re:mote voices: literature

Title: Excession
Author: Iain M. Banks
Publisher: Orbit

Excession is the second novel by Iain M. Banks I've read, following most of his books as Iain Banks which I've read over the last 10 years or so. Unlike Against A Dark Background, Excession is part of Banks' Culture set, which I gather to be a background he has worked in with more of his work.

The Culture is a future civilisation which has derived from the human species. There are other such cultures, but the Culture is the strongest with the rest being spin-offs. There are other species as well, so that space culture is made up of the interaction of these races. Other races have gone before, transcending to another level as elder species. And there are also things that remain unknown with the universe for these races to encounter. Much of the choices of Culture are dictated by Minds, what we today would call Artificial Intelligences, taken to an ultimate level where they are the leaders of the system which the organic beings of Culture find themselves in.

On the surface Excession is the story of an excession which is an extreme form of contact which is beyond anything that the Culture have encountered to date. On this level the Culture are attempting to understand what this mysterious and enigmatically black sphere that has appeared in space is, and in the process advance their position in the universe with what they learn. But as the book proceeds it is clear that there is a lot more going on. Contact is the division of Culture which deals with these sort of things and it is setting up a group to explore this situation. Then there is Special Circumstances, the shady cloak and dagger branch which is putting operatives to work here and there. Which is fine, but then there seems to be different sub groups working against each other. Covert operations and conspiracies starting to dominate what is going on, so that the action of Excession moves away from the artefact and instead sees the reader trying to work out what is really going on. Which agents are working for the good, who is being deceived and what are the real circumstances of the war that has erupted.

Throughout Excession Banks provides repeated characters and threads, so that we have something to work with. So that we follow the progress of Byr, the attempts to stop him by Uriel and what his old relation with Dajiel signifies. Which covers the human level, but a novel level is that a lot of the action happens between ships and drones and the like - each decent sized mechanism being imbued with a mind which can run endless simulations and conspire with its fellow minds on numerous levels. With this there is a lot of drama, Minds bemused by the sneaking suspicions they develop and then incensed by the revelations of duplicity. Much of the humour Banks works into this work also comes from the names that the Minds have taken for themselves, with warships called "shoot later" or the eccentric "grey area", the enigmatic "problem child". With that there is a certain irreverence and tongue in cheek nature demonstrated by the human characters and they way that they are allowed to behave within this "perfect" society.

An enjoyable read that has a strong combination of human and not human characters. Mixing a certain level of humour with conspiracy, action and drama.

RVWR: PTR
March 2002

Title: Shamanspace
Author: Steve Aylett
Publisher: Codex

"Teaching you to fieldstrip and reassemble yourself like a gun? You think being permitted is the same as being free?"

Shamanspace marks the fourth book by Steve Aylett that I have read - following on from Slaughtematic, The Inflatable Volunteer and Toxicology - and being more of a solid story and narrative than the latter two of those three. Though at 120 pages or so I suspect it could be more considered as almost a novella, I certainly had read it in no time at all, an hour or so in one sitting and it was done.

For centuries the Internecine have been a secret organisation of assassins, stemming from the 'hashishins'. Mixing mystical skills in their mission to destroy god. A mission which has been taken for granted through that time without any concrete proof that there is a god. There have been schisms within the organisation, so that the Internecine and the newer group the Prevail are both set with the task of deicide, though with different reasoning's - the Internecine believe that with the death of god the universe will cease to exist, while the Prevail think it will keep on going.

Shamanspace is the story of Alix, Internecine hit man - god has been proved to exist, there have been previous failed attempts - but Alix knows where the heart of god is, and is preparing for the kill. Unfortunately things aren't that straight forward, the information came from a dead Prevail agent, and there seems to be treachery from friends and colleagues.

Pretty much we know that Alix fails from the start, the story is told to the latest edgeman, the latest bright young thing following in his footsteps. It's Sig's turn to take his pop at god, but not before he is forced to talk to someone who failed; in the same way that Alix explains he also did before going for the kill.

As with the rest of Aylett's books this is stripped down narrative, raw and abstract. Evocative flow, which says so much about what is happening without being blatant or entirely transparent, flirting with poetic license.

RVWR: PTR
March 2002

Title: Toxicology
Author: Steve Aylett
Publisher: Gollancz

Reading Toxicology comes across as a flashback to The Inflatable Volunteer - recreating the baffled sense of wonder that one experienced with that free-form novel. Though in saying that, Toxicology is not another novel by Steve Aylett rather it is a collection of "short stories". I think most people have a perception of what length a short-story should be, for the most part these pieces are shorter than that - Aylett hitting us with a couple of pages at a time and moving on. In contrast to The Inflatable Volunteer, I tended to find that Toxicology was a demanding read in a different way, despite its mere 120 or so pages I took longer to read it - rather than having to keep up with the momentum of The Inflatable Volunteer I found that after each story I instead had to stop and take a moment. Ploughing on into the next story made me feel flippant, as though I expected to be able to just absorb everything as it happened.

Steve Aylett has written a trilogy of books set in the one environment - The Crime Studio, Bigot Hill and Slaughtermatic - with some of the stories coming from that background so that the ideas of the perfect thought crime are at work as is the repeated presence of the confounding copper Henry Blince and private investigator Atom (who featured in the book of the same name). Some of the stories are just random, where Aylett hits us with a full on flow of consciousless diatribe.

