes that fly themselves to brain implants that can give you night vision (and much more.)") It's also a pretty cool adventure story.

Short Story

Cat Rambo, "Crazy Beautiful", (F&SF, 3-4/21)

Sarah Pinsker, "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather", (Uncanny, 3-4/21) 

P. Djèlí Clark, "If the Martians Have Magic", (Uncanny, 9-10/21)

José Pablo Iriarte, "Proof by Induction", (Uncanny, 5-6/21)

Gregory Feeley, "Striding the Blast", (Asimov's, 11-12/21)

Rambo's piece is both about art, and why art might be important to an AI, and why an AI might see art differently than a human. And it’s both scary and ... crazy beautiful. Pinsker's is a beautiful and spooky story of an investigation into the origins of a certain folk song. Clark's is a lovely piece set decades after the Martian invasion in The War of the Worlds was repulsed by -- magic, and about its heroine's belief that Martians can do magic also. Iriarte's is about math, or rather, mathematicians -- a son using tech that can "revive" (in simulation) his dead father, with the hope that he can continue a collaboration on a proposed proof. (So, it's really about fathers and sons!) Feeley's story is fascinating posthuman hard SF set on Mercury, echoing mythology, highlighting the terrible nature of that culture and hoping for possible change. 

I had other outstanding candidates for Best Short Story, and I 'll list them here:

Karen Russell, "The Ghost Birds", (The New Yorker, 10/11/21)

Sofia Samatar, "Three Tales from the Blue Library", (Conjunctions:76)

Alexandra Seidel, "January House", (Not One of Us, 1/21)

Best Fan Writer

I mention this category as well, in part because I am eligible in it, and I would hope people will consider my writing ... But also to highlight some excellent fan writers I've been following. These include John Boston, reviewing Amazing Science Fiction of 55 years ago for Galactic Journey. (There are other fine writers for the Journey as well -- notably proprietor Gideon Marcus, and Cora Buhlert, already a two-time Hugo nominee, who writes about books from that time.) Also John O'Neill, editor/publisher of Black Gate (for which I write), who writes all sorts of cool stuff about books (vintage and new.) And there are two blogs I've been reading: Science Fiction Ruminations, by Joachim Boaz, in which he looks at short ficton and novels from before 1985, including extended series about subjects like astronauts, generation ships, and such authors as Carol Emshwiller. The other blog is the Hugo Book Club Blog, mostly written by Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk -- so I would suppose a nomination ought to be for them as a team. 

Astounding Award for Best New Writer

I also looked through some lists of writers eligible for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer and these are the five whose stories have most impressed me over the past couple years:

Filip Hajdar Drnovsek Zorko

Nadia Afifi

Charles Q. Choi

Shaoni C. White

John Possidente

Boskone 59: A Con Report

 Boskone 59: A Con Report

by Rich Horton

My last convention before Covid was Capricon, in Chicago, in February 2020. For a few years prior to that I had been semi-alternating between Capricon (in my hometown) and Boskone (in my Dad's home state.) I remember that Capricon for unfortunate reasons -- I got violently sick, and managed only a couple of panels and about half a dinner with Arin Komins and Rich Warren before I had to retreat to my Mom's house for the weekend. (I admit that in later months I sometimes entertained the idea that I was all-unknowing Covid Patient Zero in the US, but, really the symptoms weren't consistent with that disease, and, anyway, it's kind of horrifying to think about me staying with my then 88 year old Mom and potentially giving her Covid -- luckily, no such thing happened (though as I recall Arin showed some signs of con crud and I may have contributed to that!) )

Since then the list of cons I wanted to attend that I could not has been truly depressing -- two Readercons, a Windycon, an Archon, a World Fantasy, two SFRA conferences (at one of which I was to receive an award!) ... the only convention I missed for good reasons was this past Worldcon, Discon III, which I missed because my grandson was born that week. Late last year I made single-day appearances to two cons -- Windy City Pulp and Paper, and Windycon, both late in 2021. But I wasn't on programming in either case, and I didn't really have the full experience, though they were certainly fun.

