The Inter-Galactic Playground

Wheelchairs with hidden machine guns: McGann, Oisin (2009). The Wisdom of Dead Men, Corgi.

2009-09-27T02:04:00.000-07:00

Ancient Appetites was one of my favourite YA sf novels and I've been eagerly awaiting the sequel. The Wisdom of Dead Men is a damn good successor. It is not an easy sequel, it has a host of new political directions, and some uncomfortable discoveries.

The Wildernstern clan are unsually long lived and have a special relationship with gold (it heals them) and with the living animals that turn up from time to time. If the share blood with one, it will acknowledge them as its master.

In Ancient Appetites , the family discovered some bog bodies which unfortunately revived and claimed their rights as the eldest of the line. To enforce these rights, they cut a swathe through the family (using the Rites of Accession to support the various assassinations) and were finally done away with by the patriarch's second son Berto and his youngest brother Nate, along with Berto's wife Daisy. None of these people were very happy to find themselves at the head of the family. Furthermore, Berto had been crippled in the fight and as the book opens we find him in a wheelchair.

The Wisdom of Dead Men sees Berto get involved with the shady Knights of Abraham in search of a cure for his paralysis, while Nate and Daisy investigate the apparent spontaneous combustion of local witches, and find themselves digging up poorly buried family skeletons. We find out more about the engimals which roam the countryside and even more about the Wildernstern's blood and the miraculous healing they share with a small number of other families. Irish politics gets murkier and more unsettled.

There is clearly going to be a sequel, and despite being sequel averse, I'm looking forward to it. McGann is not the greatest of writers, there are a lot of clunky sentences, but unlike too many of the sf texts being pushed at kids, his work always has a really fantastic story to tell.

There'll always be a London: Philip Reeve, Fever Crumb (London: Scholastic, 2009).

2009-05-10T11:02:00.000-07:00

Very good indeed. A prequel to Mortal Engines, it only slides into prequel mode very occasionally. Most of the time it is firmly its own book.

Fever Crumb has grown up in the Engineers' house shortly after the collapse of the Scriven rule of London. The Scriven were not quite human, and their inability either to breed true or to breed well with humans eventually led to their downfall and to the Patschkin riots.

On leaving the Engineers for the first time, Fever discovers she herself is at least part Scriven, but this becomes a minor issue as the nomads advance on London, and the archeologists and engineers look for the secret which the Scriven left behind.

Although there are some big themes, this is a slight novel, and most of its pleasures are in the discovery of the run down future London. It's nice to see an sf writer for kids keeping firmly to sf as well, the moment at which the book could have gone all mystic, science and scientific exploration comes firmly to the fore.

Untreasured: Michelle Harrison, 13 Treasures (Simon & Schuster, 2009).

2009-05-10T10:59:00.000-07:00

Harrison, M. (2009). 13 Treasures. London, Simon & Schuster.
A very weak book: Tanya goes to stay with her grandmother because her mother can't cope with her apparently psychotic behaviour. There Tanya meets Fabian and together they unravel the mystery of the girl who went missing 50 years before. Tanya, it turns out, can see fairies, and Morwenna was kidnapped by the fairies many years ago.

The problem is that the book is very badly written, the sentences clunk, and the structure is all wrong. We spend too much time in the build up to figuring out what's going on, and only in the last fifth of the book does Fabian discover the secret Tanya is hiding. Only in the last tenth do we find out that Morwenna went willingly and that everyone is conspiring to protect Tanya. I wish I could say that Tanya figures out how to protect herself, but she is actually saved by Red, a girl who is herself trying to rescue her brother from the fairies--a twist which could have been fascinating but which is handled as a mere side-story. The 13 treasures barely figure.

The two most grating aspects of the book are the newspaper stories which are written as if by someone who has never actually read a newspaper crime report, and the Enid Blyton style wise gypsy woman.

Elliot, Zetta. (2008). A Wish After Midnight. ?, Self-published?

2009-05-06T07:00:00.001-07:00

The easy way to describe A Wish After Midnight is that it's a YA version of Octavia Butler's _Kindred_. I mean that as a compliment by the way.

Genna lives in Brooklyn. In the first half of the novel we see through her eyes all the threats that Black ghetto families face. Under the pressure of poverty and low expectations her family is disintegrating, and Genna's chances of getting up and out are diminished with every attempt she makes to help her mother. Her own confidence however is increased when she meets a Rastafarian boy called Judah.

In the second half, Genna finds herself flung back into 1863 Brookly, badly injured although she can't remember how. She is taken in by free black folk and settles down to the indignities of being Black in America in 1863. Later, Judah arrives, but he has been sold into slavery and is far willing to accept the hard scrabble comfort of freedom. The book ends with the draft riots, and a place for a sequel.

This really is rather a good book: the pre time travel section is too long for my tastes, but it's exploration of Genna's life is complex and demonstrates the degree to which racism is held together by many institutional structures. Once in the past the book really takes off: the racism and prejudice of white northerners is given short shrift, the ways in which white immigrants and blacks are played off against each other is dealt with very well, the compromised expectations of many people are depicted well, and the casual prejudice of the well meaning is displayed.

Sheldon, Dyan (2008). The Difficult Job of Keeping Time. London, Walker Books.

2009-02-22T03:05:00.001-08:00

This is a rather nice time travel fantasy in which a town's old church is about to be obliterated by re-development. One of the things I liked about it is that while Good = preservation and Evil = obliteration of memory, one of the issues is that the redevelopment will not benefit locals but only marginalise them. Of the two protagonists, one is a refugee boy settled in the town, the other the child of a not very reliable single mother with a drink problem. As far as there is a metaphoric arc, it's that they learn to draw on their own resources.

Kiki and Trish meet a lady, of middle age, who sends them back into the past to reclaim some documents. The lady is an avatar, as is her opponent. Both of them will be born, again and again in different forms to face off against each other (each body lives its natural life unless terminated, so killing one's opponent is not always the right way to go, the lady, for example, has in a previous incarnation been locked inb a mental hospital and drugged, to keep her out of play). There is a hint that these are old gods in an old game.

The nineteenth century drawn here is reasonably realistic, with child labour portrayed as just one of those things: all the shock is in Kiki and Trish's experience of it. No one is shown as especially callous, just having different values.

I liked the book a great deal, for its combination of the nicely drawn present, and protagonists with genuine ingenuity.

2009-01-20T12:28:00.000-08:00

Lavender Ratties!!! or Rat Trap by Michael J. Daley from Holiday House, 2008.

2008-07-04T02:40:00.000-07:00

I reviewed Daley's Space Station Rat back here in 2006. It's remained one of my favourites in my collection.

In Rat Trap Daley continues the story, as Rat has to hide from investigators, learns something about ethics and learns how to tempt a computer into sentience.

I love this book. I love that Rat remains always and ever a grown up person who has as much practical to teach the boy as she has to learn. I love the fact that Daley never loses sight of the fact that in a rough, tough universe sentimental messages aren't half as useful as a good set of screwdrivers.

End of the blog.

2008-06-12T23:45:00.000-07:00

Dear All

I may post the odd thing here, but this blog is more or less dead. The book is due sometime next year.

Active and excelellent however is a blog by Susan Fichtelberg who seems to have a firm grasp on what sf for children and teens should be. See here.

Books about computer gaming.

2008-05-20T12:25:00.000-07:00

At the request of Waller Hastings, the members of Child_lit came up with this list, and kindly permitted me to post it here.

Baron, Nick. Virtual Destruction. Previewing a new virtual reality game,
Marc McClaren becomes alarmed when he begins to have strange nightmares
and then his friends begin to die in strange accidents.

Besher, Alexander. Rim: a Novel of Virtual Reality. In the wake of a
mega-earthquake in 2027 Japan, the virtual-reality entertainment empire
Satori Corporation attempts to rescue thousands of people trapped in
virtual worlds.

Bloor, Edward. Crusader. 15-year-old Roberta struggles to separate truth
from virtual reality when she works in her uncle's failing arcade at the
mall in this blend of murder mystery and mall rat culture.

Card, Orson Scott. Ender's Game. Set in a future where children are
trained for military battle using video games, Ender rises above his peers
to become a commander of a virtual army.

Carpenter, Christopher. The Twilight Realm. Five young people addicted to
a fantasy role-playing game are transformed into characters with
remarkable powers and sent into a strange and dangerous parallel world.

Catran, Ken. Running Dogs.

Catran. The Onager._

Cross, Gillian. New World. Fourteen-year-old Miriam agrees to test a new
computer game in utmost secrecy but finds that it is more than she
bargained for.

Dick, Philip K. Game Players of Titan.

Foy, George. The Shift. Burned-out soap opera writer Alex Munn finds his
life in danger from a serial killer when he plays with new virtual reality
technology.

Gibbons, Alan. Legendeer trilogy. Shadow of the minotaur.

Goldman, E. M. The Night Room. When a group of students uses an
experimental computer program that simulates their tenth high school
reunion, they get an unsettling look at their possible futures.

Hogan, James. Bug Park. Visionary teens Kevin and Taki realize that they
can make millions from Bug Park, a micro mechanical entertainment park
that employs direct neural interfacing, but a murderous saboteur forces
them into a war of physics.

Horowitz, Anthony. Eagle Strike. After a chance encounter with assassin
Yassen Gregorovich, teenage spy Alex Rider investigates a pop star, whose
new video game venture hides sinister motives involving Air Force One,
nuclear missiles, and the drug trade.

Howarth, Lesley. Ultraviolet. We think we are in a post-catastrophe
dystopia but actually we are testing a computer game.

Ipcar, Dahlov. The Warlock of Night. Based on chess.

Kostick, Conor. Epic.

Kostick. Saga.

Landsman, Sandy. The Gadget Factor. Boys build a virtual world that looks
a lot like what we might call Sim Universe, and then war game it to
destruction.

Locke, Joseph. Game Over. When a new video arcade named Hades opens in
town, the students of Dinsmore begin committing bizarre and violent acts.

Lubar, David. Wizards of the Game. RPG fan Mercer wants to bring a gaming
convention to his middle school, but instead attracts four genuine wizards
who are trapped on Earth and want his help in returning to their own
world.

Miyabe, Miyuki. Brave Story. {Tr. Alexander O. Smith} This year's Mildred
L. Batchelder Award winner. Fourteen-year-old Wataru enters the fantasy
world of Vision hoping to change his real-life situation (he is an only
child whose world is falling apart as his parents become estranged) by
relying on the video-game rules with which he is so familiar. but they
don't work. This doorstop of a book (816 pages) is a phenomenon in Japan,
where it is also available as a video game and a multi-volume graphic
novel. The last time I checked, the first 3 volumes of the graphic novel
had been translated into English.

Norman, Roger. Albion’s Dream. Edward's involvement with a mysterious
adventure game leads to a confrontation with his boarding school's
tyrannical headmaster and evil doctor.

Odom, Mel. Crossings (Buffy the Vampire Slayer series). When local video
game players who have been testing a new game begin exhibiting strange
behavior, Anya and Xander investigate, but when Anya disappears into an
alternate demon universe, Buffy must discover how to get her back.

