Here's Why

Midnight Lamp

“Midnight Lamp” by Gwyneth Jones, was a fun, engaging view of a future not very far from now when the instability of Britain predicted by Ken Macleod and other authors has come to pass. Rockstars have taken control. The world has quietly been complicated by the discovery of “effective magic” and “Zen Self” technology, accessing the “information space” that underlies reality and the rockstars are at the heart of it.

This is the third in the series starting with “Bold As Love” and “Castles Made Of Sand”, which I haven’t read yet. Jones is such a good writer that I had no trouble with starting the story AFTER the major magical battle between the heroes and the monster. She gets the best of both markets by having very English rockstars wandering around a very American Hollywood landscape.

The three-way romance between the rockstar heroes is believable and touching. Ax, Sage, and Fiorinda are all walking wounded, but all are a lot more than they appear to be and always looking out for each other. Ax Preston, with his digitally animated skull mask, is the super-powerful rockstar Ozzie Osbourne fantasized about being, and like Osbourne, he’s now older and trying to cope with responsibility and having survived his youth. Sage is a bodhisattva, brought to Zen enlightenment by information space technology, and returned to the Earth with wisdom, but badly injured and recuperating from his magical battle. Fiorinda is a fragile, beautiful redheaded diva who has effective magic without any technology, but who dare not use it because of the schizophrenia the magical battle has brought upon her.

The heroes are in retreat on a beach in Mexico when they get drawn into an American plot to “weaponize” effective magic by the Pentagon. Somebody wants to use black magic to pump a talented candidate up to “Fat Boy” status - a human weapon of mass destruction. The rockstars have to stay free of other people’s plans and save the world.

Midnight Lamp will be published by Allen and Unwin in Australia in February 2004, don’t miss it.

Bold As Love website

Broken Angels by Richard Morgan

I loved Richard Morgan’s first novel “Altered Carbon”, and this is the sequel. In the first book, Kovacs has been trained to be an Envoy, an elite government soldier who discovers that the only retirement job is crime. He lives in a future where your mind and personality are routinel;y accurately recorded on an Altered Carbon chip embedded at the base of your brain. The chip can be extracted at death, and then implanted in a forced-grown clone adult body so that you can live again.

Kovacs has been caught, his data extracted, and squirted as information faster than light from his colony homeworld to Earth. Convicts are no longer kept imprisoned in the expensive flesh, instead their chips are removed and kept in a Stack. Kovacs is taken off the stack to become a bonded private detective and solve a murder in “Altered Carbon”.

“Broken Angels” takes up Kovacs’ career afterwards, and he’s returned to the military as a mercenary. His edge over everyone else is his Envoy conditioning and training. This is another story where Zen enlightenment has been adavnced by science into a useuable technology. Not so far-fetched when New Scientist is running stories about how the brain scans of Zen masters are different than average and where they can see in the neurology how Zen practices can make a person feel more inner peace and control. Kovacs can control his emotions and his perceptions utterly, he’s always cool. He has skills and reflexes that can transfer over to an unfamiliar body in unfamiliar environments.

Kovacs has been “sleeved”, re-embodied, in a war zone to recover an alien artefact before the other side do so. Human life is cheap among mercenaries, but in Kovacs’ case, he goes to a market to buy soldiers mind chips, recovered from their battlefield corpses. He’s cheerfully served by a man who scoops chips out of a huge pile and charges by the kilogram. Soldier’s minds are booted up in a virtual environment, where the recruitment officer asks them if they want to sign up. Since the alternative is death, its an offer that can’t be refused.

This is a very different book to the previous one, it was a big jump for me from private detective muder mystery to military campaign, and so I don’t know if the feeling I had that we took too long to get to the artefact was because of the change of pace in the switch in sub-genres, or was just my impatience. I love the character and the writing, but the second book wasn’t quite the pure joy of “Altered Carbon”.

Richard Morgan has a wonderful writing style, and he keeps coming up with further and further implications of his basic world set-up and technology. Kovacs is a punk who doesn’t deserve the Zen enlightenment his Envoy conditioning has gifted him, and is enlightened enough to know so. His character grows throughout the two books, and I’ll be very interested to see where Morgan has him going next.

evolution by Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter’s “evolution” is a really ambitious piece of writing, he’s attempted no less than to novellize ALL human history from our early rat-like primate ancestors scurrying around the feet of giant dinosaurs, all the way through pre-human and more human ancestors, the stone age, the invention of agriculture, all the way up to the modern day, the near future, and then the far future. He’s mostly succeeded.

