Review of Mieville’s Embassytown

Far, far away and a long time in the future, space travel has enabled humanity to spread throughout the cosmos and come into contact with all kinds of unusual manifestations of alien life. Few aliens, however, are as unusual as the Ariekei, who have formed a complex society based on a dualistic form of language that they call, well, Language. Language differs from ordinary language in requiring two component parts which must be spoken simultaneously: fortunately for the Ariekei themselves, they each have two speaking orifices which can be used for this purpose.

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Review of Cobley’s Seeds of Earth

Although each birthday makes me increasingly and uncomfortably aware of the fact that the number of books I will have time to read in my life is decreasing every day, as well as being reminded whenever I look at the bookshelves of the swelling ranks of the books I have already bought but have not yet had time to read, imagining that not being able to discover new authors and new works remains a dispiriting one.

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Review of Krzhizhanovsky’s Memories of the Future

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is one of a number of Soviet era Russian (in fact Ukrainian) authors unable either to settle into the post-revolutionary lifestyle or to have his fiction published. In fact he died, in 1950, forty years before the stories in this collection were published and these were the first to be made available to the public. It is not, of course, very surprising in retrospect to consider that the individualist Krzhizhanovsky, unable to blend in to society as a whole, would constantly find his work rejected by the official censors and the editors who acted as their gatekeepers.

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Review of Bester’s The Demolished Man

Into the twenty-fourth century and the world is dominated by a form of industrial, monopoly capitalism regulated not just by state laws but by the presence of a group of ‘espers’ – people who have been able to develop powers of extra-sensory perception and who can be used, therefore, to determine the intentions of people and so stop any crime before it is committed. The espers are also used as human resources managers, business consultants and in a whole range of ways to support the political-economic system. Is it possible that such a system can change human nature overall?

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Review of Glukhovsky’s Metro 2033

The apocalypse has arrived via a massive nuclear war and a few thousand desperate survivors cling to what remains of life in the once glorious metro system of Moscow. Their lives are hard, brutish and short. Most people are tied to the micro-regimes that have emerged at one or a small number of subway stations as part of the system – in fact, numerous such regimes have emerged and it is the differences between them that mark the majority of the action of the plot.

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Review of Stapledon’s Starmaker

This is a book – it seems inaccurate to call it a novel – that receives no justice from a brief description or even a review of limited scope. In basic terms, the plot is quite straightforward: a man is sitting on a hillside gazing at the night sky when he is suddenly whisked up and sent on a mystical, time- and space-spanning journey across the history of the universe. Then, having seen the marvels of the universe, he returns to his family hearthside, wiser and better able to cope with mundane vicissitudes.

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Review of Hamilton’s Manhattan in Reverse

Peter Hamilton is best known for his extensive space opera sagas, which generally extend over several volumes, feature numerous characters and commonly feel like the author is making it all up as he goes along and has only a vague understanding of what the ending is going to be. However, Hamilton has in the past proved that he is capable of writing coherent and enjoyable shorter novels and, indeed, short stories with the same qualities.

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Review of Stapledon’s Last and First Men

To write the future history of the human race from the middle of the twentieth century to a position two billion years from now is quite an achievement, one which will inevitably give rise to as many questions as answers. That, of course, is a good thing in that it stimulates consideration and debate. Stapledon begins with the epoch-defining struggles between three sets of competing ideologies: the first is the war between Britain and France, which represents to my mind the rival approaches to imperialism, the highest form of capitalism as Lenin called it.

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Review of Bester’s The Stars My Destination

Into the twenty-fifth century and mankind has begun the colonization of space, albeit still on some unsteady and uncertain steps. On the Earth, domination of nature has been rather more successful and people, some people at least, have developed the ability to jaunte (teleport) from place to place, thereby enjoying the best that the world has to offer. In space, however, the reliance upon fragile spaceships continues to constrain commerce – and it is commerce that is the driving factor of this society.

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Review of Vega’s Majesty’s Offspring

We are in the future in a fast-moving world of spaceships, guns, and rapid reversals of fortune. Hackers steal into corporate sites to discover their secrets. Dangerous alien creatures serve as watchdogs to keep out the many unwanted predators of the world. Men will have to be bold, resilient, and willing to seize the day in order to succeed in achieving their goals in the teeth of the hostility of the galaxy and, indeed, of society. Exotic drugs present new dangers to people unwise enough to think they can handle them – it is a time for space cowboy heroes, in short.

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