Paulsen, Gary. Rodomonte’s Revenge. Best friends Brett and Tom love the
new virtual reality game, Rodomonte's Revenge, until the computer
infiltrates their minds and transforms the game into something dangerously
real.

Pratchett, Terry. Only You Can Save Mankind. A classic but the gaming
itself becomes something of a metaphor/portal fantasy world by the end.

Pryor, Michael . The Mask of Caliban.

Rubinstein, Gillian. Space Demons. Twelve-year-old Andrew, bored with
life, becomes obsessed with a mysterious new computer game, which has the
power to zap him and his friends into a dangerous world of menacing space
warriors. Andrew M. Butler writes about this in The Lion and the Unicorn,
Vol 28, number 2. There are sequels: Skymaze and Shinkei.

Scott, Michael. Gemini Game. When players of their virtual reality
computer game fall into a coma, Liz and BJ O'Connor, teenage owners of a
computer games company, flee from the police in an attempt to locate a
copy of their game and correct the programming.

Seidler, Tor. Brainboy and the Deathmaster. When the new prototype of his
favorite game, StarMaster, leads him to the laboratory of software guru
Keith Masterly, orphan and computer game genius Darryl Kirby finds his
life plunged into danger when he uncovers Keith's diabolical scheme, which
forces him to confront his painful past.

Simons, Rikki. Reality Check! (Manga) When tenth-grader Collin Meeks is
at school, his cat, Catreece, puts on her owner's virtual reality helmet,
assumes the identity of a cute teenager, and surfs the Virtual Internet
System while Collin is at school. (Graphic Novel)

Skurzynski, Gloria. The Virtual War. In a future world where global
contamination has necessitated limited human contact, three young people
with unique genetically engineered abilities are teamed up to wage a war
in virtual reality.

Sleator, William. Interstellar Pig.

Tangherlini, Arne. Leo@fergusrules.com. Leonora, a teenager of mixed
ancestry, begins to spend most of her time in a virtual reality program
but is lured into computer-generated danger when a boy she likes
disappears.

Townley, Roderick. Into the Labyrinth. A sequel to The Great Good Thing,
about turning a world into hypertext.

Vande Velde, Vivian. Heir Apparent. Giannine is trapped in a flawed
virtual reality game that will kill her unless she beats it.

Vande Velde. User Unfriendly. Arvin Rizalli, his mother, and six of his
friends pirate a computer-generated, interactive video game that plugs
right into the players' brains.

Weiss, D. B. Lucky Wander Boy. Obsessed with creating an encyclopedic
reference of every video game ever played, Adam Pennyman continues to be
frustrated by his attempts to uncover information about "Lucky Wander
Boy," a game that he had loved as a child, until a chance encounter takes
him to Portal Entertainment, which, in turn, leads to the game's creator.

Werlin, Nancy. Locked Inside. When Marnie is kidnapped by a crazed fan of
her late mother's, an Internet gaming friend comes to the rescue in this
mystery/thriller.

Westwood, Chris. Virtual World. Fourteen-year-old Jack North finds himself
literally drawn into the frightening world of what he thinks is a new
virtual reality game.

Wieler, Diana. Ran Van the Defender. Rhan Van uses his success at video
games under the name "RanVan" to see himself as a modern knight and to
cope with life with his grandmother and as an outsider at his Vancouver
high school, with his anger, and with girls.

Wynne Jones, Diana. Homeward Bounders.

Wynne Jones. The Game.

ALSO:
All "The Web" series of which the recommender’s favourites are:
Baxter: Webcrash
Joyce, Spiderbite
MacLeod, Cydonia
Cadigan, Avatar
all from Orion.

While Cathy's Book is not about gaming per se, it was written by someone
who writes games: Jordan Weisman. (Sean Stewart is a coauthor and has also
done stuff with gaming, I believe.) The interactive nature of the book,
along with the reader making choices of how to "read" the additional
information, is gaming influenced.

Not a computer game, but Scott Corbett's The Big Joke Game might fit.
Sort of halfway between Through the Looking-Glass and the computer game
stuff.

For nonfiction, try Masters of Doom: how two guys created an empire and
transformed pop culture, by David Kushner.

Jonathan Strahan, The Starry Rift, New York: Viking Penguin, 2008.

2008-05-15T06:53:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Strahan’s The Starry Rift is a really excellent YA sf collection, for 12 yrs and up. It contains thought provoking stories by some of the best writers in the field and they are all science fiction. There isn’t a fantasy story in the lot. I know that sounds odd, but you'd be surprised at how many sf and fantasy collections for kids I have upstairs which contain very little science fiction.

It’s the best collection of sf for teens that I’ve seen in the past four years. It compares well to what I think of as the gold standard, the Out of this World series, edited by Amabell Williams-Ellis and Mably Owen in the 1960s.

Note: this is not a review it is a critique. If you don’t want to read spoilers, don’t read further.

This is a fabulous collection (and I urge you to go out and buy it now) but I do have some quite strong comments about presentation and ideology, most of which relate to the issues I’m talking about in my book. The stringency of the critique is in part because this was a book I could really enjoy and get my teeth into. I got more out of each of these stories in terms of stuff-to-think-about than all but about twenty of the books on my shelves.

First, I was delighted by the real density of the stories: much of my distress over the YA and children’s sf I’ve read is about how empty they are. In many books children reject knowledge of the world in favour of knowledge of themselves, or demonstrate innate talents that overwhelm adult knowledge. Here the authors know what they are aiming for: Scott Westerfeld delivers a hell of a lot of info about space and the concept of mass. Cory Doctorow gives an intense seminar on sweat shop economics and union organization while Ian McDonald tackles water politics. Stephen Baxter slides in uncertainty theory and Margo Lanagan looks at the structures of poverty economies. There is also a real range of stories, some contemporary, some near future.

My first caveat however, is that none of these stories are allowed to stand as they are. All but one (the Egan, which is also the most transparent story) gets a neat little explanation from the author about what was intended, and here my heart just sank. Almost every one of these explained the “relevance” of the story. Halam talks about children and gaming experience, Doctorow gives us a little lecture about obesity, Goonan explains that her story is about dealing with death. Even the more sf focused author notes such as those from Baxter, Ford and Reynolds seemed to detract from the stories. I wanted the stories to stand alone, for a kid to experience that sense of awe and mystery that the stories on their own generated. I wanted the sf in them to be the most important thing, to be able to read about things not about “me”. I also really didn’t want to be told that a story was “relevant”, because I don’t ever remember a time as a teen when I didn’t resent some adult telling me what was relevant. Which brings me to a story which separated from this book I would have really enjoyed, but which struck me as a serious misfire both for the market this book is intended for and more specifically as an opener for the book, Scott Westerfeld’s “Ass Hat Magic Spider”.

The level on which I love “Ass Hat Magic Spider” is that it functions as a reworking of Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” both in terms of the problem it sets, and the fact that a smart kid will realize that it's an ideological set up. In “Ass Hat Magic Spider” a boy has to decide what he will leave behind in order to take a favoured object with him to a colony world. The weight limit is incredibly tight, tight enough that he has shaved off all his hair, starved himself and reduced his water in take for the final weigh in. The discussion of the limits of space flight, of mass-energy calculations etc are very well done indeed. The Godwinesque ideological seal is of course that no one would be daft enough to weigh a 13 yr old boy and then insist that he is not allowed to grow over the next couple of months. For the story to work, you have to assume that no one would have had the common sense to factor in allowance for growth (or simply refuse child colonists). But that’s ok, because it’s a cool thing to have to think about. Where I winced was when we discovered what it was our protagonist was holding out for: a hard copy of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. I’m sorry, but while I can really see adults getting this nostalgia, and I can also really see pre-teens loving that ending, I’m having a really hard time believing that the target audience—12-17—are going to respond. A hard copy book. A mawkish, incredibly sentimental book at that. I know this is personal taste, but that in a sense is my point. As the opening story, that’s one hell of a risk.

There is one other issue relating to the age range I want to raise: this book is aimed at the whole of the YA range, but this is not reflected in the stories. I confess to going looking for this because the plummeting age of Juvenile/YA protagonists has been one of the things I’ve been considering. The short version is that around 1968 there is a revolt against adult protagonists in fiction for teens. By 1975 there are almost no adult protagonists left. I think there are two interconnected reasons for this: first, as the school leaving age climbs, the world of work is increasingly seen as irrelevant to teens; second, the model of desired reader response changes from “protagonists for readers to emulate” to “protagonists for readers to identify with”. I’d like to see both, but there you go. Of the “protagonists to identify with” the story most swamped by this ideology is Kelly Link’s “The Surfer”. A tale of a soccer kid who finds himself in a refugee camp with his Dad, fleeing a flu pandemic and a collapsing US infrastructure. The back story is brilliantly delineated, but in the end the story is about a boy learning to think outside himself, fall in love for the first time, and generally be a teenager. It was one of two stories in which the sf background was far more interesting than the use to which it was put.

In Starry Rift, seven of the sixteen protagonists are adults. Of those five are adults by age and the other two I have granted adult status on the grounds that they are either in the workplace (as in Lanagan’s “An Honest Day’s Work”) or are carrying adult responsibilities (as in Sullivan’s “Post-Ironic Stress Syndrome”). All of the other stories use protagonists who are clearly children or teenagers, but of those only two are what we might think of as coming of age stories (MacDonald and Link) which is a relief. So that the general pitch of the book is (I think) closer to 12 thru 15. An older reader is going to spend a lot of time reading about people younger than him/herself in modes which ask for indentification. There are many readers who do that cheerfully, but if this is an entry gate book, it strikes me as not quite thought through. Ironically, it may be one factor in ensuring that the book is successful with adults. Personally, I long for the days when sf published for teens assumed that what those teens most wanted to be, and to identify with, was adults. I don’t think I’m alone in this. The Inter-Galactic Playground reader survey (see the forthcoming book) suggested it was under 13s who wanted protagonists their own age and recent experience with classroom response suggests the same.

Now on to the stories themselves: briefly, the range of subject matter is huge as is the representativeness of different aspects of the genre and this is very definitely due to Strahan’s skill as an editor in selecting authors. I’m not trying to write a beautiful review so the following should be read as mostly enthusiastic notes.

The two weakest stories for me are Kelly Link’s “The Surfer” and Greg Egan’s “Lost Continent”. Both are as you would expect very well written, but neither need to be sf stories. I’ve already discussed Link’s story in which the future is simply a facilitating device to get the boy out of the house, and confronting his sense of self. Egan’s story is even weaker: it is a very fine piece about how terribly we treat refugees. But there is nothing in it whatsoever that means it needs to be sf. So the refugees come from over a time bridge from a past parallel world. If this is meant to be a metaphor for the fact that refugees come from places that seem to be living in the past with parellel world ideas—well yes. We got that. It might have been more interesting if we saw refugees going back and taking new time with them, but that time bridge is really just another ocean and there is no consequence to it being a time bridge that I can see.

I’ve already written about Westerfeld’s “Ass Hat Magic Spider”, and I just want to reiterate that I like what Westerfeld is trying to do. I haven't reviewed it here, but I recently read his Last Days, an sf vampire novel and enjoyed it very much.

