Peter F. Hamilton: The Chronicle of the Fallers (The Abyss Beyond Dreams/ Night Without Stars) Another month, another enormous bonkbuster from Peter F. Hamilton. Back in June I reviewed the Commonwealth Saga (Pandora’s Star/ Judas Unchained) in which the prosperous Commonwealth of human planets, all neatly linked together by railways and wormholes, is invaded by a hostile alien force whose sole goal is conquest and the elimination of all life apart from itself. Last month I reviewed the Void Trilogy in which the Black Hole at the centre of the Galaxy turns out to be a micro-universe, the Void, in which different physics applies — including telepathy — but whose consumption of energy threatens to swallow the rest of the Galaxy. The Chronicle of the Fallers is another two-volume whopper that’s a continuation, in a way, of all the others, creating a seven volume series. In The Abyss from Dreams, Nigel Sheldon — a major character from the Commonwealth Saga — infiltrates the Void in attempt to find Querencia, the planet on which much of the action of the Void Trilogy takes place. By mistake he lands on a different planet in the Void, also colonised by humans, called Bienvenido. The humans here face a constant threat from space — aliens called the Fallers who are a cross between the threads of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight novels, and zombies, who either take over humans, or eat them. On Bienvenido, a young soldier, Sivasta, obsessed with the Fallers, rises to power and becomes a kind of Marxist dictator. As a result of Nigel Sheldon’s trying to disarm the Fallers at source, Bienvenido is ejected from the Void and finds itself in real space — but circling a lonely star in the intergalactic void. Now we move to Night without Stars. This star system is a kind of sin bin in which transgressive civilisations congregate. After that I kind of lost the plot a bit, but [SPOILER ALERT] the Fallers eventually win, though not without the human population having been transferred back to the Commonwealth, with the aid of another of the Commonwealth’s star turns, genetically engineered super-sleuth Paula Myo. Often exhilarating, increasingly exhausting, my impression after reading these novels was one in which McGuffins tend to predominate over story. Hyperdrives, ultra drives, easy voyages between galaxies, weapons that destroy stars, wormhole generators, re-life, rejuvenation, accelerated development from infancy to adulthood in a month, telepathy, telekinesis, transcendence into post-physical status, sentient robots, aliens of every kind: if a character (and the characterisation is excellent) face a problem, some new gizmo should be able to help them out. This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy these novels, because I did, very much. But one can have too much of a good thing.
Tom Lathan: Lost Wonders We hear a great deal about how the encroachment of humans is driving many species to extinction. What we hear much less about is extinction at the sharp end, on a case-by-case basis. Here Tom Lathan presents ten case histories of species that have become extinct very recently, that is, in the 21st century, their demise known to the very day. The only one anyone is likely to have heard of is Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island giant tortoise of the Galapagos. Others include birds, bats, fish, snails, and a shrub. The time, energy of efforts expended by conservationists to keep the various species alive in the face of natural disasters and bureaucratic ineptitude add up to a poignant read, but in the end I was left waiting for the other shoe to drop. All the species lived on small islands or in remote, patchy habitat and would very likely have gone extinct anyway, and rather soon, whatever anyone did. Some were close relatives or even variants of other, known species, so their existence and extinction rather depended on one’s viewpoint as a taxonomist. Lathan didn’t broaden his outlook to, say, consider other threatened species that represent much deeper lineages: the tuatara, say, or the aye-aye. More importantly, he didn’t explore whether the extinction of a few species of which nobody had heard might be the thin end of the wedge. That once one starts to pull at the seemingly insignificant threads of an ecosystem, first one species goes, and then another, until the whole thing collapses. And he doesn’t address the perhaps unfashionable view that, by creating new and novel patches of habitat, and moving animals and plants around, human activity might actually have increased biological diversity. In which case the efforts of conservationists to save endangered endemics, while laudable in and of themselves, look increasingly like Canute trying to stem the tide on command. Nature is much bigger than humanity, against which the efforts of humans to demand that nature stays exactly as it is looks a lot like hubris. DISCLAIMER: An uncorrected proof of the book was sent to me by the publisher. The book will be published in November.
