A Trio of Classic Science Fiction Novels

I'm steaming ahead with my book challenge at the very least, 10 books so far out of my target of 40. According to Goodreads I am 4 books ahead of schedule, though I feel like I will be losing some ground over the next few weeks as I'm about a quarter of the way through the 950 page Tolstoy opus, Anna Karenina. Anyway back to the science fiction.

The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov

The Caves of Steel is the first book in Asimov's Robot series, which has multiple novels and many short stories in it. This book takes place in the near-ish future, at a time when robots were still in their infancy. Most robots in this book are dumb things, not a great leap from artificial intelligences of today. This book features detective Elijah Baley, and possibly the first of the truly intelligent robots, Daneel Olivaw. An important ambassador has been murdered, and it is Baley and Daneel's job to investigate the crime and discover the culprit, to prevent a greater crisis.

This book has been on my to be read list for a long time now, and I finally got around to it after picking up a cheap paperback copy. The detective story itself is quite a basic one, but it was the world building and the great ideas that really got me hooked on this book. Considering it was written in (checks Wikipedia) 1954, it has aged really, really well. Okay so the computers they are talking about are pretty basic and possibly involved punched cards, and some of the numbers are a bit off (the 8 billion population may be several times that of Asimov's era, but today's population is close to that) but otherwise it is very believable. The political/social system described is bordering on communist, but is still quite believable, and some of the technology was a delight (I loved the idea of the moving walkways where you stepped from lane to lane, which increase in speed each time). Overall, a great, short book, still very relevant and enjoyable today and a good start to his Robot series.

The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl & C M Kornbluth

This is a 1950's classic science fiction novel by the writing team of Frederick Pohl and C M Kornbluth. Ad man Mitch Courtenay is at the top of his game, and has been given the plum assignment of managing the Venus contract - promoting the new colonisation of Venus to ensure that his agency exclusively controls the spending of the would be colonists. In this imagined future, the world is effectively controlled by three giant advertising companies, the leaders of which are more powerful even than the US president. The ad men are rich, powerful and can have whatever they want, the consumers however are a downtrodden underclass...

This is a short novel, and in keeping with most science fiction of this era, it is desperately short on good characterisation - the characters are quite two dimensional almost just ciphers to move the plot along. The plot itself is also somewhat pedestrian, although with a twist at the end. I have to say however I really enjoyed this book. Although it is really dated, having been written over 60 years ago it has some very interesting technology and even the dated aspects of the novel hold a certain interest - in many ways the future the authors portrayed is already here. A lot of the scary stuff is a lot closer now than it was in the 1950's and even the stuff they got wrong casts light on the present. A great read.

The Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison

In the far future, criminal intent, violence and deviousness has been bred out of the human race. Once in a while though someone slips through the genetic net. James Bolivar diGriz a.k.a. Slippery Jim is such a person. He is a master criminal and a brilliant disguise artist with a cunning mind, always staying several steps ahead of the law. Until...

This is the first in a science fiction comedy series, begun in the 1970s by the prolific science fiction author Harry Harrison. It was written, I think, as a spoof of the early space opera series by the likes of E E Doc Smith. I've never been a big fan of comic science fiction, or comic fiction generally, but it gives the author a lot of freedom to disregard the rules of science or sense and just have fun. I really enjoyed this, it was a great fun read. Incidentally, rather than reading this I listened to the audiobook from Brilliance Audio (on Audible.co.uk) and I thought it worked great as an audiobook and the narrator did a really good job.

That's it for now. I've just ordered several of the SF Masterworks so I'll be covering them in a later post. Before that, Hemingway and Tolstoy amongst others!

Jump into the Escape Pod for great audio SF!

There are so many great places to read and listen to short stories online, especially science fiction but most of these are not well known. I've decided to periodically take a look at one, to shine a light on some hidden gems.

In my forays into the world of SF short stories, I came across Escape Pod (http://www.escapepod.org). It is a science fiction short story podcast with a new episode each week. Each episode features one new short story, sometimes a new one, sometimes a reprint (can you call it a reprint if it's an audio story?). I've listened to quite a few, and while I've not liked all of them, there's been some really gems and the rest are not bad at all. I'm not usually a big audio fiction fan, preferring to read, but I've found that short stories really do work for me in audio format as I can often listen to them in one sitting. Escape Pod also have some really excellent narrators that add an extra touch to the story.

As well as the story, each episode features a short preamble, a bit of a summary or reflection afterwards, and some listener feedback from a previous episode (incidentally, this is taken from the active forums on the website where listeners discuss each episode afterwards). It adds just a little bit to the overall package, but add something it does.

One of the really good things about Escape Pod is that if features old stories as well as new. There's some classic stories that have been given the Escape Pod treatment, including the following:

Episode 400 - Escape Party by Arthur C Clarke

Episode 100 - Nightfall by Isaac Asimov

Episode 453 - The Grotto of the Dancing Bear by Clifford D Simak

Episode 392 - Aftermaths by Lois McMaster Bujold (not sure if this is a classic or new story, but I love her books, so thought I'd include.