Ann Halam’s “Cheats” is a fantastically well written, disabled child liberated by the web, story. Neil Gaiman offers us a very silly (for highly enjoyable values of silly) story of a teenage sister who uses Mom’s magic bubble recipe to tan her skin and turns into something weird and alien. The story is told in a series of answers to questions we don’t see… a bit like a Locus interview really. Stephen Baxter’s “Repair Kit” offers us a very shaggy dog story fuelled by uncertainty theory of the kind I used to love in the Out of this World series (Ellis and Owens). Jeffrey Ford is at the other end of the spectrum with “The Dismantled Invention of Fate” about the intercourse between a human and alien, their separation and eventual spiritual reconciliation. The story is lyrical, and gently old fashioned, I was reminded rather strongly of Heloise and Abelard.

More serious stories are offered by Kathleen Ann Goonan, Ian McDonald and Walter Jon Wiliams. All three of these stories can be seen as coming to terms with adulthood responsibilities, but keep their eyes firmly on “in a different kind of world”. Goonan’s “Sundiver Day” explores the emotional consequences of trying to clone a much loved person, while in “The Dust Assassin”, McDonald tells the story of the last surviving daughter of one of the great water houses of India. Walter Jon Williams “Pinnochio” is very good indeed as it considers the increasing pressure on child stars, but points out that changing technology may increase their ability to take control of their lives.

I long for derring-do and panache in my science fiction, and Al Reynolds, Paul McAuley and Tricia Sullivan all deliver. In “The Star Surgeon’s Apprentice” Reynold’s hero escapes from a space station where he has killed a gangster who hurt his sister and signs on as surgeons mate on a ship. The ship turns out to be a pirate ship full of cyborgs and he ends up helping a lobotomised young woman and a star creature destroy the surgeon and the ship. Paul McAuley’s “Incomers” is a classic adventure story in which boys think they’ve found a spy in the aftermath of war (it reminded me strongly of Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner (1929). Like Egan and Link’s stories, it doesn’t have to be sf to work, but the way they spy, and the things they discover are all firmly depedent on futuristic technology and politics. Finally here is Tricia Sullian’s “Post-Ironic Stress Syndrome” in which a girl from the future is fighting a virtual war in 1994 against another side’s champion for control of the Meq, another dmension. Each of them is a map of their own sides resources whch can be knocked out by their injuries. When a third party steps in a feedback loop is created so that each injury they inflict on the other, rebounds on themselves. The story moves as fast as the fighters and while the protagonist is immune to the third party’s political arguments, the readers may not be.

My favourite stories are by Nix, Lanagan and Doctorow. Garth Nix’s “Infestation” is a fairly straightforward story of a vampire hunt, but these vampires are genetically engineered alien war machines. The story is about courage and pride, and about skill, it’s also a lovely demonstration of why sf isn’t about its tropes and icons. Margo Lanagan’s “An Honest Day’s Work” takes a damaged child from a very poor family into his first day’s work in a breaker’s yard, where what is being broken up is some large, live, toxic beast: a dark vision of Lilliput and the way whole nations are treated as if they are Lilliputians. The absolute stand out for me though was Cory Doctorow’s “Anda’s Game”. It’s no secret that I loved Little Brother and this has the same passion and panache: as Anda earns real money and even realler confidence acting as unthinking muscle in virtual reality, she comes up against real world capitalism and discovers that there are sweatshops in the web.

THE STARRY RIFT
table of contents

Contents

Ass-Hat Magic Spider by Scott Westerfeld
Cheats by Ann Halam
Orange by Neil Gaiman
The Surfer by Kelly Link
Repair Kit by Stephen Baxter
The Dismantled Invention of Fate by Jeffrey Ford
Anda’s Game by Cory Doctorow
Sundiver Day by Kathleen Ann Goonan
The Dust Assassin by Ian McDonald
The Star Surgeon’s Apprentice by Alastair Reynolds.
An Honest Day’s Work by Margo Lanagan
Lost Continent by Greg Egan
Incomers by Paul McAuley
Post-Ironic Stress Syndrome by Tricia Sullivan
Infestation by Garth Nix
Pinocchio by Walter Jon Williams.Acknowledgments
About the Editor

Best sf for children and teens 2007.

2008-04-26T23:52:00.000-07:00

Given that sf is getting a very raw deal in the Norton Award, here is my list again.

My top pick has to be Stephen Baxter's The H-Bomb Girl,. London: Faber and Faber, 2007. (parallel worlds, time travel, teens and up).

Runner up: Oisin McGann. Ancient Appetites. London: Random House, 2007. (alternative Ireland, queer protagonist, very strange machines, teen and up).

Other fantastic books:
Bertagna, Julie. Zenith. London: Picador (PanMacMillan), 2007. (post-global warming, pre-teen and up).
Daley, Michael J. Shanghaied to the Moon. New York: Putnam & Sons, 2007. (conspiracy space adventure, pre-teen and up).
Lennon, Joan. Questors. London: Puffin, 2007. (parallel universes, DNA puzzles, conspiracy, queer protagonist, pre-teen and up).
McGann, Oisin. Small Minded Giants. London: Doubleday, 2007. (corporate conspiracy, ice ages, pre-teen and up)
McMullen, Sean. Before the Storm. Melborne, Victoria, Australia: Ford Street Publishing, 2007 (time travel, saving the world, pre-teen and up).
Reeve, Philip. Starcross. London: Bloomsbury, 2007 (steam punk, tale of derring do, pre-teen and up)
Rex, Adam. The True Meaning of Smek Day New York: Hyperion, 2007 (alien invasion, girl and cat save the world, non-white protagonist, pre-teen--unlikely to appeal hugely to older readers).

O.T. Nelson "Award" for insane libertarian sf for kids that has no idea at all how communities really survive in times of trouble:
Pfeffer, Susan Beth. Life as We Knew It. New York: Harcourt Inc., 2006.

Expelled "Award" for telling lies to children about Darwinism:
Coleman, MIchael. The Cure. London and Australia: Orchard Books, 2007.

Andre Norton Award for YA Sf and Fantasy

2008-04-26T23:40:00.000-07:00

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Rowling, J. K. (Scholastic Press, Jul07)

Total nomination list:
Vintage: A Ghost Story, by Steve Berman (Haworth Positronic Press, Mar07)
Into the Wild, by Sarah Beth Durst (Penguin Razorbill, Jun07)
The Shadow Speaker, by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu (Jump At The Sun, Sep07)
The True Meaning of Smek Day, by Adam Rex (Hyperion, Oct07)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling (Scholastic Press, Jul07)
Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog, by Ysabeau S. Wilce (Harcourt, Jan07)
The Lion Hunter, by Elizabeth Wein (Viking Juvenile, Jun07 (The Mark of Solomon, Book 1))

London calling Neptune: Mansfield, Keith. Johnny Mackintosh. London: Quercus, 2008.

2008-04-25T11:23:00.001-07:00

Fun, but too many ideas. Johnny lives in a children's home. He's fantastic with computers. He gets kidnapped, discovers a sister, is taken off by aliens, given a space ship, sent ack to Atlantis, discovers his mother is something terribly important and is quite obviously going to tun out to be a relative of the Emperor of the galaxy (who looks suspiciously human).

On the other hand the London setting is lovely, the space ships living beings, and some interesting stuff about aliens.

Godzilla in London: Enthoven, S. Tim, Defender of the Earth. London, Random House.

2008-04-25T11:13:00.000-07:00

Tim is a genetically engineered T-Rex. Chris is a fourteen year old boy. Together they will defend the earth against a scientist who has turned himself into nano-machines.

It makes no sense, the science is terrible a T-Rex can't sleep on it's side, and it can't cope with nano machines) and it all ends up very spiritual with Tim inheriting the mantle of Defender of the earth from a Kraken, and Chris discovering that he has to identify with the world in order to save it, but it's still sort of fun and a honest and open homage to Godzilla.

One really irritating thing tho was the idea that no one would want to join the scientist as nanomachines. I can think of several hundred people who'd jump at the chance.

Locus Award Finalists

2008-04-24T00:18:00.001-07:00

YOUNG ADULT BOOK
Extras, Scott Westerfeld (Simon Pulse; Simon & Schuster UK)
The H-Bomb Girl, Stephen Baxter (Faber & Faber)
Magic's Child, Justine Larbalestier (Razorbill)
Powers, Ursula K. Le Guin (Harcourt; Gollancz)
Un Lun Dun, China Miéville (Ballantine Del Rey; Macmillan UK)

Congratulations to all. But I confess to having my fingers crossed for Baxter

http://www.locusmag.com/2008/LocusAwardsFinalists.html

Karen Traviss on Not Reading

2008-04-24T00:11:00.001-07:00

One of my favourite authors talking about not being a reader.

http://www.karentraviss.com/html/notreading.htm

End of the Line

2008-04-23T23:44:00.001-07:00

I sent the manuscript of the book to a copyeditor yesterday and from there it will go direct to the publisher. This blog is going to remain as an archive resource, and I may occassionally add to it (there will be a post about a new YA collection next month), but I won't be actively searching for books any more. However, from now on, it will be an "open" blog. If you find a cool book you want to talk about, send me a write up (spoiler's allowed) and I'll post it here.

I've listed all the books I consulted over the past five years here: http://young-sf-list.blogspot.com/

If you want to add to the list so that no one ever has to engage in the kind of foraging I've been doing, please send me references. I'll also be maintaining my database so that I can assist with queries, so also give me a short summary and some key words (themes, setting etc).

Thank you all for keeping me company the past few years. Knowing there were people out there has been very reassuring.

Jonathan Strahan (ed) The Starry Rift (New York: Viking, Penguin), 2008.

2008-04-17T23:22:00.000-07:00

British Values Win Out: Ronsson, Robert. Donovan Twins: Olympic Mindgames, Roswell Encounters. Brighton: Pen Press, 2008.

2008-04-15T09:30:00.000-07:00

Sophie is the youngest competitor in the Olympics. Her twin brother Jack is approached by an alien to try and capture another alien. Sophie wins a bronze for the team (no easy victories here), Jack plays bait for the alien. Lots of good stuff like discussion of various scientific and technological information. Lots of silly stuff such as another alien using Jack and grooming him for his role in the capture of the other alien (left a bad taste in the mouth actually). Also, really, really poorly written. But despite that it had the flavour of a Wollheim or a Bova. I'd rather like to get my hands on this chap because there's real potential here.

The Web Series, from Orion.

2008-04-11T02:07:00.000-07:00

The Web, 2027
Baxter, Stephen. Gulliverzone, The Web: 2027. London: Orion Books, 1997.
Bowkett, Stephen. Dreamcastle, The Web: 2027. London: Orion, 1997.
Brown, Eric. Untouchable, The Web. London: Orion, 1997.
Graham, Joyce. Spiderbite, The Web. London: Orion, 1998.
Hamilton, Peter. Lightstorm, The Web. London: Orion, 1998.
Furey, Maggie. Sorceress, The Web. London: Orion, 1998.