In 2022 I am ready to really get back to congoing, and Boskone 59 was my first chance! Thanks to Omicron it wasn't as fully attended as usual perhaps, but with Omicron rapidly receding it was still well-attended and lots of fun. (Though room parties remain a (wholly understandable) casualty!) The two Boskones I previously attended had already put it high on my list as a convention I would love, and this one was also delightful.

In fact my flight to Boston was my first time on an airplane since Covid. I had a work trip booked to Tuscon in mid-March 2020, cancelled at the last minute (I had hoped to run into my friends Claire Cooney and Carlos Hernandez that week, as they were in Arizona for what, as I recall, turned into an unplanned extended stay.) I still have, in my work account, credit for a future trip whenever I travel for business again. The flight to Boston was nice, in that the plane was perhaps 20% full -- a Covid hangover, I thought maybe? But both return legs were booked solid. On the way to Boston I read Robert Holdstock's Where Time Winds Blow, and on my return flight (twice as long due to connections and such) I read Peter Heath's The Mind Brothers, and E. Lily Yu's On Fragile Waves. 

I had two panels scheduled that evening: Rediscovering Great Writers and Books You've Never Heard Of; and Greatest SF/F/H Book You've Never Heard Of. Definitely worthwhile topics, but I have to say I had a hard time distinguishing between the two subjects! Add that I wasn't the only person to be on both panels -- so was Greg Feeley! The first panel also featured Jim Mann and Christine Taylor-Butler, and the second also featured Steven Popkes and Grant Carrington. Between the two panels I don't think we duplicated a single book, which I thought a good achievement. Alas, I didn't take notes, so I will forget many of the books we mentioned. Here are a few: Josephine Saxton's The Heiros Gamos of Sam and An Smith. (I learned something I had wondered about concerning Saxton -- she is mixed race.)  Several books by Edgar Pangborn, including of course A Mirror for Observers, but perhaps more intriguingly (as it's a lesser known book) a non-SF example, that Greg suggested might be his best novel, A Wilderness of Spring. Angelica Gorodischer's Kalpa Imperial (and also Trafalgar.) You Shall Know Them, by Vercors. Growing Up in Tier 3000, by Felix Gotschalk. Floating Worlds, by Cecelia Holland (a book which I think occurred to both Greg and me independently.) And Chaos Died, by Joanna Russ -- nominated by Greg on the grounds that while Russ is of course well-remembered, this one of her books, much celebrated on first appearance, is somewhat neglected now. (And, indeed, it's not a book I think of often, though I certainly read it when I was young.) The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn, by Algis Budrys. (A strange book, and one of my favorite Budrys novels, though it was Greg's choice.) (I added a mention of Budrys' last novel, Hard Landing.) Fremder, by Russell Hoban. I think we were all aware of the risk of the panels becoming "list panels" (indeed that risk applied to all four of my panels) and I think we did a good job avoiding, for instance diving into a discussion of canon forming at one point.

My other two panels were on Saturday. One was a panel I've done before at Boskone, with the same four person team as I recall: myself, Bod Devney, Vince Docherty and Jim Mann; recommending Hugos in the fiction categories. As always, we ran out of time! I suggested The Unraveling, by Benjamin Rosenbaum in novel; "The Dark Ride" by John Kessel in novella, "If the Martians Have Magic" by P. Djèli Clark in novelette, and "Crazy Beautiful" by Cat Rambo in short story. Other stories mentioned (some by me, and others of which I'd have mentioned but someone else beat me to it) included "Where Oaken Hearts do Gather" by Sarah Pinsker, "Unseelie Brothers, Ltd" by Fran Wilde, "The Ghost Birds" by Karen Russell, "Proof by Induction" by José Pablo Iriarte, "Broad Dutty Water" by Nalo Hopkinson, A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine, Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir, Perhaps the Stars, by Ada Palmer, "A Master of Djinn" by P. Djèli Clark ... and others that I have forgotten, I am sorry. (I need to think of taking notes.) 