Lavie Tidhar: Central Station I can’t remember if I ever visited the central bus station in Tel Aviv, though it’s highly likely, given that I visited Israel in 1985 and traveled extensively round the country by bus. Like all major transport hubs, I suspect that it was and is a magnet for people of every kind, and generated its own kind of life. In Central Station, Israeli author Lavie Tidhar has inflated it into a spaceport that separates Jewish Tel Aviv from Arab Jaffa in a near-future Balkanised Israel-Palestine. People go through Central Station to reach other parts of the world via sub-orbital spaceplanes, or, via space stations, to the Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt and the outer planets. The novel is less a narrative than accounts of the intertwined lives of the people born, raised, living in, working in, and passing through. The people are a stew of ethnicities, and include alien elements, people grown in labs and then forgotten about and left to grow up as street kids; and the ‘others’ who are more digital than human. There is a panoply of religions, including ones presided over by robots. There are knowingly playful references to other SF stories, and some rather good Jewish jokes (I was fond of the robot who, while invoking the Nine Billion Names of God, served as a mohel to the local Jewish community). The most poignant scenes involve the hard-bitten robotniks: human soldiers killed in battle but patched together with machinery and sent back to fight in wars that everyone has forgotten and whose results turn out, in the end, to have been meaningless. The robotniks are the beggars of Central Station who appeal not for cash, but for spare parts. They speak a dialect called Battle Yiddish (which is basically just Yiddish), different from the argot of many residents of the Station, which is Asteroid Pidgin (which is basically just Pidgin). There is overt racism, too — to a young woman who has been converted into a strigoi, a kind of bio-weapon with many characteristics of a vampire. Good science fiction (and this is very good) is not necessarily about the future, but a genre in which ordinary people are presented with extraordinary situations, thus providing a satirical or even allegorical commentary on the way we live now. Parallels with the ongoing chaos of the Middle East are not hard to find.
Lavie Tidhar: Maror People of a certain age will remember James Michener, who wrote vast blockbusters in which historical panoramas were seen through the eyes of a multi-generational cast of characters. One such was The Source (1965), telling of the Holy Land from pre-Biblical times to foundation of Israel. Maror, by Lavie Tidhar, can be seen as its antithesis. Yes, it’s a vast epic about Israel, but it is relentlessly anti-heroic. It stems from the idea that any fully rounded nation must have more than just politicians, heroes, generals, visionaries and pioneers. It must have whores, pimps, gamblers, gangsters, crooks and villains, too, and the boundaries between good and evil are not always clear. It starts with Avi Sagi, a cop so hard-boiled that he makes Dirty Harry look squeaky-clean. Assassination is Avi’s middle name, it seems, and he doesn’t question who it is he’s popping off. Avi’s story, in the early 2000s, turns out to be just the first in a series of short stories and vignettes set in Israel (or among Israelis abroad) from just after the 1973 Yom Kippur war, through the Lebanon campaigns of the 1980s, up to 2008. The stories illustrate the history of Israel but through the eyes of cops so bent they could be drawn as pretzels; drug lords who are also devoted family men; soldiers, who, once out of the army, find jobs as ‘security consultants’ (please don’t call them ‘mercenaries’) to foreign terrorist organisations; professional drug couriers; politicians and generals who are also serial rapists and embezzlers, and who take advantage of the chaos of the Middle East to indulge in what are euphemistically called ‘import-export’ businesses. There is enough blood to satisfy even the most rabid fan of Tarantino. At the heart of it all — and the only common feature of all the tales — is the mysterious, Bible-quoting Cohen, a policeman who is also a gangster, who plays both sides because, he says, if crime can’t be stopped, it has to be ‘managed’, and this means bending the rules. It turns out that Cohen was born on the day Israel achieved independence, and he can be seen as a kind of genius loci for Israel: sleeves-rolled-up, practical, cunning, doing everything to ensure Israel’s survival by any means necessary. Several real people have walk-on parts. Some, such as Chaim Topol and Ofra Haza, will be recognisable to an international readership, but there are lots more who will, I suspect, mean nothing to anyone (such as me) not steeped in Israeli popular culture. The book is not without hope, though, even if cruelly dashed. In the mid-1990s, the young and idealistic Avi, trying to put a life of petty crime behind him, and fuelled, like all his generation, by the hope of the nascent Oslo peace accords and a peace treaty with Jordan, goes to a rock festival in Arad, in the Negev desert, and makes out with a girl. It all looks lovely… until disaster strikes. This is a portrait of a real event. The collapse of security barriers led to serious injury and death for young festival-goers. In Israel, 18 July, 1995 is as much ‘The Day the Music Died’, as Altamont, or the death of Buddy Holly, are remembered in the US. And on 4 November 1995, Yitzhak Rabin, an architect of peace, was assassinated by a Jewish ultra-nationalist hothead. Avi turns back to crime and after that the course of the book is relentlessly downhill. The story ends, as it began, with Avi, and from the foregoing you’ll not be surprised to learn that it’s not a happy conclusion. To anyone like me who admires Israel, even if they don’t always love it, this novel is deeply unsettling. But I am consoled that there is a message here, too, for progressives, who rightly deplore the fact that women and minorities have to work twice as hard to achieve as much as their white, male colleagues, but, in their hypocrisy (born of deep-seated antisemitism) question the very existence of Israel, because Israelis don’t live up to ethical standards they would not match themselves, or expect in anyone else. Postscript: in Hebrew, maror refers to the ‘bitter herbs’ that are eaten at the Jewish festival of Passover in which Jews celebrate their liberation from slavery in Egypt.