The Web, 2028
Baxter, Stephen. Webcrash, Web 2028. London: Orion Books, 1998.
MacLeod, Ken. Cydonia, The Web 2028. London: Orion, 1998.
Lovegrove, James. Computopia, The Web 2028. Computopia: Orion Books, 1998.
Furey, Maggie. Spindrift, The Web 2028. London: Orion Books Ltd., 1999.
Cadigan, Pat. Avatar, The Web 2029. London: Orion Books Ltd, 1999.
Brown, Eric. Walkabout. London: Orion Books Ltd, 1999.

--
These books are quite old now. I read a few of them at the time, but didn;t read them all, and didn't read them in order, so hadn't quite registered that there is a story arc. In the 2027 books the web is threatened by a sorceress, in the 2028 books aliens download themselves into the web, never quite arriving as each book seems to be "wow, aliens have arrived".

The books are uneven and the quality is where you would expect it. The standouts are Baxter, Hamilton, MacLeod and Cadigan, with the Joyce not so hot, but clearly leading towards the really outstanding YA material he has produced more recently. Joyce may actually have suffered here because most of the protagonists are only *just* YA, in one or two cases pre-teen, and his more recent and better works have used older teens. Baxter is also interesting because although his books are excellent in many ways (and I'd hold up Webcrash as one of my favourites because of the intricate advice on how to build a wooden rocket ship with Viking technology) he really doesn't know how to write for kids here: there is too much backfill and info dump. Fascinating to compare this to H-Bomb Girl in which he has the confidence to just let the readers work it out for themselves. MacLeod's Cydonia is a slightly bemusing second read: I hadn't registered the degree to which nothing happens. In this book a boy gets caught up in a conspiracy in the web, set in the consiracy web site Cydonia. Except that there turns out to *be* no conspiracy, except in the mind of a web cop and an observation AI who have both gotten caught up in the paranoia of the web location Cydonia and lost the firmly cynical perspective of its child users.

The best of the lot tho' is Avatar by Pat Cadigan. A boy who has been paralysed and lives in a low tech community gets taken around electronically by a friend. When she accesses the web--against the wishes of the community--she is ejected from her body by an alien. He must go into the web to rescue her. In the end tho' it's the alien he liberates. His friend chooses to stay in the web, and he opts for a prosthetic body. Lots of excellent things about choice, lots of real thought about the possibilities that the web creates for all sorts of people. And fun. Lots of fun.

Boys Will be Boys...: Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, Tor, 2008.

2008-04-02T07:49:00.001-07:00

There is an explosion in San Francisco. The authorities use it as an excuse to crack down on this city of hippies and queers and other undesirables, and generally speaking, as too many American teens have discovered, just being young makes you undesirable.

There is a full review over at Strange Horizons. Doctorow's Little Brother ticks all my boxes: it's about building seemingly irrelevant skills, because one day they may be necessary, it's about tyranny and the kind of education you need to fight back, it's bouncy, irreverant and a demanding read. The politics are real and so are the technical details. It's a handbook for bringing down your government.

I hope it wins the Prometheus Award. I hope it wins the Andre Norton and the Golden Duck. I know I'll be nominating it for a Hugo next year.

2008-03-12T00:34:00.001-07:00

A group called the Mind_Meld approached me and others on the question, Is Young Adult SF/F to explicit?

The comments are here.

A Lonely Little Petunia in an Onion Patch: The True Meaning of Smek Day by Adam Rex, Hyperion, 2007.

2008-03-09T14:30:00.001-07:00

After my bitter complaint here that there wasn't a single sf book on the initial Norton ballot, miraclously, the final ballot has added one, The True Meaning of Smek Day by Adam Rex.

It's sort of fun, has lots of nice Messages, joins the ranks of the *tiny* number of sf books for kids with a black protagonist (which is not to be sniffed at), and is politically interesting if heavy handed and ruins its own message. It's best feature is that Gratuity is the kind of competent kid protagonist that I treasure. All that apart, it's ordinary as hell.

Gratuity Tucci is eleven and she has been asked to submit a school essay on The True Meaning of Smekday for a time capsule competition. In her first essay she tells of her mother's mole, how her mother is abducted, and her own decision to drive to Florida instead of getting on the rocket. She also explains that the invading Boov have decided that the planet is now theirs and they have signed a treaty "forever" with humans--using as representatives anyone they pick up (the first of the political messages, as this is pretty much how native American "representatives" were chosen). She takes her cat, Pig [which made me smile as I had a cat called Pig] and ends up collecting a rather worried looking Boov. There are adventures.

Part two: Gratuity is told to add more to the essay. She tells of the journey through Florida onto Arizona where the Boov have pushed the humans having decided they want Florida [again reference to history, not very subtle]. Then the Gorg arrive, all clones of a single inhabitant of a planet where the species wiped itself out after fighting non stop for generations--so much for the anti-stereotype messages otherwise running though the book. The Gorg are nicely gruesome and they hate cats.

Gratuity and J-Lo, the Boov, who has been rendered cute by this time with nicely broken English and odd eating habits, finally find Gratuity's mother who is helping to organise one of the Arizona encampments [and there is a discussion on the way all the Americans in Arizona have split into ethnic and ideological groups, a racist is shouted down and a lecture about free speech given.] Gratuity discovers that the Gorg hunt cats because they are allergic. Gratuity and Boov clone and teleport Pig[s]. The Gorg leave the planet, someone else takes the credit, and Gratuity explains this is a good thing because she gets to lead her life as she wants to. There is a coda ninety or so years after.

End of book.

It isn't allegory, but its real message is teaching children to question the colonialist stories told by America and Israel (those being the contemporary examples) and once it's done that, it actually falls back into some of the trite assumptions about "the other" it ostensibly sneers at.

I enjoyed it, it's fun. it will go down well with kids. It has an identical plot to about twenty other books in my collection which it handles with a certain swing. I have nothing bad to say about it. Except it isn't a patch on any of the titles I listed in February in terms of any attempt to introduce kids to any kind of speculation.

It could be so much worse: Shadow Web by N. M. Browne. Bloomsbury, 2008.

2008-03-09T10:35:00.000-07:00

Jess Allendon is bored with her homework so googles herself. She finds another Jessica Allendon who asks for a meet up. Not being stupid she takes her mate Jonno with her when she goes to meet the other Jessica in Waterloo Station, but when she sees a face identical to her own, shock takes over and on automatic pilot she moves forward and takes the other girl's hand.

There is an explosion and when Jess wakes up she is in a different Waterloo Station, one where the floor is made of coloured marble, and young men in purple uniforms are rushing toward her, hustling her out the door as a "Yank poppet". Jess is put in a taxi when they realise she is from a resectable household, and is driven to a grand house not far from Soho. There. she finds herself forced into the role of Jessica, sixteen year old secretary to Mrs. Landsdowne, in a house riven with politics and suspicion.

The world "Jessica" lives in is not just alien to Jess it's horrifying: women appear to have no rights, only those over thirty can vote. Jess is subject to constant sexual harrassment, and if she complains, other women assume it is her own fault. Her employers are oppressive. wages seem to be incredibly low and the workhouse awaits any servant who dares to transgress. Outside there is a low level civil war going on: in a Britain which still holds its colonies and the Black and Indian people she meet seem oddly exotic compared to those of her own world; in which the technology is still analog but an internet exists; in which the manners and mores and industrial politics seem out of the 1910s, someone is planting bombs.

Jess gets pushed from pillar to post, becomes a pawn in a game she never really understands, and falls in love with her best friend's doppleganger. Jess is only in the other world one week but it's a terrifying week in which the threats of the grey suited Security or the dapper black clothed King's Constabulary seem far less frightening than the constant sexual threat. By the time she returns home, she isn't quite the same person.

Browne hands her alternate world with a deftness of touch I've rarely seen in YA sf: she is happy to leave Jess confused and us with her. Although we learn the broad outlines of the society, we don't get to know it, and we never find out how it got that way. We know very little more about alternate London than most of us (Jess included) could describe of our own world. Browne sticks rigidly to Jess's viewpoint and as no one has time to explain the world to her, or even really a place to start explaining from (where would you begin if a stranger landed here?) this other world remains powerfully nebulous.

When Life is Brutal, Nasty and Short, Ask Mother: Remnants by K. A. Applegate. (1998-2003)

2008-02-02T04:41:00.000-08:00

It's been three long years reading, and I still have about a hundred books upstairs to go, but I'm almost at the end of my project. In this post, I want to describe, not necessarily the best written or the most complex of the books I read, but quite simply the one that captured my imagination most, and which I've been evangelising for even when I only owned parts 1-3 (it's taken me ages to secure all 14 and I'm still missing number 8.)

In terms of recommendations, age is not a factor, but you might not want to give these books to anyone who has a propensity for nightmares.

1. "The Mayflower Project"
2. "Destination Unknown"
3. "Them"
4. "Nowhere Land"
5. "Mutation"
6. "Breakdown"
7. "Isolation"
8. "Mother, May I?"
9. "No Place Like Home"
10. "Lost and Found"
11. "Dream Storm"
12. "Aftermath"
13. "Survival"
14. "Begin Again"

To name Remnants series fiction is rather missing the point. It's series fiction the way The Old Curiosity Shop is series fiction. In reading reality there are two books here, divided into parts: the first ends with Book 8, Mother May I, and the second starts with No Place Like Home.

The first book opens as the Earth is about to be destroyed by a huge asteroid. NASA manages to pull together an old shuttle and turn it into an escape ship, with sleep berths for eighty. The ship is filled with Nasa employees and their families, and people who have bought their way on. It's nasty and messy--think the last helicopter out of Saigon. Two of the boys, Jobs and Mo'Steel are woken briefly to help fix the solar sails and witness the death of Earth.

When the ship people wake, over half are dead. Their hibernations have failed, the coffins have been drilled into by worms, or they were holed by meteorites: for the next few books we are with people experiencing serious PTSD; no instant recoveries here.

When the survivors look out of the ship they see black and white on one side, and colour on the other. They turn out not to have landed, but to be in a ship which has raided their databanks to create an environment out of great works of art: this is seriously disorienting and turns out to be threatening as well. Would you want to be inside a Bosch painting? Not only that, but the other inhabitants of the ship aren't too happy that their environments are being messed with. Plus, there is another species--ejected angels--who want to get back on board: once the engineers of the ship they think the ship (Mother) is mad, and want to fix her. There is also a changeling child, born on board ship which seems to have been taken over by a species called the Shipwright, and a boy called Billy, a refugee from Chechnya who has been brought up in Texas. Billy is insane, as anyone would be if their life support had kept them awake but paralysed for 500 years.

This is not a fun adventure: the first eight books proceed a lot like Charlie in the Choclate factory as concieved by Dean Koontz.