By the very scope of the subject, the book is really a linked series of short stories, where a female ancestor is the central character. Baxter’s description of the morivations and perceptions and most importantly, the relationships of his characters is amazing. Starting the book, I wasn’t certain I could stay interested in animal stories while waiting for the humans to emerge, but Baxter rewards the reader for persisting.

It was fascinating to read about how our basic body plan evolved way before our brains, and that our bodies are optimized for running. Two legs are faster than four, and we were once the fastest and most persistant of predators, before we could even speak. Just when you start to get impressed with these people, you discover that there are giant sabre toothed tigers that have evolved to out-smart the clever pre-humans. Baxter gets into the minds of our ancestors and convincingly describes how they feel, and to what extent they think. He shows how consciousness evolved in response to social relationship needs, and how originally our ancestors only had “selves” when they interacted with others. The invention of grandmothers has as huge effects as the invention of stone tools.

Baxter charts the time when there were several different human species all living in competition and cooperation, the stagnant millenia when human culture was stuck in a stone-age balance with the environment, the effects of schizophrenia and creativity, deception and political manipulation. Our brains evolved to deal with other people, and the people are realized very sharply and believably.

Baxter has done such a remarkable job that I was almost disappointed when the people have developed into modern humans with an agricultural feudal society with an aristocrat called “Potus” at the head of the empire. POTUS stands for “President of The United States” to fans of the West Wing TV series. However Baxter comes through with continuity from the ancestor characters, and keeps you facsinated.

I was a little disappointed with his far future projections for humanity and life on Earth, but its a very hard thing to do convincingly.

“evolution” takes a little patience and persistance at times, but you’ll come away looking at the world with new eyes.

Light by M. John Harrison

My first impression of LIGHT was that it was entertaining, but mean. You’re reading along enjoying the thread, when people are suddenly, coldly and irrationally killed. And thats before the Lovecraftian horror elements are introduced. Then the thread switches from the near to the far future, and the reader is sucked in the same way again. Its a schizophrenic, but fun ride.

Every chapter is a different thread, and we switch between physicist Michael Kearney of modern day, researching quantum computers and running away from a un-human entity. K-captain Seria Mau Genliche is a brain-in-a-ship of the year 2400, using Kearney’s discoveries to navigate her space battles faster than light. Finally virtual-reality addict Ed Chianese of 2400, also running away.

Michael Kearney lives in Britain and has met and objectively verified the reality of the horror that pursues him. Harrison uses the classic element of horror stories, where the reader knows Kearney’s work is related to what haunts him, but Kearney is too terrified to deal with it rationally. Everything that happens to him spurs him in a new direction as he constantly reacts to the fear that destiny will eat him up. Is he right, or is he massively over-reacting?

K-Captain Seria Mau Genlicher lives near the Kefahuchi Tract, a huge conglomaration of astronomical bodies centered around a naked singularity that beeds impossibility into the fabric of reality. Humanity has come in sixty-five million years after other intelligent species have tried to find the secrets of the Tract. Humans and aliens alike now mine the ancient artefacts of the peoples who have explored before them; millions of years worth of working technology and ideas. The nightmare and wonder is that everything works. Even when the underlying theories contradict each other, the technology works. Seria wants to believe her inner life and her relationships bring her far past humanity, but she knows she’d do anything to live as a person again.

Ed Chianese is a twink, someone who spends their time and money escaping into virtual reality fantasies. His everyday life in 2400 on the Beach of the KafaHuchi Tract gives a great sense of how bizarre 21st Century life really is. He surfs life without any plan, and is happier that way. He enters the Circus of Doctor Lao, and like the famous legend, he grows from the experience and finds Destiny there.

M. John Harrison has achieved amazing things in LIGHT. The style is fun, and playful, while still filling the reader with wonder and horror by turns. He describes a rich, vibrant, bizarre, but believable and engaging world. I highly recommend you read this book.