Alastair Reynolds: Aurora Rising I’m always on for one of Alastair Reynolds’ space operas, tinged as they are with a certain gothic menace, so imagine my delight when I came across two that I’d never seen before, Elysium Fire and Machine Vendetta, more on which below. These are sequels, of a sort, to a novel I’d read long ago called The Prefect, now renamed Aurora Rising. I prefer the old title, though it soon become apparent why it was changed. So I re-read it. Aurora Rising is set in the same universe as Reynolds’ Revelation Space novels, in which humans a few centuries hence have colonised the nearby stars, thankfully by slower-than-light propulsion. As I get older I am beginning to get a bit fed up of faster-than-light McGuffins, and sympathise with Arthur C. Clarke who said (in the author’s note to his novel The Songs of Distant Earth) that they are tricks that allow characters to get from A to B ‘in time for next week’s instalment’. But I digress. Some of the Revelation Space novels are set in the Glitter Band, a utopia of ten thousand habitats in orbit around Yellowstone, a planet in the Epsilon Eridani system, just over ten light years from the Earth. Having a large set of mini-planets in orbit around another obviates the need for hyperspace to get between locations (Reynolds managed the same trick with his Revenger trilogy). Managing the diverse societies of the Glitter Band is Panoply, a small police force quartered in a habitat of the same name. One of these policemen, or Prefects, is the rugged and somewhat morose Tom Dreyfus. The action opens when one of the habitats is wrecked by the seemingly deliberate torching by the fusion drive of a starship, one of the ‘light huggers’ used by post-human Ultras who spend decades traveling between the stars. As Dreyfus and his colleagues investigate the atrocity, they discover that not all is what it seems. The Ultras have been framed, with the aim of covering up events that happened eleven years earlier. Back then, the Prefects had to fight off an incursion by a rogue artificial intelligence called the Clockmaker, during which Dreyfus’ wife had been reduced to mental imbecility and his superior, Supreme Prefect Jane Aumonier, was subjected to an exquisite torture in which one of the Clockmaker’s devices, the Scarab, was affixed to her neck. As well as denying her sleep, the Scarab will not allow her to come closer than seven metres from another human, on pain of instant death. As if that wasn’t enough, the Prefects have to contend with Aurora, another rogue AI — the result of a disastrous attempt to upload human consciousness into electronic form — whose aim is complete takeover of the Glitter Band because, she says, she can foresee an awful calamity that will submerge all of them a century or two hence. The plot is as clever, twisty and turny as any police procedural (for this is really what it is). There are times when I get tired of characters talking to one another in a series of sarky double negatives, and I do wonder whether the gruff Dreyfus and the saintly Aumonier shouldn’t just get a room, but there were moments when I found myself actually moved by the Prefects’ predicaments and the sacrifices they make to uphold order.
Floe Foxon: Folklore and Zoology Just when you think scientists have shaken every tree and peered behind every bush, animals previously unknown to science keep emerging into the light which, far from being microscopic, would do you a mischief if they trod on your foot. Such as the okapi in 1901; what became to be known as the saola in 1993; and the bizarre hominin Homo floresiensis, which lived in Southeast Asia for more than a million years but became extinct a geological eye blink ago. Because of this I have a certain sympathy for cryptozoology, the search for unknown animals. Sadly, the reputation of cryptozoology has been tarnished by wishful thinking, fakery and the outpourings of people one might politely refer to as ‘enthusiasts’ who persist in pursuing such phantoms as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. Floe Foxon aims to set this aright with a comprehensive inquiry into all claims for such mysterious beasts, debunking all of them, and calling for a more rigorous discipline that takes into account reports from indigenous people about mysterious creatures, not taking them at face value, but sifting them to account for the fact that tales of the unexpected may be more folkloric than fact. This is a worthy aim but the book fails for three reasons. The first is that the references are absolutely all over the place, which would be forgivable in a self-published book (which I originally assumed this was) but not in the product of a supposedly reputable publishing house. The second is that the book promises to explore the importance of indigenous folklore, but hardly touches the subject. And there is no index. It reads like a first draft — I hope Foxon revisits this book to correct these problems, because this could be a valuable work. [DISCLAIMER: The author sent me this book in order that I might review it].
Alastair Reynolds: Elysium Fire But back to Prefect Dreyfus. A few years after the events in Aurora Rising, a demagogue appears in the Glitter Band called Devon Garlin, who hops from habitat to habitat urging citizens to secede from the already loose society and the governance of Panoply, and ‘take back control’ (that this novel came two years after the Brexit referendum might not be entirely a coincidence). At the same time, a contagion appears to be spreading, and growing exponentially, in which the implants that each citizen has in their brain malfunction and kills them. In a separate storyline, two young boys are raised in seclusion to manifest extraordinary powers of material manipulation in order that they might, one day, rule the Glitter Band. That these things are all connected is no surprise, and Dreyfus and his colleagues weave and wind their way to a solution. Aurora and the Clockmaker are here too, but as two equally matched adversaries, they spend most of their time engaged in stalemate, at least for the moment.
Alastair Reynolds: Machine Vendetta Continuing straight on from Elysium Fire, Panoply hatches a superblack project to confine and eliminate Aurora as well as the Clockmaker. Jane Aumonier closes the project, preferring a state of detente between the two artificial intelligences. But the project goes rogue, with disastrous consequences. SPOILER ALERT. the Clockmaker is destroyed, and Aurora is unleashed, a pre-teen Mean Girl with the seemingly limitless power of a god. The jig is up, it seems. It is only thanks to the devious — and, by now, compromised — Prefect Dreyfus, that ultimate disaster is averted. This is the most satisfying of all three Prefect Dreyfus novels, as well as the most serpentine.
W. G. Sebald: The Rings of Saturn As it was Offspring#2 who recommended The Night Circus, it was Offspring#1 who introduced me to this modern classic. Both now number among my favourite books. The Rings of Saturn made its way to us by a circuitous route. Offspring#1 stumbled on it crabwise through Everywhere at the End of Time, an epic series of concept albums that depicts a person’s journey into dementia, the work of a composer of ambient music called The Caretaker. Seeking for more work by The Caretaker, Offspring#1 found that he’d written the music to a documentary about The Rings of Saturn, which inspired him to seek out the book itself. It’s easy to see why The Caretaker might have been asked to work on a programme about this book — both gravitate towards themes of loneliness, decay and desolation. Sebald was an expatriate German academic who taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. The Rings of Saturn is ostensibly a travel journal, made on a walking holiday along the Suffolk coast southwards from Lowestoft, via Dunwich and Southwold. In reality it is a long series of digressions connected together in an almost stream-of-consciousness way, giving it the flavour of that peculiar state of thought one experiences while just on the edge of sleep. There you are, reading (to take one example among many) about a man who spends most of his life making a scale model of the lost Temple in Jerusalem, but before you know it you’re deep into a history of the cultivation of silk moths, with no recollection of how you got from one to the other. There are more literary allusions here than you can shake a stick at, and certainly more than I grasped. The debt to Borges is obvious and acknowledged. There is also a flavour of Joyce, though one should beware (as Borges himself would have warned) of trying to spot influences. In the end, comparisons fade. This book is sui generis: melancholic, marvellous, magnificent.