Finally there was a panel on SF, Fantasy, and Horror for People Who Don't Know They Like SF/F/H. The other panelists were R. W. W. Greene, Joshua Bilmes, and Ian Randal Strock. We approached this from two directions -- SF works by writers outside the genre on the one hand, and those works within the genre that non SF readers might be likely to respond to. The first category includes some "usual suspects" -- Nobelists like Ishiguro and Kipling and Saramago and Lessing, and other prominent writers like Nabokov and Kingsley Amis. And David Mitchell and Michael Chabon. Or, of course, Emily St. John Mandel and Station Eleven. From within (to some extent) genre borders we mentioned, I think, Le Guin; and Crowley. I think I brought up Susan Palwick's Flying in Place, which I know can work for non SF readers because my wife loved it. (Same for Karen Joy Fowler.) I know there were many other suggestions, which I just can't recall now.

I attended some other panels as well, of course. Brendan Du Bois, Jim Kelly, and Suzanne Palmer talked interesting about novellas and novelettes, and when (or if) a writer knows she's got a novelette or novella on hand or just a short story. There was a virtual panel on "Impossible Cities", featuring Fran Wilde, Ada Palmer, Mur Lafferty, Greer Gilman, and Kelly Robson. Greg Feeley, Ginjer Buchanan, Bob Devney, and Jim Mann discussed "What Classic SF Got Right and Wrong". Ted Chiang gave a really neat talk on Time Travel, and the differences between historical stories involving time travel and the more contemporary science fictional representations. Claire Cooney had a book launch of her story collection Dark Breakers. I attended one Kaffeeklatsch, by Michael Swanwick, lots of interesting stories.

As ever, however, the best part was meeting friends, old and new, and the various conversations I had. I talked, sometimes at length over a drink, sometimes just briefly, alas, with Greg Feeley (first time we'd met in person), Ken Schneyer, Walter Jon Williams, Ian Randal Strock, Mark Olson, Fred Lerner, Claire Cooney and Carlos Hernandez, Bob Devney, Michael Swanwick, Jim Kelly, Jim Cambias, Mike Allen, Margery Meadows, Mark Pitman, Ted Chiang (first time to meet him), Sally Kobee. I got to talk very briefly to Tamsyn Muir in an autographing line. I was able to (all too briefly) meet Filip Hajdar Drnovsek Zorko, who has published some intriguing short fiction in places like Lightspeed and Clarkesworld, but who I met virtually in another context entirely -- we are both members of an online trivia league, and he coordinated a project to write a long set of questions for the league about SF -- and I was one of the assistants on that project. 

Also of course I bought some cool books in the dealers' room, and I got a bunch of intriguing free books from the free table. I even gave away some books at the free table, but I have to admit, I came home with more books than I got rid of!

Boskone remains a favorite convention of mine, and it was wonderful to be "back in the saddle" again, so to speak. 

Review: Where Time Winds Blow, by Robert Holdstock

Review: Where Time Winds Blow, by Robert Holdstock

a review by Rich Horton

Robert Holdstock (1948-2009) is nowadays almost entirely known for his series of fantasy stories and novels beginning with the most famous, Mythago Wood (novella in 1981, novel in 1984.) The novella appeared in F&SF about when I graduated from college, at which time I had let my F&SF subscription lapse. Both novella and novel were huge successes (the novel won the World Fantasy Award) and they were followed by several sequels. But somehow I never got around to reading it, and in the process I missed his other novels as well. He was quite prolific, writing under several names such as Robert Faulcon, Robert Black, Chris Carlsen, and, for collaborations with Angus Wells, Richard Kirk. And while he is now best known for fantasy, his early novels were often SF. (The pseudonym Robert Faulcon is amusing, as Faulcon is the surname of the protagonist of the novel I'm considering here.)

I happened to run across one of those early SF novels, Where Time Winds Blow, at an estate sale, and I snapped it up, motivated in part by the enthusiastic review Joachim Boaz gave it. I read it mostly on the plane to Boston for the Boskone SF convention.

Where Time Winds Blow was published in the UK by Faber and Faber in 1981, and in the US in paperback by Timescape in 1982. I have the SFBC edition, the first (and only) US hardcover, also 1982, with an excellent wraparound cover by Ron Walotsky (erroneously credited as "Ron Walotski" on the cover flap.)