Applegate has not just provided setting: her characters are strong and clear. The children in the ship come from a culture in which children and teens rename themselves in accordance with who they think they are. Our two heroes (trans. they make it to the end of the series) are Mo'Steel, the risk taker who thinks he's indestructible, and Jobs, his computer nerd friend. But Jobs is interested in other things than computers and proves brave when it counts, and Mo'Steel is smart and very, very good at maths. Then there is 2Face, with her burned face; Miss Violent Blake, the Jane Austen fan, ultra-femme and art expert. There are others but these are the main four. All are interesting, All use the skills they bring with them. All go beyond the skills they bring with them and by the end of the book the skill set is mutating just as their bodies are mutating. Oh, did I forget to mention mutations? The main characters aren't too keen on them either. Jobs' little brother has chameleon abilities. Several other characters mutate into spider like beings before forming a gestalt. While in the second half of the serie Miss Violet, the gentle, prim, neat and tidy young lady, becomes a vermiform, able to break into healing worms at will (it's disgusting and incredibly painful) ; Tate becomes all mouth when she detects betrayal--and Mother and Billy haven't really got the hang of indigestion tablets).

The first eight books are horrible, terrible, nasty adventures in which everything that can go wrong does, people are tired, wet, hungry, clutching marble statues and totally disoriented. Brilliant in other words. At the end of the eight they have reached some kind of rapprochment with the ship (Billy has become Mother's friend) and with the other inhabitants...

Which is why in Book 9 they get the smart idea to turn it round and see what's happened on Earth: cue really pissed off neighbours, and a lot of divide and rule poltics and 2Face and (President of the USA's son) Yago continue the divide and rule policies they've battled each other with before, and Yago, who has found god and it's him, tries to convert the aliens on board ship to the one true cult of Yago, while negotiating with a very weird threesome in the hold.

They make it to Earth which is a disaster with a very narrow band of survivability, but Yago, and the three in the hold make off with the ship, accidentally taking Tate. Those on Earth meet up with various survivors--some scientists, and some semi-savages and get caught up in the politics there (but it's noticeable that there is still historical memory, none of the artificial cuts offs of other books). More of them die. The book ends when Tate, who has eaten and absorbed the others on ship into her body and mind, turns the ship around and lands on Earth, where Billy uses the crash site to re-create the world although, as Jobs occassionally contemplates, it may well be all an illusion.

Through out all of this the main characters act with sense, competence, not always sanity, but as humans engaged with the world at all levels. There is no inevitability, no destiny, no sense of helplessness even among the poorest of the people they find on Earth. Romance is kept to a minimum by rining the changes on the focus of interest (just as most teens really do). And if I haven't convinced you yet, let me mention one more thing.... In book 10 Jobs, searching for models of what he is trying to do, remembers readng a book by an author called Heinlein when he was ten, Stranger in a Strange Land.

Orson Scott Card wins award for "writing for teens".

2008-01-17T14:53:00.000-08:00

Orson Scott Card has been given the Margaret A. Edwards Award. " The award, established in 1988, honors an author and a specific portion of his or her work, and is administered by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) and sponsored by School Library Journal." Not everyone is pleased. There is a write up here in which David Levithan (an author whose work I adore writes,

“I would like to believe that the Edwards committee would not have honored someone who had written essays that were as racist or as anti-Semitic as Card’s are anti-gay,” he says. “The charter of the Edwards award says that it “recognizes an author’s work in helping adolescents become aware of themselves and addressing questions about their role and importance in relationships, society, and in the world”—I think Card’s writings on homosexuality do the exact opposite of that.”

I have two opinions on this, and the following was posted at the hornbook editor's blog.

Card's older books have been repackaged for teens, but he has never to my knowledge set out to write for teens (and I've heard him speak several times).

I am afraid, fan of his work that I am, I also share Levithan's feelings that here is someone who holds views about me and mine, that if they were concerned with my religion rather than my sexuality would be abhored by the same committee as has just presented him an award. It's rather shameful that hate speech against gay people is defended under "freedom of speech". Card is indeed free to say such things, but we are also free to point out their repulsiveness, and no one is obliged to ignore them.

See here for an example of Card's writing on the subject.

Because, you know, there isn't any amazing science fiction for kids and teens being written today.

2008-01-11T07:57:00.000-08:00

The Nominations for the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy 2008.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Rowling, J. K. (Scholastic Press, Jul07)
Into the Wild - Durst, Sarah Beth (Penguin Razorbill, Jun07)
Vintage: A Ghost Story - Berman, Steve (Haworth Positronic Press, Mar07)
Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog - Wilce, Ysabeau S. (Harcourt, Jan07)

My personal nominations for best YA sf of 2007:

Baxter, Stephen. The H-Bomb Girl. London: Faber and Faber, 2007.
Bertagna, Julie. Zenith. London: Picador (PanMacMillan), 2007.
Daley, Michael J. Shanghaied to the Moon. New York: Putnam & Sons, 2007.
Lennon, Joan. Questors. London: Puffin, 2007.
McGann, Oisin. Ancient Appetites. London: Random House, 2007.
---. Small Minded Giants. London: Doubleday, 2007.
Reeve, Philip. Starcross. London: Bloomsbury, 2007.

Only one of the above is published in the US, and the SFWA decided that this would be a useful criteria.

Next year look out for Cory Doctorow's _Little Brother_. I'll blog it here soon.

Nowhere on Earth: Galax-Arena by Gillian Rubenstein. (Simon and Schuster: New York, 1992).

2008-01-06T14:10:00.000-08:00

Three children are kidnapped to become gymnasts in an alien circus, but the middle girl is no good and is sent instead to be a pet. There she discovers that they are really still on earth and the "aliens" are very elderly and rich humans.

The book is interesting less for the plot than for the really excellent contextualisation. The children are all from war zones, lost and unregarded. The circus brutalises them but one of the older children has attempted to create a lingua franca patois and to create some kind of dignity and collaboration. Rubenstein does an excellent job of depicting slavery, the process of divide and rule, and active reistance.

Addicted to the future? E. M. Goldman, The Night Room (New York: Viking Penguin, 1995)

2008-01-06T04:28:00.001-08:00

Seven teenagers are invited to take part in a virtual reality programme which "anticipates" their future, casting a projection based on their hopes, ambitions and characters. The first five each have worryng experiences, but most worrying is the absence of one of their number. All the data suggests that she died in high school. They set out to protect her.

It turns out that someone whose girlfriend has split up with him on the basis of the projection he saw has planted a "death" in the programme for the sixth person to go (the final clue is when the teens realise that a shift in the order has changed the target: the person missing in the first projection is not the same person as was missing in the other four).

The book has much to offer: first these are real characters, not avatars, who react in ways that make sense for who they are. Each of them is a complex person with personal politics stitiched into a wider school scene (no "righteousness" on diplay of either liberal or rightist type). Goldman is also careful to emphasise that what is presented is a projection, not a real prediction. None of it may be true. All the students are competent in individual ways. Parents are portrayed as complex and as people who are part of their children's lives without being rescuers'. One of the students reads sf and carefully feeds her reading into the book (which is in part a thinking through of a science fiction convention speech about the real life perils of a holodeck).

A Boys Own Space Adventure: Starcross by Philip Reeve (London: Bloomsbury, 2007)

2008-01-05T13:00:00.000-08:00

A sequel to Larklight, Starcross sees Arthur Mumby, his sister Myrtle and their several million year old Mother invited on holiday to the asteroid resort of Starcross. There they meet intelligent hats, discover a dastardly plot and defend the British Space Empire against the machinations of a French spy, daughter of the failed American revolutionary Wild Bill Melville. At the end the irritatingly prim Myrtle decides to study alchemy in order to prove to her love, the ex-pirate Jack Havock, that she really is the girl for him.

Country Girl Goes Aventuring: Sue Welford, Starlight City, Oxford University Press, 1998.

2007-12-04T20:49:00.000-08:00

Kari's mother brings home Rachel, a scruffy bag woman. When Rachel is collected by the police, Kari and her friend Jake go look for her in the city and meet Razz, a street boy who helps them find her.

Rachel turns out to be the representative of aliens who have been watching earth and had abducted Kari when she was little to check out her musical talent (this abduction is seen as completely morally acceptable and never questioned). They help Rachel escape, and the aliens head home.

I did enjoy the tale, but as well as the qualm about the failure to question the morality of alien abduction (and such questioning would have made sense in the context of this tale) there is other stuff which Kari takes for granted in ways that do not encourage us to question.

This is a police state with identity cards, ghettos, fuel shortages and the oppression of the urban poor. Not only does Kari blithely accept this, but the sense that it is somehow right is built in. When she worries about Razz, Jake reassures her that he is a street kid and will be just fine. At the end of the novel they leave Razz behind who accepts his lot like the proverbial cockney sparrow. And what really icked me out is that Rachel is loved, not because she is a Misfit they have got to know, thus proving that maybe the label is a bit problematic, and the police harrassment of Misfits unacceptable, but because she is not really a Misfit and therefore we don't actually have to think about all of the above.

Finally a small oddity. How do you react to a book that contains a dedication to Princess Diana, "You were the wind beneath our wings", and epigraphs from Wilfred Owen's "Shadwell Stair", and Ursula LeGuin's "Semley's Necklace"?

A boy and his basset, a girl and her cat: Carolyn MacDonald, The Lake at the End of the World. Hodder and Stoughton, Australia, 1988.

2007-12-04T20:40:00.000-08:00

Diana lives by a lake with her mother, and her father who has been damaged by a tractor accident. As far as they know, there is no one else left in the world. They look after the birds that her father transplanted many years ago, grow crops and have no meat. Their only animals are the barn cats. Diana has made friends with one called Matilda.

Hector lives in an underground community of one hundred and two. The community is self-sufficient, has much food stored and lives in quiet darkness to save energy. Everyone whispers. They also have basset hounds. Hector's basset hound is called Stewart and Stewart is a wanderer. One day he leads Hector above ground, and Hector, entranced, keeps returning until one day he meets Diana. He follows Diana into the world where she hides him in her shed.

As Hector grows stronger, Diana's mother finds him, but the two women initially don't tell each other, and Beth makes friends with Hector on her own terms. When Diana discovers she is initially angry with Hector but that gradually subsides. By the time he meets her father as well, he is on his way to being integrated.

But Hector, who was being raised to be a leader in his own community, decides to go back at the very least to say good bye but also with the sense that he needs to find out if he is needed. Diana and Stewart accompany him and find at the heart of the underground system a dictator who has kidnapped many scientists to create his underground empire: yes, he had preached the end of the world, but as we discover his plan to dump the accumulating toxins of the power plant into the lake, we realise he isn't exactly a Green, just a believer in the ecological equivalent of a modern Gated Community.

Diana is expelled and Hector locked out of the community and left to starve. Hector decides he has to leave, and just decides to go--realising that much of the Counsellor's power is simply about fear. As he as one of the older members leave, the lake breaks through into the tunnels forcing many of the community above ground. The Counsellor is killed.

At the end there is the hope that the underground dwellers will contribute ther resources to help create a viable lake community [although it's too small really for genetic diversity].

I really did like this quiet story. Ok, so I'm predisposed to like anything that;s essentially a tale of a girl and her cat, and a boy and his basset, but even the mild mysticism of the lake didn't annoy me and the issues of environmental collapse were handled very well.

Going Deep: I Feel Like the Morning Star by Gregory Maguire (Harper & Row, 1997)

2007-11-30T23:07:00.000-08:00

Shame we lost this chap to fabulous fantasies.