Episode 490 - Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

There's also stories by David Brin, Robert Silverberg, Ted Chiang and loads more. For a list of episodes, you are best checking out this wikipedia page.

Reading Arthur C Clarke - Early stories

As part of my recent enthusiasm for short stories, I've started on some classic science fiction stories. I mentioned Clifford D Simak last week, and I'm going to be reading more of his books soon, but I decided to take a fresh look at a rather more well known name in the field of science fiction - Arthur C Clarke. He's written many classic novels, but also many excellent short stories, and like many classic authors, many later novels started out as short stories.

There are a few of his short stories available online (I've already talked about 'Rescue Party'), but I decided to splash out on 'The Collected Short Stories of Arthur C Clarke', which includes all 104 of his published short stories in chronological order. It's quite expensive in paperback, but a bargain at £7.99 on Kindle. Here are my thoughts on the first few stories.

'Travel by Wire' was his first published short story, published in December 1937 in Amateur Science Fiction stories, what seems to be a short lived small press type magazine. Clarke would have been 20 at the time, and you can tell as it has a jokey vibe, relating student pranks and rivalries between different science faculties (though interestingly he didn't go to university until many years later). This story is based on the idea of a Star Trek style transporter (albeit 30 years before Star Trek did it), sending people down telephone wires and re materialising them at the other end. Told in a humorous way, it also has an amusing little twist at the end. Told in the first person (though often using collective 'we'), it is also very short, probably no more than 1500 words. It may be three quarters of a century old, but I really enjoyed it, and but for the mention of dates and a couple of quaint anachronisms it could have been written yesterday.

'How We Went to Mars' is another first person narrative, starting with: 'It is with considerable trepidation that I now take up my pen to describe the incredible adventures that befell the members of the Snoring-in-the-Hay Rocket Society in the Winter of 1952'. This was written in 1937 when national space agencies had not yet become interested in space, but amateur rocket societies were springing up everywhere. This tongue in cheek story is about a rocket from one of these societies which launches (with several members of the society on board including the narrator), aiming for Earth orbit. Unfortunately they lapse into a temporary coma, aren't awake when they need to break and overshoot. They are now heading to Mars... This is something of a tongue in cheek story, and is for many reasons now very dated. It is still however worth reading for a glimpse of a time when rocket technology was starting to come of age, and Amateur Rocket Societies were a big thing.

Sometimes, my thoughts on a story are indelibly linked in my mind with where I was when I read it and I read this story while sat in the sunshine on the deck, sipping a Starbucks coffee overlooking the boating lake at Center Parcs. I always like reading in the sunshine. Anyway, 'Retreat from Earth' isn't much about sunshine, it is about aliens who come to colonise Earth. A well trod path you might say (albeit not at the time it was written). But it is also about Termites, and it is a story about humanity's origins. This is also the first of Clarke's stories to be written in the third person.

'Reverie' is a strange inclusion in a book of short stories, as it seems to be an article about the state of science fiction (in the 1930s). It's quite short however and is certainly interesting, not least because it would not really be out of place today.

'The Awakening' is an early story about cryogenics, and one dying man's wish to be put to sleep for a hundred years in the hope that a century's advances in medical science will find a cure for, well, death. It's story that has been told many times before, but this could well be the first, and it is a good story too.

'Whacky' is the next story, and is one I really don't get, maybe it is just wacky! If someone has read it, perhaps they can explain it to me.

Arthur C Clarke sold 'Loophole' to Astounding Science Fiction in the closing months of the Second World War, and it was published in 1946. It is an example of the 'don't underestimate us humans' story, and is told in the form of a series of memos (I'd actually call them emails as that's what they look like, except for the fact that at this point there was a long time before they were going to be invented) between various alien military and political figures about a surveillance of Earth and the human race. Short and punchy, this is an easy, enjoyable read.

The next story is 'Rescue Party' which I've talked about previously - you can read about it here. Anyway, that's it for now, more soon.

Dust by Hugh Howey - Book Review

This is the third book in the Silo trilogy, following 'Wool' and then 'Shift'. In many ways though, it is more of a direct sequel to Wool, as Shift is -mostly anyway - a prequel. However don't try reading Wool and then Dust, there are several chapters of Shift that move the story along.

*spoilers for the first two books*

Dust starts off after Juliette has returned to her Silo, the only person ever to come back alive after being sent out to Clean. She comes back with stories of other Silos, and has a crazy plan to dig to the (almost empty) neighbouring silo. She has been elected Mayor, but not many people trust in her. Meanwhile, in Silo One Donald continues impersonating Thurman while trying to help Juliette, and also trying to keep his newly awakened sister a secret.

To me, this is the weakest of the three books in the trilogy. Book One was extremely novel, an introduction to a fascinating world. Book Two explored how the world of the silos came about and is really gripping stuff. Book Three though was a bit flat, there were no big surprises or new problems to overcome. That said, the ending is good, and fitting of the overall series as a hole. I'd give it 7/10.