Where Time Winds Blow is an ambitious SF novel, built around some intriguing SFnal ideas which the author is not afraid to reconsider, even upend, in the course of the book. It is set on a world called Kamelios (implying its changing nature) or a more colonialist name, VanderZande's World. The world is fairly inhospitable to humans, who either live in enclosed cities or undergo surgery and genetic modification to become "manchanged". The most unusual aspect, however, is the "time winds", which blow through certain areas as unpredictable times, leaving strange detritus from the past or future.

The story opens with a three person team, led by Lena Talloway, with her other members Leo Faulcon (her on and off lover) and rookie Kris Dojaan. Just as they are planning to head back to their base in Steel City, they encouter a strange time wreck on the shores of an ocean, and the impetuous Kris Dojaan retrieves a strange relic before it disappears again. 

On their return to Steel City fissures appear in the team, despite their discovery gifting them a nice bonus. Leo is uneasy about everything, while Kris is impatient to be allowed to explore the dangerous Kriakta Rift in an "r-suit" (a sort of giant robot operated from within by the explorere), and Lena's mood is turning dark. It becomes clear that Kris is obsessed with his brother, Mark, who disappeared in the time winds some time before -- and Kris thinks Mark may be the Time Phantom, who occasionally appears in the Rift. It also becomes clear that there's a mystery behind all this -- behind Mark Dojaan's disappearance, and the potential involvement of either Leo or of their section leader, Gulio Ensavlion, and behind Ensavlion's obsession with the aliens he believes he has seen in some fleeting visions of past or future times, and who he thinks may control the time winds. 

All this is intriguing enough, and Holdstock keeps upping the ante. It's curious, indeed, how he begins with a plenty cool idea that could have satisfied an entire novel, and keeps throwing in additional fillips. In this case, one example is the symbiotic alien natives of Kamelios, the huge gulgaroth and tiny olgoi, which seem predator and prey but instead are mutually dependent for reproduction. Also, the many moons of Kamelios, and their effect on the natives. And Leo Faulcon's tortured history with Mark Dojaan, who was by no means the hero his brother considers him. At any rate, the middle of the novel climaxes with a disastrous r-suit trip into the rift, when a time wind sweeps in and takes up Kris and Lena, while Leo survives. Kamelios tradition demands that Leo, having lost the rest of his team, surrender himself to the time winds. But for some time he refuses to do so, in the process facing ostracization. He finally leaves Steel City to spend some time with the "manchanged" and to understand thair somewhat fatalistic but natural attitude towards life on Kamelios.

All this is leading to the conclusion, where, inevitably, Leo must face the time winds again, and the Time Phantom, whom he is convinced is his lost lover Lena. Ensavlion will accompany him -- convinced he will finally encounter the aliens he believes control the time winds. But ... the true revelations awaiting them -- Leo especially -- are not at all what he expects -- nor what the reader expects. I found this conclusion very satisfying -- completely out of left field but once you encounter it logical and honest. And quite moving.

Is this a great novel? Not quite. It's a bit of a slow burn, which needn't be a bad thing, but which I'm not sure always works here. There are some, I thought, unnecessary weirdnesses and implausibilities, such as, to name one thing, Kris Dojaan's quasi-telepathic connection with his brother. And some of the novel depends on us buying Leo's love for Lena Talloway, and this aspect, this relationwhip, is not sufficiently well developed, to my mind. 

Still, this is a fine novel, and very original. Definitely worth a look, 40+ years after it appeared. Holdstock, I'd suggest, is an interesting figure in the genre's history, perhaps partly because he died a bit young (or at least so I say, speaking as I am a year or so older than Holdstock was when he died.) He's not at all forgotten -- Mythago Wood at least is still a book to reckon with. But he's not in the forefront of the field's history -- and perhaps he deserves a slightly more prominent place. 

One minor point to add -- one panel I did at Boskone involved highlighting undeservedly forgotten novels. I was ready to mention Where Time Winds Blow as a candidate -- but one audience member trumped me by suggsting another early Holdstock SF novel, Eye Among the Blind (1976). I thought the coincidence delightful, and more evidence that Holdstock may deserve more latter-day attention than he seems to get.