A "colony" lives underground to hide out from a nuclear war, but as the story emerges it becomes clear that they are reluctant "colonists" and that their projected two year stay has been extended due to a cave in. The tunnels that should have allowed them out, are full of rubble.

The story is centred around three teens, dreamy Sorb, feisty and rebellious Mart and the musician Ella. But it is not about them, but about the way the colony has -- through its very coping mechanisms --drifted into apathy and brutality (physical and psychological). Not for Maguire the standard "the old people want to keep us down" narratives of most of this kind of story. Maguire sets out to explore the ease with which even the angriest and most rebellious are sucked into the system. When the escape does come it is supported by adults, and even by the scared into terror. This is a novel in which everyone really is acting for the best, and the evil comes from the way people convince themselves that resignation to imprisonment and death are the best possible options.

One aspect of the book that renders it particularly effective is that the colonists' past is not our present: the past of the story begins perhaps a hundred years after us, yet issues of history, of race and class tensions are allowed to permeate the book. Maguire takes on arguments about personal, local and civic memory.

As an aside: he handles sex, and teen romance elegantly. It happens, but is affected by the pressures around them, it doesn't masquerade as any sort of solution. There is also no assumption of heterosexuality. Or of whiteness.

Very, very impressed.

Alien Contacts: Arthur C. Clarke, Dolphin Island. Gollancz, London, 1963.

2007-09-21T23:29:00.000-07:00

Johny runs away from home, stows away on a hover craft which is then damaged in a storm. The crew, not knowing he was there, leave without him, and he jumps into the sea. He manages to get onto a packing box and is drawn to an island by dolphins where he finds a research community who are working to understand and communicate with dolphins. The sf plot is then about teaching killer whales not to eat dolphins.

But more interesting is that most of the Island is Black, and Johnny's best friend is a local boy (black). Clarke handles this incredibly well in that Mike is just Mike: clever, and bigger and stronger than Johnny so although he is "the protagonist's friend" he never feels like a sidekick. The island economy is dependent on the work of everyone and Clarke does a really suberb job of blending the different peoples (as I had just read a K. Bulmer book in which a handsome, clever man was declared "clearly not really a Negro! There had to be some other blood in him! Clarke came as a breath of fresh air.

Shame the illustrator of the puffin edition ignored Clarke's descriptions of the boys. In the picture opposite p. 39, Johnny is drawn as his age (16./17), but Mike is drawn to be about 14. Someone, somewhere, clearly couldn't handle the idea that a Black friend could be older, smarter, physically fitter and better looking than the white protagonist.

Thinking Books: Terry Dear's Classified

2007-09-14T13:11:00.001-07:00

These aren't sf but I can see them appealing to kids who like to puzzle things out. Each fictionalizes a real life mystery/case history, and then takes the reader through various possibilities. I rather enjoyed them.

All were reprinted by Kingfisher in 2004.

Break Out (1996): investigation into the disappearance of an imprisoned spy.
Discovery at Roswell (1996): young FBI man investigates Roswell.
Vanished! (1996): Investigation into the Philadelphia Experiment.
The Nuclear Winter Man (1996)--investigation into the disappearance of a Russian scientist.

Restoring the Natural Order: John Christopher, Empty World. Hamish Hamilton: London, 1977.

2007-09-14T10:48:00.001-07:00

Neil Miller's entire family is wiped out by a car crash and he is still numbed when the Plague hits, killing the elderly first but rapidly moving on to the young. The disease ages you in four days. You die of old age.

The first part of the book which deals with Neil's numbness in disaster is fantastic. The section where he moves through an empty world was also pretty good.

But I had completely missed the really nasty homophobia.

When Neil finally finds people, he finds two girls living together. Billie is boyish. Lucy is sweetly feminine. Billie is hostile. Lucy welcomes him. Getting the picture? There is increasing rivalry betwen Neil and Billie. Billie tries to kill him. He gets Lucy on his side and locks Billie out of the house, at the mercy of the winter and wild dogs. At the very end, at the very point where Lucy comes completely on to his side and awards him the victory by suggesting that they not let Billie back in, he "relents" and goes to let her back in.

I must have been young when I read this, because I don't remember it at all, and I'm fairly sure that by 15 or 16 I'd have picked up the sub-text. Billie shared Lucy's bedroom until Neil comes along. She "plays boy" while Lucy keeps house, even finds Lucy a sewing machine. But when a "real" man comes along, the Adam and Eve mythos can play out for real, and there is no place for Billie.

Empty world: Molly Brown, Virus. Scholastic: London, 1994.

2007-09-14T10:42:00.001-07:00

Starts well in a depopulated world where most of the world is sterile. Amanda is a rare 16 year old who has secured her first job as a temp at a computing firm. When she arrives she discovers that the programmers are suffering from fever and then dying. Amanda discovers that Carol, the owner of the firm, was the daughter of a women who developed organic computers (they are in all in fact her brothers and sisters). They survived a purge many years ago [when Carol had discovered they were responsible for the plague] and are out to get her.

The construction of the depopulated world is brilliant, but when Brown "reveals" that it has all been caused by computers the book flags. All of this has to be explained because its essentially an imposition on a different kind of sf novel, one which is about living in the future. The result is far too many pages of download, a segue into a rather predictable Frankenstein narrative and a rather too simplistic solution. A shame because the first half of the book is really excellent.

Creationist Science Fiction: Michael Coleman, The Cure. Orchard Books: London, Australia, 2007

2007-09-13T00:15:00.000-07:00

Up until now my nomination for "most poisonous book in my collection" would have been The Girl Who Owned a City by O.T. Nelson, a libertarian fantasy from 1975 which is utterly dishonest in its ideological plotting ie it twists notions of intellectual property ownership to justify the redevelopment of feudalism.

I have a new nomination, The Cure, by Michael Coleman. The only Creationist Science Fiction novel I've ever read.

Michael Coleman is a Catholic (he says so on his website and it is clearly part of his general sales pitch so I don't feel awkward mentioning it here). The purpose of the book is to preach belief in G-d and I don't actually object to that. What made my stomach curdle was the way in which he did it. Michael Coleman is of the "aetheists can't be moral" brigade, a position I find repellent even when expressed by people (such as Jasmin Alibhai Brown) whom I otherwise respect.

As it's relevant to this discussion let's put my cards on the table: I am a lapsed Jew, who joined the Religious Society of Friends in 1992. I believe in G-d. My G-d exists in the spaces between us. I can feel it. I have no need to worry about whether G-d is compatible with science or evolution, because for me, any argument seems to reduce G-d to "like us" and surely that is the point. G-d is not like us.

Ok, on to the book but with lots of diversions in square brackets where I "reacted".. It's the far future and it seems a bit backward which is rather odd, because this is a pro-science, secular society. This is the first indication of "stacked decks" because the implication is that a pro-science society without religion will stagnate. Yeah. Really.

But it is a society in which "Blesseds" are regularly created, and our hero, Raul, rather objects to the making of celebrities Blessed. He argues that there are now far too many and they are soon forgotten.

Aside: I wasn't at all sure whether this was an attack on celebrity culture or not. Given the rate at which the Catholic Church now makes saints, either it's pot-calling-kettle, or Coleman is attacking the Church as well,

Back to the book. Raul gets done for blasphemy for smashing a statue of the latest blessed his sister wants to send money on. [again: an attack on celebrity or on the Catholic Church's tradition of selling tchotckes of Christ and Mary? I don't know).

Raul and his sister Amry have been living in a refuge for abandoned children. For some reason this is made out to be a bad thing but although the regime is harsh, it doesn't seem cruel--and sorry to keep harping on this but it *will* be relevant, it's not as if the Church homes currently have such a wonderful reputation.

One thing about Raul: we hear his locker has been searched, and in it he keeps the instruments of science such as a telescope. Again, this is relevant.

So, the two kids end up on an island asylum where, through their "therapy" we learn about the world.

Three hundred years before there was a rebellion against superstition and religion. Darwin was set up as Our Saviour from Superstition, and all the religions were dismantled. Anyone who still believes in God is an unbeliever. The Writings, the book of this society, is a combination of science, and stories used as metaphors from various religious books. All the moral teachings are identical with the major religions (although this society is a lot more merciful with thieves than many religious societies have been).

Ok, so far I'm not too bothered. But then we get to the other kids in therapy and why they are there, and this is where Coleman begins to stack the deck in some very unpleasant ways:

Sarih (female) is probably borderline autistic in that although she is obsessed with numbers, she doesn't like large numbers so can't really be called a savant. When they are discussing the likelihood of life on other planets, one of the therapists explains that the numbers of planets are too big to think easily about, as are the number of mutations which created humans.

Sarih responds: "How big? If it is too big then it becomes an impossible." (102) And through this thought she comes to the conclusion that "Science tells lies. The Writings tell Science. The Writings tell lies." (112). Sarih uses the probability theory derived from dice to "prove" that mutations can't work as a means of development.

"What is easier?... To turn a frog into a bird or to throw forty sixes? Sixes of course. But if sixes can't be done in time how can mutations? Scence lies! There must have been a Creator-God!" (114)

Doron does explain, "Nature throws its dice more than once a second." but somehow this is less convincing, and as Sarih will be lobotomised, her maths skills taken away to make her happy, the impression left is of someone silenced to lock up "the truth".

Another child, Jack, is clearly being "therapied" for his empathy with animals which is somehow "unsecular" [because gosh, there are no atheist vegetarians, and some religious people don't think the Bible gives them mastery over animals]. Micha receives a lecture that "We are not special. Humans are highly developed animals, that is all. We are not special in any way--not even in this puny world, let alone in the universe." (103) but this is again undermined by the passion of Jack and Micah and the firm belief of Emily in the afterlife.

I'll skip ahead now to the next stacking of decks. Raul discovers the journal of a monk who had dwelt in the building they are in when it was still a monastery and realizes that some of the history he has been given isn't true. Well gosh. Apparently they got a few dates wrong. Raul's discovery of this journal inspires him to go looking for the Brother who he finds, and who insists that his "real" name is Paul and the name has been messed with by the Republic (Arym is "really" Mary). Raul uses this inspiration to deny the catechism of the Republic , gets lobotomized, dies, and inspires Arym to go out in the world having abandoned her "faith" in the Secular Society and having acquired Raul's belief that humans are here for a purpose and that God exists.

I could have handled an argument that "people tend to ritualize and make faith out of anything" but that's not what's going on here.

So to summarise:
Scientific society will stagnate intellectually without God.
Scientific societies will lose all interest in actual, you know, science.
The belief that humans are no more important than animals will lead to the death of empathy.
Probability theory can disprove the evidence of evolution and prove the existence of God.
That telescope in your closet is there to look on the works of God and and wonder.

What Fran Did: Vivien Alcock, The Monster Garden. London: Methuen, 1988.

2007-09-10T11:28:00.000-07:00

Frances Stein gets teased at school because of both her name and her father's involvement in the bio-tech lab up the road, Then her brother sneaks home some cell samples. She coerces hm into giving her some, and while his die, she grows a monster.

