Herd the Nerd

I guess I will begin by admitting that Leonard Hatred is right. I do like Iain Banks, or Iain M. Banks, or whomever, whose anarchospacetopia, The Culture, is a fun setting for roaring space operas. The most entertaining of these is Excession, a novel whose main plot involves immense, self-aware spaceships trying to figure out what the fuck is up with a totally inscrutable object that appears one day near a star on the outskirts of the galaxy, although the best is Look to Windward, which deals in the morality of war, the nature of loss in a universe where technology makes the dead indelible, and the question of art and human (well, alien, but human-scale) genius where vastly greater and older intelligences exist and interact with we small mortals. For all its whiz-bangery and space-hopping, Windward has an air of Greek myth about it: its gods so much like us, and yet, not. All that said, the more recent Culture novels are dull, overlong, overwrought, shaggy-dog affairs that are fun to skim for geeky invention but succorless as stories.

Banks' best space-opera sort of book is actually the stand-alone novel The Algebraist, a kooky, violent story that admittedly also suffers from its own bloat and authorial indulgence, but whose Dwellers, slow-thinking, nearly immortal creatures of immense antiquity who inhabit vast civilizations in gas giant planets, their odd culture in a state of hilarious and perpetual fusty Edwardian decline, are the funniest and most delightful aliens in recent science fiction, one-part Lovecraftian monsters and one-part Upstairs/Downstairs. But his best novel (better than all the rest of his science fiction and better than all of his "mainstream" books as well) is Transition, a novel about a secret society of agents who "flit" between parallel worlds, a conspiratorial update of Asimov's The End of Eternity that I read twice in a row because I enjoyed it so much.

I like Charlie Stoss and Ken MacLeod. These two are often spoken of in the same breath, and I regret being so lazy as to do the same, but they really are similar in style and substance. MacLeod's Fall Revolution series is his strongest, although my favorite of his novels is Cosmonaut Keep, the first of a trilogy that regrettably grows weaker and more dissipated as it goes on. Keep, however, is a neat book set in a "second sphere" of civilization on the far side of the galaxy, and like Banks' better Culture books, it largely concerns itself with a human society that discovers itself, suddenly, to be a very junior partner in a very ancient civilization. Stross' Accelerando is really a series of linked, speculative pieces about something very much resembling, ugh, Thuh Singularity, and is a little gadgety for my taste, but Glasshouse, set in roughly the same universe but far into its future, is a frightening, sickening story about men and women forced into a an experimental recreation of a 1950s-inspired American town, a recapitulation of gender inequity and the depredations of labor in capitalism that reminds me of The Handmaid's Tale as told by a Kafka with a computer. Stross' Eschaton books, meanwhile, are less rigorous but more fun. Singularity Sky is the more classic of the two, and its The Festival is another great alien, or almost-alien, creation, but for my money Iron Sunrise is the better book--paced quickly, told with real verve, and featuring the best Space Nazis, no, really, ever.

I hated China Miéville's Perdido Street Station, hated The Scar, and hated Iron Council most of all. Steampunk sucks, guys; it smells like a Nine Inch Nails video. It wants to feel you from the inside. So I effectively wrote the guy off, but then I read The City and the City, a book about which reviewers climbed over themselves to haul out the adjective, Borgesian, and about which, for once, it makes sense--a police procedural set in a tatty, imagined, Eastern-European city that occupies the same point in time and space as a parallel city in a world much more like our own, which becomes less and less "science fiction" as the story progresses and much more about what we choose and choose not to see. Speaking of procedurals, there is a really great short story in The Insufferable Gaucho, a recent collection of a number of older Roberto Bolaño stories: "Police Rat," about, literally, a police rat.

Since I mentioned The Handmaid's Tale, and since this list is wanting for a woman, I should say that although I have mixed feelings about Atwood, I often find myself wondering why it is, exactly, that I like her, I did really enjoy The Year of The Flood, surprisingly, since I despised its preceding volume, Oryx and Crake. And I recently read The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, another post-flood (literally and metaphorically) near-ish future fiction that seems more prescient than anything else in the last ten years.