An Obscure 1960s SF Thriller: The Mind Brothers, by Peter Heath

An Obscure 1960s SF Thriller: The Mind Brothers, by Peter Heath

a review by Rich Horton

I found this book on the free table at the SF convention Boskone. Since it was free, I figured "Why not?" I had never read of Peter Heath, but the book, though kind of in the spy/technothriller subgenre, also obviously had a science fiction element. I had low expectations, and I suppose you could say those were satisfied.

As is often the case, I find, the author's back story was in some ways more interesting than the book. His real name was Peter Heath Fine. I can only find five books by him. The first three are the "Mind Brothers" trilogy, published by Lancer in 1967 and 1968. The book I have is the first, and it was followed by Assassins of Tomorrow (1967) and Men Who Die Twice (1968). His next book was Night Trains, a mystery published as by Peter Heath Fine, from Lippincott in 1979 -- good enough to be shortlisted for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel. 1981 saw another Peter Heath Fine mystery, Troubled Waters (plus an Ace Books reprint of Night Trains.) 

And in 1995, Peter Heath Fine died, aged only 59 (or maybe 57, sources differ), under slightly mysterious circumstances -- he was last seen alive on June 1, but not found until June 29. It's intriguing when a mystery writer's death suggests a mystery -- though for all I know in this cases there's no particular mystery -- maybe he was living alone? Maybe he died out hiking or something? I don't known any more. Addendum: I had earlier made a typo, 1985 instead of 1995 for his death. Winter, in the comments, points to an article in Newsday, which had more details of his life and sad death. Thanks for that! Very interesting.

The Mind Brothers opens with Jason Starr, recently recruited from the Rand Corporation to develop a secret weapon for the Air Force, which they believe could quickly end the war in Vietnam, taking off from Saigon to test the weapon, which will drive enemy soldiers crazy but not kill them. However, before Starr can activate the machine, the plane carrying it is shot down, and Starr is apparently dead.

But Starr's life is saved by a man from tens of thousands of years in the future -- a man called Adam Cyber, the only human alive in this future, in which humans have abandoned active life, and robots have essentially destroyed the Earth (by accident.) Adam Cyber and the last remaining AI have determined that an intervention in the 20th Century might fix things, and Jason Starr is just the man. However, when the mysteriously cured Starr returns home, he finds his reputation shattered, for the remains of his weapon recovered from the crash appear to prove him a fraud. Starr's only hope is to fall in with Adam Cyber's plan, which involves foiling the Chinese, who have stolen the real prototype of Starr's weapon, and are on the verge of producing an improved version of it. 

The rest of the story involves Starr and Cyber travelling to India, where the leading Chinese scientist is attending a conference. There they encounter a beautiful Indian dancer who has reason to hate the ex-Nazi controlling the evil Brotherhood, which is supporting the Chinese scientists efforts ... This all, you see, gets a bit wacky. There follows an exciting trip to a secret installation in Tibet; and much derring-do in stopping the Chinese scientist's efforts, and exposing the ex-Nazi. It all climaxes in a thrilling escape through the Himalayas in a creaky old plane ...  Alas, the beautiful Indian dancer is sacrificed (though not before she and Starr share a blissful night together.) and for that matter Starr's other lover is doomed, too, in the way of these novels.

Anyway, this novel is, as they say, a product of its time. It is as racist and sexist as you might expect. The writing is pretty careless, but actually it's not hopeless -- I think it show signs that Peter Heath Fine had some talent, and if he was aiming at a better market than Lancer, and if he took a bit more time, the prose could have been pretty decent. The plot is a mess, but the action scenes are not too bad. Perhaps the most disappointing aspect -- at least for me -- is that the SF element (lame as it may have been) was essentially dropped, and Adam Cyber becomes nothing more than a sort of super-powered sidekick for Jason Starr. 

I have no interest in reading the other two novels. One apparently involves foiling the assassination of Kennedy. I don't know if they further address changing history so that the humans won't cede responsibility to robots in the far future ...