Fran is not, at least at the start, very interested in science, partially because she is always being told she is too young, but also because she has a poor relationship with her father (her mother died when she was very young and he can't communicate). Her interest is awoken however by the "monster's" reactions to her. Considered "soft" by her brothers she is kind to it and it grows.

This book could be read as midly anti-science with feminine qualities of caring more important than science, but actually I anger is a consequence of rejection, Alcock shows what kindness can do to them monster.

At the end Fran's dad is exonerated -- a colleague he doesn't much like may have created the cell samples-- and Fran is growing into her heritage and getting interested in science. She is also getting on better with her Dad but there are, thank goodness, no miraculous cures for bad relationships (one of the friendships sours and stays sour also).

One small point: Fran has three brothers. This is a rare "modern" book with siblings.

The Changes Trilogy by Peter Dickinson

2007-09-10T11:17:00.000-07:00

The Weathermonger, 1968.
Heartsease, 1969.
The Devil's Children1970.

Too famous to really be worth describing I have only two things to say:

1) If anyone out there read them in publication order first, and remembers doing so, I'd really like to talk to them.

2) Someone *please* reprint them! They are as fresh and brilliant as I remember, and astonishingly they haven't dated at all. The last imprint is 2003 in the UK. They need a US imprint and glossy new covers.

The metaphysics of time travel: Richard Parker, The Old Powder Line. Thomas Nelson Inc., Camden, New York, 1971.

2007-09-07T04:34:00.000-07:00

A very Geoffrey Trease feel to this book which may be as much about period as about style (although I would never have guessed it was American).

Brian wanders to the old station one day and ends up on a steam train which takes him to watch his own past. He tells his father's secretary, Miss Mincing who tells her brother Arnold. Arnold is in his forties and in a wheelchair. One of the nice things about this book is that it presents friendship between a fifteen year old and a forty year old plausibly and without sentimentality. Arnold gets stranded in the past and Brian, with the help of his sister's friend Wendy, goes back to try and rescue him/persuade him to return.

The time travel is sort of metaphysical, but there is a lot of explanation that works very well on p. 103. Also endearing is that Wendy, who gave up science in the third year, follows it all.

"I did, but you don't have to hand in your head with your physics and chemistry books."
Brian hadn't come across any really intelligent girls before. He was a little bewildered and would have liked to explore further. (p. 104)

Such is young geek love, 1971 style.

Protect and Survive: Stephen Baxter's The H-Bomb Girl. Faber and Faber: London, 2007

2007-09-06T23:18:00.000-07:00

Stephen Baxter's The H-Bomb Girl is exactly the kind of competent, well written, complex sf book I expect from an author of this calibre.

Laura is moving back to Liverpool with her Mum. It's 1962, her father is in the Airforce, her Mum is obsessed with how life was in the War, and her parents are splitting up. There is an American "lodger" in the house who seems to be an old flame from the war. And far, far away, Russian ships are approaching Cuba.

At her new school Laura hooks up with Joel, the one black kid in the class, with Bernadette, mouthy and scarred by poverty and with their friend Nick. Nick and Bernadette introduce Laura (and the reader) to 1960s Liverpool with its grime, the fading docks and the vibrant musical culture. But all is not quite right in Laura's world. Her father has given her a Key which turns out to be a key to a Vulcan, the bombers that are meant to carry a nuclear payload. People seem to be hunting her: Miss Wells and Agatha, both of whom look enough like Laura for people to comment, and the Minuteman, who seems to be a relative of Mort-the-American-lodger.

And suddenly we are into alternative history as the Government declares emergency measures and begins rounding up dissenters. Laura and her friends go on the run as the world around them collapses and they begin to realise that something very strange is going on. Miss Wells and Agatha both come from the future but different futures and Laura has a Choice to make.

Which is where the book nearly came unravelled because the Choices offered are so damn unattractive that there is never any temptation.

Luckily Baxter gets himself off this plot hook with a little deus ex-machina as Dad arrives with Joel, John Lennon and a bunch of proto-Beatles fans, and All is Revealed. The Military Industrial Complex plot to take over the world is scuppered and we return more or less to normal but with "Beatle John" as a hero of the people. That sounds flippant but it's well executed.

The book works pretty well in sf terms with enough hints to aid a child/teen to work out what's happening without wrecking the book and Baxter shows more social courage than most of the writers I've read. There's a single mum, comments on the pressures created by the Catholic Church, the horrendousness of racism and gay bashing. This is the first proper sf book in my collection which has a real, honest to goodness gay character.*

I do find myself mildly worried that despite the explanatory note quite a few kids will be asking their parents about the riots in Britain in 1962.

I have one, and only one argument with Baxter about the world he creates: whatever a random British monarch would have done, the daughter of George and Elizabeth would never have evacuated to Canada.

*The one slight problem is that Nick, the gay kid, opts to go to the future in the hope that it is better. One's first thought is "Yes!" but one's second thought is "hey, but that's not *our* future, and it may not be better, plus, even if it is ours, he's missed out on Gay Liberation, and the wonderful, fabulous backlash against Clause 28 which changed all our lives.

Government Work: Rash by Pete Hautman (Simon & Schuster: New York, 2006).

2007-09-06T01:43:00.001-07:00

I should have blogged this one ages ago but I left my copy on the bus when I was barely half way through.

Bo has grown up in the United Safer States of America. He runs in pads, and has therapy for his temper. When he loses it one too many times (and triggers a psychosomatic rash among his classmates) he finds himself making pizza for McDonalds in a forced labour factory in Alaska. The only escape is the football team, until his liberty is regained by the AI he accidentally created for a school project. There are two things going on in this book: the first is an argument about over-protection and feminising society. Fortunately it's ambivalent. B's temper is never regarded by anyone, incudling himself as a good thing. The response is linked ot the second argument where it becomes convenient to the government to describe more and more things as a crime, so that free labour is displaced by convict labour until it makes more sense for Bo's father to "voluntarily commit" since at least he will get paid, and there is a 99% recividism rate for all convicts.

I like this one: the story is clearly "a sliver from the world". The protagonist is not terribly important, his is just one story among many.

It isn't the Face stupid: Scott Westerfield's Uglies, Pretties, Specials

2007-08-11T00:57:00.000-07:00

Ugglies, Simon and Schuster: New York, 2005.
Pretties, Simon and Schuster: New York, 2006.
Specials, Simon and Schuster: New York, 2006.

I've rather been putting these books off because the entire premise screamed "issue book" and at this point, if I read one more story about how we are all lovely under the skin, and commercial values don't matter, I will sit down and weep, but ironically, it is the degree to which this trilogy is good science fiction that it proves a lousy issue book.

The history of the series is that Westerfield engaged in discussion with Ted Chiang over his stunningly brilliant story, "Liking What You See: a Documentary" (2002). In the story, people have chosen to have their aesthetic judgement and emotional reaction to beauty switched off so that they won't judge their fellow humans by exterior qualities. I wish I could have seen the conversation, because while Westerfield begins with this premise he then completely undermines the premise itself--that's confusing but what I mean is that it turns out to be not the point of the books at all which actually turn out to be about a dystopia in which people are controlled by brain lesions and all the stuff about beauty is a complete red herring.

In Ugglies Tally is waiting to become a Pretty. At the age of 16 she will be operated on and her "ugliness" transmogrified into what sounds a lot like a manga character, in accordance with evolutionary biological arguments about the attractiveness of neoteny. As it happens, her best friend Shay does a runner and Tally is sent after her. Tally meets up with renegades in the Smoke, hangs out with them, has just decided to stay when she accidentally triggers the tracking device. She is brought back and made into a Pretty but before she is dragged back to the city she makes an agreement with the Smokies to be their subject for an anti-Prettying drug because, it turns out, it isn't that al Pretties look the same that makes them happy and docile, it's lesions on the brain.

In the second book Tally is approached with the pills to unprettyfy her. She is scared to take them and Zane, her new friend who has figured out that starving himself and getting very physically excited lifts one above the lesions, takes one to push her to take the other. Unfortuntately his is the cure--nanobites to eat the lesions--and hers is the cure for the cure, so he ends up shaky, ill and dying by the time they escape to the Smokies. This time when the "Specials" (highly engineered cops) arrive Tally lets herself be caught to go home with Zane and save his life. But she ends up being made into a Special.

In the third book Tally runs away with Shay (friend from the first book), now both Specials, in order to help Zane (now sort of cured) runaway to the Smokies, so Tally and Shay can destroy they all. Instead they find Diego, a city never quite as repressive as her own but which has been flooded with the new pills and is now un-lesioned and a lot less Pretty. Tally's city attacks Diego and Tally returns to save Diego from the machinations of Dr. Cable, head Special. She does this and in an unexpectedly weak ending we are told how the whole repressive system collapses.

First let me say that this is mostly good sf. It's well written, well constructed, and in many ways complex. The relationship between Tally and Shay is fucked enough to be real, and I'm only sad that because Poly still doesn't cut it in sf for kids, Zane has to die to free Tally for the prince in book one.

But by book three the motivating impetus for adventure is boring as hell: Tally is always running away to rescue and then being caught for daft self sacrificing reasons. Westerfield seems to want us to think of her as a heroine, but she is actually a hell of a lot more interesting when she is screwing up.

Furthermore, as I have already said, it turns out that the real issue is not the pretty-ness or the way in which we view others, but those lesions, because what they actually do is prevent human desire for aggression and expansion. Non-pretties, clear cut trees, kill animals and grow their population. This thread is much more interesting than the pretty thread but it has the affect of making us rather sympathetic to Dr. Cable. Westerfield knows this: Tally worries about the dichotomy: lesioned and careful about the planet, but a bit dumb; smart, but aggressive and a threat to the ecology. So at the end, when Tally goes to live in the wild to threaten the new un-lesioned if they cause too much damage the effect is a weird combination of irritation at her sanctimony, given that she helped destroy the system, and relief that this isn't an easy ending book in which dystopia gives way to utopia.

McGann, O. (2007). Ancient Appetites. London, Random House.

2007-08-01T03:07:00.000-07:00

Set in an alternative nineteenth century Dublin, McGann has conjured the Wildenstern family, a race mutants who are resistant to most poisons, heal from most injuries, and are enhanced by physical contact with gold.
The family is huge: over thirty members live on the Wildernstern estate itself. Others are spread across Ireland and th rest of the world. Operating trading monopolies for the British Government the Wildernsterns have grown immensely powerful and scarily arrogant. The only thing worse perhaps that being an enemy of the Wildernsterns is being a family member, because the Wilderbsterns are intensely competitive, agressive and hierarchical, and the only way to advance is through the The Rules of Engagement which permits members of the family to assassinate those above them in line.
When Nate's eldest brother dies he is forced to engage in a situation he was trying to ignore, complicated when four bog bodies are found, ancient members of his own family who slowly, very slowly come back to life and bring with them a cruder time.

I can't say much more about this book without wrecking it, and although I have no real problem with spoilers, there are some contextual twists and background elements which I'd rather leave you, the reader, to stumble over. This is too good a book for me to undermine it for you.

Mars isn't like the Moon you know? Knife and Packer (2004). Captain Fact's Space Adventure. London, Egmont.