It may be worth noting (though perhaps only for myself) that the first contact I had with Aylett's work was with the story Gigantic, which is the first piece featured here. A millennial piece from a millennial collection where the history of the past is revisited on the people of the present; a story populated by crack pots and nutters so that the only truth sayer is lumped in with the rest. Tusk works with the ideas of masks and the relationship between a criminal and his mask. If Armstrong Was Interesting explores the options that Neil Armstrong could have gone for through his famous moon trip if he had actually been interesting, I mean come on "one giant step" is so lame when you could have "not bad for a girl". The Passenger deals with the lengths that some folk will go to get noticed, just to get that big break their band deserves - extreme! The Met Are All For This deals with modern surveillance and paranoia, all with a nice Kafkaesqe twitch of phrase. Fiasco shows how badly things can go wrong when you just set out to do someone a favour. And so on across 25 stories which don't really bare neat summary of this fashion. After all how can neat summary really capture the idea of a man who calls his dog Fire and then is surprised when people reacting oddly when he calls its name or when original thought comes down to the declaration that bees are aerodynamically wrong for flight and really move the world about around them with telekinesis.

One of the senseless beauties of Toxicology is that you could probably get to the end and start all over again and in the process get something entirely different out of it. That is of course if you thought that you were hard enough to take reading text this dense again so soon. I know I'm not.

RVWR: PTR
March 2002

Title: The Nights Dawn Trilogy
Author: Peter F. Hamilton
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

The Night's Dawn trilogy, which is made up by The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist and The Naked God, is a colossal undertaking - with each volume coming up to 1200 pages. Which allows for some amount of characters and plot complexity, while also being surprisingly gripping.

With the environmental decay of Earth people have had to seek refuge in great domes to protect them from the weather. At the same time resources have become scarce and the population is continuing to rocket, this was the impetus for further space exploration. Over the course of 7 centuries the human race has spread across the galaxy, building up a new kind of society and economy, which includes relations with alien species.

A new group of settlers arrive on a young colony, along with their group of prisoners (criminals deported as an involuntary workforce). This seems to be a new life for these people, hard work setting up villages and farms, but at last a release from the Earth's overcrowding. However things go wrong when some of the prisoners step out of line, with once incident accidentally opening a gateway which allows something to come through, something which takes over the human bodies and is extremely powerful. With no idea of how or why the planet soon finds that it has been invaded, and the enemy are quickly building to threaten the entire confederation that the Earth has worked so hard to build.

The Reality Dysfunction sets the scene, Peter F. Hamilton constructing a space opera of epic proportions, but one which is contemporary enough to fall into the category of hard science fiction as well. Over the course of the book as the threat spreads he manages to work in a real sense of tension and horror, introducing us to characters and building them for their fall while we watch. With the end of Dysfunction some of the truth of what is happening is becoming revealed, which opens up the way for The Neutronium Alchemist. The humans who have been taken over are referred to as the possessed and they are spreading across the universe, fighting with their extraordinary powers at every turn. With each turn things seem only to get worse, whole planets fall and vanish from the universe, while the nature of the possessed has changed the entire meaning of life. All sides struggle to regain a doomsday weapon - the Alchemist - in the hope that it will provide an advantage, a solution. Battles are being fought on every front, desperation for a solution continues to drive the confederation, leading to the search for The Naked God deep in uncharted space.

Hamilton fleshes out his future to an incredible degree, filled with ideas and the terminology to go with it. At the core a schism in the human race - Adamist versus Edenist - the churches are appalled by bitek (advanced bio-technology) and strive to ban it, while those that embrace it set up a new community (Eden) and set themselves up as the first new community of the future. Throughout we follow how various factions are dealing with the problems that beset them, from the political to the social. Along the way old conflicts must be resolved to form new alliances, we view action on the political front and on the covert as we continually discover new organisations and new interest groups. From the horror and tension that mounts with the spread of the problem in the first book Hamilton moves it so that we are less aware of that as an issue by the third book, confronted by big questions and elusive answers.

With a work of this scale and having set up such a threat we must become aware of one question as the trilogy continues - how is Hamilton going to pull it off? A solution to the problem must be found, or at least some sort of credible ending must be reached for all this work to have been worth it in the end. Through the books we find that other alien races have faced the equivalent problem in the past, with which each have faced it in a different manner, giving us insight into the different levels of society these races represent. The Kiint maintain that there are solutions from the start, but as a vastly superior race they have sworn themselves to non-involvement. So while they won't provide the solution it is with this aspect that we are helped to realise that there can be an answer. In the end the solution is extreme, final battles are culminating, lost battles are trying to recover, heroes and villains are set up - then the answer is presented and it is sweeping and dangerous. Dangerous for an author that is, a fine line between getting carried away - did he go to far or did the massive universe changing finale justify the scale of the tale being told? I suspect that for some the feel of what Hamilton is doing will not work - from the detail and cause throughout to this momentous conclusion. However if you get as far as the third volume then you are probably up for it, and with that the big ending is pulled off just on the satisfying side (it is a thin line after all).

RVWR: PTR
March 2002