Two Novels by Russell Hoban

Two Novels by Russell Hoban: The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz; and Fremder

a review by Rich Horton

A couple of years ago my book club read Russell Hoban's most famous novel, Riddley Walker, and that nudged me to finally address one of my guilty non-reads -- I've known of Riddley Walker for decades, but had never read it. And when I did, I was extremely impressed. It's a brilliant brilliant novel. I knew also that Hoban had written some other fantastical or SFnal novels, but I didn't immediately jump to buy them. I was finally prodded in that direction by the excellent blogger/reviewer Joachim Boaz, who is an admirer of Hoban's work, and who in fact took his blogger name in part from one of Hoban's novels, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz. Thus prodded, I recently bought copies of that novel; and of his 1996 novel Fremder.

(Joachim Boaz' site, highly recommended, can be found here: Science Fiction Ruminations. Therein he reviews pre-1985 SF, with some persistent themes: among them stories about future media, stories about astronauts (Fremder might qualify, though it's too late for Joachim!), and generation ship stories.)

The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz came out in 1973. It was his first novel for adults -- he had previously been best known for a series of picture books about a badger named Frances, and one longer children's book, The Mouse and His Child. Hoban was born in Pennsylvania in 1925, and he had moved to London in 1969 with his wife and children, expecting the move to be temporary. Instead, he and his wife divorced, she returning to the US with the children, and he stayed in England the rest of his life, remarrying and having three more children. This seems to have spurred a change in focus, as all but a couple of his subsequent books were for adults. He died in 2011. 

Hoban is still best-known for Riddley Walker, which is certainly science fiction, set in a post-apocalyptic England. What seems less well remembered is that most of his novels have significant fantastical elements. Only one other one is true science fiction (that is Fremder) but most of the rest range somewhere between magical realism and out and out fantasy. (Turtle Diary, Kleinzeit, and Mr. Rinyo-Clacton's Offer seem perhaps more completely realist, though as I haven't read them I can't say for sure.) 

To get back to The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz -- this novel sits somewhere on the magical realism end of the spectrum. Jachin-Boaz is a map seller (and mapmaker) in a town in what seems vaguely mid-to-late 20th Century, vaguely near the Mediterranean, perhaps in something like Israel (Jachin-Boaz is clearly Jewish). He has a teen-aged son, Boaz-Jachin, and a wife; but he is discontented -- going through a midlife crisis, in essence. So one day he just leaves, abandons his wife and son and their shop, takes the remarkably detailed map he had intended as a gift for his son.

The son, Boaz-Jachin, is soon also discontented -- he never wanted to inherit the shop, he has no particular interest in or ability in maps. He has a girlfriend, but even so he decides to try to track down his father, and also the map his father took. At this time he also visits an old museum, of the ancient past, and takes a particular interest in a sculpture/mural/bas relief of a king on a lion hunt. Lions are now extinct, and it comes to seem to him that the king killed the last lion, Boaz-Jachin makes a drawing of the lion. And soon he is on the road again.

Jachin-Boaz, meanwhile, has settled down in a town in a nearby country -- somewhere in Europe, anyway. (One review I read identified it as London -- but to me somewhere in Germany made more sense, especially as there is a line in the book from Jachin-Boaz to his new lover saying something like "Your people killed six million of my people.") He works in a bookshop, and he has a much younger lover. He seems to be rejuvenated (the young lover being key to that, it might seem!) -- but then he starts having visitations from a lion -- a lion that no one else can see. He begins to feed the lion -- but the lion is not tame, and at times claws Jachin-Boaz -- injuries that are hard to explain. Boaz-Jachin fares further afield, even crossing the sea, and has a variety of adventures -- encounters with several women, a couple of sea journeys, one of which ends in shipwreck, all the time trying to find his father, or more than that to work out his relationship with his father. 

And that's what the novel is, really -- a story of fathers and sons. The lion -- who is both real and not real -- is important. The women -- Boaz-Jachin's various lovers, Jachin-Boaz's new young lover, and his wife, who is quite bitter -- are treated somewhat casually -- it's a very male centric novel, very male gaze centric really, as well. The climax, of course, involves Boaz-Jachin finally reaching Jachin-Boaz's new home, and Jachin-Boaz having a last encounter with the lion. It's a nice novel, well written -- very much so, different, but it didn't really fully engage me. 

