Tag Archives: English Science fiction

Galactic Empires: Volume Two

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Galactic Empires: Volume Two [Amazon, Abebooks, Local Library] ed Brian W Aldiss, with Poul Anderson, Roger D Aycock, James Blish, Fredric Brown, Algis Budrys, Avram Davidson, Gardner F Fox, Harry Harrison, John D Macdonald, Mack Reynolds, A E van Vogt, F L Wallace, trans Heinz Nagel, epilogue Olaf Stapledon, and cover by Karel Thole.

Aldiss Galactic Empires Volume Two

This second volume of Brian Aldiss’ multi-author science fiction anthology is at least as good as the first. As before, selections are drawn from periodicals in the tail end of the pulp era: the 1940s and 1950s. (Harry Harrison’s “Final Encounter” is an outlier from 1964.) The thematic sections of the book treat “Maturity or Bust” and “Decline and Free Fall,” but the stories are more accurately characterized by the subsections, such as “The Other End of the Stick,” which uses narrative reversals to point out subaltern perspectives.

In his editorial remarks, Aldiss is especially fervent about the James Blish story “Beep.” It is definitely an interesting tale, adding the espionage bureaucracy flavor to a narrative that uses FTL communications technology to explore philosophical determinism. I was curious to read the Gardner Fox story “Tonight the Stars Revolt!” but it turned out to be pretty unexceptional sword and planet fare.

Women authors are conspicuous by their absence from this book, and the relatively late Harrison story is the only one with anything interesting to say about gender. The fault lies with Aldiss’s choices more than with what was written in the period. Leigh Brackett and C. L. Moore wrote many stories that would have suited this collection. The Poul Anderson story “Lord of a Thousand Suns” particularly struck me as perhaps Brackett-derivative. Anderson is also a repeat author from the previous volume, the only one to have two stories selected by Aldiss.

In its two books this anthology supplies a distinct perspective on Golden Age science fiction. It was notable to me that I had read none of these stories collected elsewhere. Still and all, I will be happy to turn my sfnal attention to more recent works after this excursion into an early phase of the genre.

2061: Odyssey Three

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews 2061: Odyssey Three [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Arthur C Clarke, book 3 of the Space Odyssey series.

Clark 2061 Odyssey Three

In his foreword to 2061: Odyssey Three, Arthur C. Clarke wrote that scientific advances kept this book from being a “linear sequel” having “perfect consistency” with the previous volume, let alone the original 2001 (vii). Unlike the case of the first book, though, he did not allow the changes in the cinematic version of 2010 to usurp the narrative of this novel. The fate of the Chinese exploratory vessel Tsien, so important to the second book and omitted from the film, is still a fact in this third book.

Despite teasing out at great length a plot reveal regarding Mount Zeus on the Jovian moon Europa, this book does not have the sort of cosmic “punch” of either of the two previous volumes. It is a pleasant read, though. By 2061, interplanetary travel is on its way to being routinized as a luxury product, and we are treated to centenarian Floyd hobnobbing with the cultural elite.

The story stirs in some normalized homosexuality in the persons of Floyd’s longtime friends George and Jerry. And there is a curious little thumbnail history of gay military conquerors in Chapter 40 “Monsters from Earth.” By Clarke’s standards, he was really tipping his hand here, but I can’t help noticing that Delany had already written Flight from Nevèrÿon a couple of years earlier.

Clarke thought the Beatles would descend into obscurity by 2061 (220). I suppose that will be true in the event of a civilizational collapse, but not in the interplanetary expansion of the Anglosphere that this book contemplates.

I have been attending to esoteric readings of the Odyssey Sequence, and while this volume seems to have less to offer on that front, there is some packed into the final chapters. . . (Spoiler: hover over to reveal) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . There is also a strong suggestion that the artificial star Lucifer presides over an apocalyptic Millennium from 2001 to 3001.

Galactic Empires: Volume One

Hermetic Library Anthology Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Galactic Empires: Volume One [Amazon, Local Library] ed Brian W Aldiss.

Aldiss Galactic Empires Volume One

This anthology volume is made up of science fiction stories mostly from the third quarter of the 20th century (1951-1975). It is constructed around themes within the general space opera subgenre. Its four subsections are titled “A Sense of Perspective,” “Wider Still and Wider …,” “Horses in the Starship Hold,” and “The Health Service in the Skies.” The themes were not as coherently demonstrated as I would have liked, and the book got off to a shaky start with two weaker stories from authors I like: R. A. Lafferty and Arthur C. Clarke.

It was interesting to me to read the original Asimov “Foundation” story in the text first published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1942. Although it has been decades since I read the Foundation novel, one difference was obvious: Hari Seldon was not the pioneer of psychohistory, but simply “the greatest psychologist of our time” (96). I suspect some actual psychologists set Asimov straight regarding the aims and limitations of their discipline. The cliffhanger ending made this piece an odd inclusion here, though.

It had been a long while since I had read anything by Clifford Simak, and I found his longish story “Immigrant” to be one of the more enjoyable ones in the book. I also appreciated the rather naïve romp of Coppel’s “The Rebel of Valkyr,” even though its plot twist was telegraphed quite obviously. It offered better star wars than Star Wars. With some exceptions, I found the longer stories more deserving of my attention, and the shorter ones tended toward negligibility.

Representations of gender in these selections are often painfully dated, if not downright reactionary by today’s standards. There is only one female author included, and her story “Brightness Falls from the Air” is a mournful one about interracial exploitation.

I have a copy of Volume Two of this collection. The first volume was good enough that I expect to read the second, but not so cohesive that I feel any special urgency to do so.

Cosmogramma

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Cosmogramma: Short Stories [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Courttia Newland.

Newland Cosmogramma

The “speculative fiction” of this collection is not hard sf by any stretch; it is not even very scientifically competent. Page 21 in the first story “Percipi” says that rebels living on the dark side of the moon “had survived five years of constant darkness.” This howler left me dubious when later stories offered wormhole-based propulsion and other technological leaps. These are also not generally stories with “big ideas” that are breaking conceptual new ground. There are an android uprising, zombie apocalypse (with an Invasion of the Body Snatchers inflection), a cyborg circus, robots tending a generation starship, and other well-worn themes that will be familiar to science fiction readers.

The jacket copy says that the book “envisages an alternate future as lived by the African diaspora.” But the individual stories aren’t clearly part of any sort of integral future history, and it wasn’t until the fifth story “Buck” that there was any clear indication of a principal character’s race. There’s no question that some of these stories do leverage author Courttia Newland’s perspective as a Black Englishman, and two of them use the Nommo spirits of the African Dogon people to characterize what seem to be extraterrestrials. Still, the science fiction element is definitely more consistent through the various stories than racial concerns are.

The title story “Cosmogramma” was all right, but it–like many of these–was little more than a vignette. In any case, I preferred the descriptive snapshot pieces like this one to the chronicle style evident in “Percipi.” Since the stories are typically quite short, there are a lot of them, and some of them really are notably strange and interesting. I best enjoyed the ones that incorporated significant elements of weird horror and/or were set closest to our contemporary situation, such as “Dark Matters” and “Link” that have city-dwelling youth encountering some sort of alien intelligence.

I really wanted to like this book, but I found it altogether a mixed bag, and it wasn’t one I returned to eagerly story after story.