Fremder is quite different. It is set mostly in 2052. Fremder Gorn is an astronaut, working what seem routine routes between the several galaxies humans can reach. But then one trip goes terribly wrong -- Fremder's crewmates are all lost, but Fremder is recovered, floating in empty space, without a spacesuit, but somehow alive. Fremder not surprisingly becomes the focus of a concerted effort by the authorities to understand how he could have survived.

His treatment, I might note, involves a lot of sex, first with Caroline Lovecraft (a name chosen with purpose), his doctor at the original treatment centre in space; and later with Katya Mazur, a nurse in a facility in London. In both cases the object is to learn if possible what happened when Fremder's ship "flickered" -- the term uses for going in and out of reality during space flight. But Fremder is resistant to revealing what happened, largely because he doesn't know. The treatment in London is actually facilitated by an AI called Pythia, which takes on a feminine persona.

Throughout all this we are getting hints of Fremder's back story -- he was born from an artificial womb after his mother Helen committed suicide while seven months pregnant. Helen, it turns out, was the leading researcher, along with her brother, on the project that eventually led to the development of the "flicker" drive. Helen's suicidal nature is attributed, to some extent, to her rape and her brother's crippling at the hands of a gang in London, while they were still teens. These gangs are part and parcel of a completely decayed social order on Earth, a persistent part of the background to this story. Fremder was raised in a fairly privileged-seeming orphanage, and became an astronaut.

The central concerns of the story, then, are family, sex, and death, or so it seems to me. The flicker drive seems to suggest, in its flickering, a constant death and rebirth. Fremder's resentment of his mother's abandonment of him before his birth, and of the fact he does not even know who his father is, is central to his character. His sexual relationships -- a bit obsessive on his part -- are perhaps partly an attempt to create a family, or even a substitute mother. All of this seems a bit gothic, really -- and I dare say it is. But Hoban pulls it off. The narrative is consistently involving, and stuffed with references to music, classical and pop alike. And the conclusion has some shocking (but plausible) revelations that really work. It's a striking novel, and quite original. (It also reads, to me, like a product of the '70s (and not in a bad way) instead of the '90s when it actually came out.)

I will undoubtedly continue to make my way through Hoban's oeuvre.

Review: The Unraveling, by Benjamin Rosenbaum

 The Unraveling, by Benjamin Rosenbaum

a review by Rich Horton

I'll begin with the meat -- this is the best SF novel I've read from 2021, by some margin -- my favorite novel since Piranesi, indeed. It succeeds on multiple axes. It is absolutely pure quill science fiction, set in the far distant future, on (or in) a world hundreds of light years from Earth. It features characters who are recognizably human but very strange -- they have multiple bodies, for instance, and are very long-lived. It both displays and interrogates a significantly different economy (essentially reputation based, complete with betting pools.) It is deeply interested in a radically different family structure. Perhaps most noticeably, this is a story of a highly gendered society -- and the genders are quite different from those in traditional contemporary societies. 

The Unraveling is, plotwise, several different entities at once. It is a bildungsroman, following its main character from early childhood to early adulthood. It is a romance, and a powerfully affecting one. It is in a curious way a traditional sort of YA novel, about characters who are not quite adults rebelling (to a degree) against their parents' expectations, and against what they perceive (unwillingly?) as their society's faults. It speculates intriguingly about a different model of family. It is about a near utopia, and about that apparent utopia's faults -- and in so doing confronts the age-old questions about utopias (are they too boring? too static?) In a way, the book sometimes seems to be about social media, even! And it is also about what I think SF's most achingly central theme -- exploration. And it's about literature's most achingly central theme -- what is the purpose of human life, either as individuals, or as a community?

Is it perfect? Of course not. "Nobody's perfect," said Joe E. Brown, in perhaps the most perfect movie comedy of all time. At times the YA-ish aspects of the plot seem a bit too pat. Our heroes perhaps a bit too -- not perfect, but "good". But really this is not badly handled, and perhaps it's unavoidable. The society is so excellently different from ours that I felt at times that the narrative shied away just a bit from allowing that difference to overwhelm us,It's understandable -- you don't want to end up with a Murder in Millennium VI situation (this a reference to Curme Gray's 1951 novel, widely regarded as incomprehensible, though Damon Knight praised it.) But the book does sag just a bit towards the middle, after the first major climax, by when we understand the society and its strains fairly well, but it regains its footing later and finishes powerfully. The bottom line remains -- this is a lovely book, a thoughtful book, a powerful book ... and it sticks its landing.

Benjamin Rosenbaum has been one of the most original and intriguing SF writers, one of my favorites, really, since his debut in 2001. He has mostly published short fiction. I've reprinted a few of his stories in my anthologies, most notably, for our purposes, "Fift and Shria", from the 2014 original anthology Solaris 3. Fift and Shria are the main characters of The Unraveling, and the story "Fift and Shria" is a slighly different version of an episode in the novel. Rosenbaum was born in the US, but has lived for some time in Switzerland, and (perhaps as a result) this novel was first published in German translation in 2018, as Die Auflösung. The English version was published by the very intriguing new imprint Erewhon Books in 2021, and I have that edition, and I also got the audio edition, read by Fred Berman. 

The novel centers on Fift, a "Staid", one of the two genders of the humans living in his polity -- the other gender being "Vail". The other main character is Shria, who is of course a Vail. Rosenbaum presented the short story "Fift and Shria" as a rendering in contemporary English, and as such he rendered the pronouns of the two genders ("Staid" and "Bail" at that time) as "she" and "he", while cautioning that those genders don't cleanly map to "female" and "male". In the novel, the pronouns are "ze" and "ve", and this change is essential and very well handled. Staid and Vail have nothing to do with genitalia (indeed, different genitalia can be adopted at different times in this world) -- instead, they represent, essentially, emotional states -- Staids are the "still center", and Vails are more flamboyant, more expressive, more violent, more sexual. And these genders are assigned, in early childhood, by the somewhat mysterious Midwives, who live apart from the rest of this polity.

Their world is a terraformed planet hundreds of light years from Earth. The humans live inside it, with the rarely visited surface devoted to nature. There are several "nations" on the inside, and these nations are further subdivided into habitation. We meet Fift as a young child (nearly 5,) as Staid, ready to be introduced to the Long Conversation, in the company of his nine parents ... one Mother, eight fathers, two Staids, seven Vails. (Later we learn that the cohorts that raise children can come in almost any permutation of genders.)  Fift (and Shria) live in the nation of Fullbelly, and the habitation of Foo. They become friends on a field trip to the surface, at age 9 or so; and by the age of 15 they are feeling romantic attraction to each other, which is quite taboo, at that age, between Staids and Vails. And then they get tickets to the Cirque, a presentation of the Clowns. And there they meet Thavé, an ancient human, something of an historian mainly ... and Thavé makes some observations about their world and civilization that seem to question its central values. And shortly later things are temporarily plunged into chaos, as a revolutionary group of Vails cuts the "Feed" and urges people -- Vails, at least -- to abandon the cultural limits placed on them. And, somehow, Fift and Shria become, entirely involuntarily, celebrities, and symbols of this "revolution" -- though they are by no means sure they support it.

I don't want to say much more -- I think I'm garbling things a bit, and I think the wonders of this novel are best revealed by reading it. My expectations kept changing as my understanding grew. I was surprised again and again. Sometimes I wanted to argue. I was challenged too -- in particular by my default (and often false) genderized assumptions about Staids and Vails, because they so beautifully don't match "male" and "female", and also don't match contemporary non-binary expectations. I was moved to wonder -- by things like the Long Conversation of the Staids, which we only barely begin to comprehend; or by the polysomatic identity of these people, for by Thavé's half-million year perspective on human civilization(s). And I was emotionally moved, by Fift's yearnings, and by Shria's, and even Thavé's. Two short lines, each close to the end of the novel, brought me to tears: "Oh: It was joy." and "Be alive, Siob. You have to be alive."