2007-08-01T02:59:00.000-07:00

Captain Fact slept in a library as a boy, was hit by lightening and absorbed all the information. In his ordinary life he is a weatherman but in an emergency he is Captain Fact.

On this occassion he is called upon to rescue a monkey, stranded on Mars and running out of bananas. All of this is told with plenty of explanation of space travel, orbits, what various bits of vehicles are made of etc.

And with no reference to Mars gravity whatsoever. Captain Fact touches down on Mars in a moon rocket! it's a big disappointment after the careful handling of all the rest of the information.

But a good, fun semi-cartoon book.

Churning of the Land: Oisin McGann, Under Fragile Stone. O'Brien Press: Dublin, 2005.

2007-07-07T04:20:00.000-07:00

A sequel to The Harvest Tide Project it stands effortlessly alone. Taya and Lorkrin Archisan are teenage shapechangers and in this book they move from mischevous to mildly resentful and striving for independence. It's a bad time to do this as the local empire has invaded and is threatening to mine the local holy mountain.

The Empire imports a priest to exorcise the mountain (which is resisting the miners) with disatrous effects. Taya and Lorkrin's parents are trapped in a rockfall along with some of the miners. The story then splits in two, with Taya and Lorekrin accompanying their uncle on a searchabove ground for cave entrances while the survirors of the rockfall work their way through the mountain.

Both groups encounter new people and the end comes when Taya and Lorkrin convince their companion, Rug, that he is the god of the mountain, driven out by the exorcism.

This is proper, secondary world science fiction in the tradition of Jack Vance. While the characters are fun, increasingly it is the planet that is the her

S.African Visions: Jenny Robson, The Denials of Kow-Ten. Tafelburg Publishers Ltd.: Cape Town, 1998.

2007-07-03T23:28:00.000-07:00

The first part of the book is told from the point of view of four or five different people, watching the celebration of the millenium and fearing the violence endemic in S. Africa. There is a hint that someone is about to do something about it.

In the second half we are in a domed community set in a forest and Shiyne is watching a lion. It's not a very bright lion, it keeps stepping in a pot hole and getting a shock. Shiyne wants to know why. Shiyne wants to know lots of things. Many of them are things his teachers don't want him to think about and he is getting into more and more trouble at school. One day, in his curiosity about things he is not supposed to think about he ends up on the outside of the compound and sees for the first time the large black wall around it, the weather towers and the localised weather that means water falls only on his city, and not on the land around it. Which has people. And they are angry with him.

Shiyne discovers through these people the history of his world. The adotopion of Atlas Shrugged as a sacred text, creation of the enclaves, the destruction of the infrastructure outside and the degree to which the life he lives inside is artificial, created by holocasts. He goes back inside with a message for the leader of the dome from his twin brother, but he has an accident and while asleep his memory is wiped.

At the end we are left with the possibility that Shiyne is a sleeper and that things may change in the future.

Rather a good book: completely unoriginal but to be prized for excellent execution.

Weird shit hard sf: Margaret Simpson, Strange Orbit. Scholastic (AdLib), London: 1992.

2007-06-29T13:02:00.000-07:00

Jessica Baron, daughter of a Physicist father and a New Age mother, wins a trip on a rocket ship along with four other kids. It's led and paid for by an eccentric female millionaire.

Part one of the book has Jessica explaining lots of cool science to us and siding with her Dad.

Part two of the book the ship slips out of the universe into Eternity where they meet Schroedinger's Camel, an Eastern mystic and send telepathic messages to loved ones (Mom recieves it, Dad doesn't) Jessica begins to side with Mom and brother Steve.

Part three, they land on Titan where they meet the Shantih Yogi Baba (Steve has given Jessica his photo to carry) and who has made his presence felt first as an Eastern Metatron.

They get home. It's all true.

Never before have I seen someone try to combine hard sf with hippy shit. It almost works.

Rejection of learning: Andrew Clements, Things Not Seen. New York: Puffin, 2002

2007-06-24T05:06:00.000-07:00

It quickly becomes clear that this is not an sf book. Although Bobby Phillips wakes up to find himself invisible, and this is eventually tracked to his electric blanket, partly through the knowledge of his brilliant physicist father, these are all merely devices. The book is actually about social invisibility and Bobby uses his physical invisibility to lose his own feelings of inferiority to his brilliant parents by befriending Alicia, who woke up blind one day after a knock on the head.

All this is well and tedious, but what rendered me irate is the way Bobby despises the knowledge of his father and remains in that state even as he grows in confidence. I don't mind him not being interested in physics. I mind that even when he proves rather good at research and analysis, he does not ever connect that to the acquisition of long term (rather than one time) information. This book is ostensibly about Bobby growing into maturity but it is a very specific definition of maturity, one which is oriented to self and intimate relationships. It's outward trajectory is to a new inner self, not out to the world. By *my* values, at the very moment Bobby and others are acknowledging Bobby's growing adulthood, I want to shake him, tell him to grow up, and stop dissing the smart kids.

Laser Guns and Old Lace: Sean McMullen, Before the Storm. Ford Street Publishing, Hybrid Publishers: Melbourne, Victoria, AU. 2007.

2007-06-22T02:24:00.000-07:00

Emily and Daniel are well brought up young people living in Melbourne in 1901. Emily is sixteen, Daniel is a little younger. But while Daniel chafes openly at the strictures of Australian Victorian society, his brighter older sister arms herself with rigid good manners and the arts of manipulation in an effort to open some kind of intellectual space for herself.

Into their lives drop BC and Fox, soldiers from the a future British Empire which is consuming itself and its children in total and almost continuous war. Their mission: prevent the opening of the new Australian Parliament from being destroyed by German terrorists, and starting the next world war.

McMullen offers a rich depiction of life in Victorian Melbourne, and nicely balances the need for plausibility of period with the development of character: Emily is well on her way to becoming one of Australia's early feminists, but this novel lets her stand as simply a determined young woman pushing at boundaries. The portrayal of social class and foreignness is also nicely done, and is an essential part of the plot, not simply background. McMullen demonstrates an interaction between the protagonists that is about skills and competence and weaves this too into an essential element of the plot.

Perhaps the most satisfying element of the plot is the time travel and Emily and Daniel's attempts to get it straight in their heads. Too many authors gloss over this or wave a magic wand to turn time travel into a portal fantasy. McMullen joins Sleator and James Valentine (see review of the Jumpman books) as one of the few modern writers of sf for teens who does not assume that his readers will be bored by science and philosophy.

Blue polytunnels, violet eyes: Lesley Howarth, Ultraviolet. Penguin: London, 2001.

2007-06-18T22:22:00.001-07:00

In most ways an awfully good book. Violet lives in an underground compound protected from the worsening ozone levels by super-blue plastic invented by the company her father works for--is one of the chief scientists for. Most of the novel is about her every day life with her friends, unable to go out without risking their "rad count" and with it their acess to life's necessities. The way in which "advice" can turn into law and enforced compliance is very well played out, and particularly convincing are the friendships as each teen chafes in their own way about the restrictions. Much of the time they spend absorbed in a cypergame and part of the novel is about the ways in which that both is, and isn't satisfactory. I was particularly impressed by the writing itself which is simultaneously sparse and playful: the dialogue, more than anything else, gives the impression of people exhausted by heat.

What I should have remembered is that while Lesley Howarth is responsible for the brilliant Maphead (1994, alien father and son on earth looking for son's human mother, drink a cat milkshake while they wait for something to happen) she is also responsible for Mister Spaceman (1999), a metaphor book. So I regret to say that at the end of this rather splendid construction of a plausible future, it all turns out to be a cyberspace game.

The Bleeding Edge: Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses sequence (2001-2005).

2007-06-17T14:18:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure what to do with these books: if I miss them out of the bibliography, or even the discussion, I'm going to get it in the neck because Malorie Blackman's series is one of the very few texts advertised as sf for younger readers by a Black woman.

The snag is that they aren't sf. They aren't even remotely science fiction. They barely even classify as allegory.

Noughts and Crosses (2001), Knife Edge (2004) and Checkmate (2005) are, when all is said and done, very straightforward, very well written stories of teens attempting to construct a life across an Apartheid divide. Noughts and Crosses is Romeo and Juliet, Knife Edge reminds me of Joan Lingard's 1970s Irish Protestant/Catholic sequence. Checkmate is a rather tense thriller.

I need to say the next bit, but before anyone's hackles go up, make sure you read the paragraph afterwards: in most ways it matters not one bit that the oppression of colour is reversed. Yes, there are nice asides about elastoplast only coming in brown, and Callie Rose (mixed race) having "lank hair" but almost all of the time these books simply replicate the situation in South Africa, although actually it's a country where the oppressed group is in the minority, and the immigration politics are those of the UK, which makes the role of the Nought Liberation Front a bit weird at times as they are acting like the ANC in a country where they represent the minority.

But there is one way in which the role reversal mattered enormously: it forced me to confront the casual "racism of assumptive vision" (someone give me a better term!) I found it enormously difficult to keep people's colour the right way round in my head. I have non-white step mom for heaven's sakes. My own siblings are the colour of cafe au lait. I work in one of the most multicultural universities in the UK. I live in an area where most of my neighbours are immigrants. And *still* unless I was careful I automatically "saw" the wealthy people in this book as white, and the poor as black.

If sf is fundamentally about cognitive estrangement, then despite everything else I said above, they are science fiction.

Leprous in Utopia: T. E. Berry-Hart, Escape from Geneopolis. London: Scholastic, 2007.

2007-06-15T12:26:00.000-07:00

A well written dystopia that loses in interest as we move away from the city.

Arlo is a Natural living in a world of Citizens genetically engineered to feel no pain. He discovers he is a Natural just before he turns eleven years olf and at the same time as a new regent takes control of the city of Genopolis. Quite quickly he becomes the subject of conspiracy as the Regis seeks to control the city and the intellectual classes. Arlo is forced to run but is sent off with a book containing information about his birth and a map to the regions.

Usha is a Gemini. genetically engineered as a servant to work for a Citizen, she discovers that she is actually a clone of her mistress and is wanted for transplanted organs. She kills the surgeon and her mistress and runs.

The interesting material is all in the world building. Berry-Hart depicts well a socety that feels no pain and so, ironically, becomes susceptible to inury and infection. The collapsing economy of Genetopia is also well drawn and so are many of the poltiical conflicts.

Where the book falls down is that there are too many easy answers on the horizon: the Citizens will prove susceptible to emotion because proximity to a Natural provokes it (even if it is hatred), and while the book doesn't end in this volume you just know that the villains will die and there will be an emotional and emotive solution at the end--this is not a book in which, say, engineering will make a difference. The other problem is simply that this book is ongoing. Once Usha and Arlo start running, we lose the depth of the city and are into action adventure territory. It's written well, is reasonably excting but there is nothing new here, and very little reason for the adventure except to increase the pace--we know, after all, that neither main character will die.

Overall, a competent post-disaster story with an interesting dystopia, that falls into too many cliches of futuristic post-technological dystopias written for children. I've read a lot of them.

Gravity Wells and Flower Clocks: William Sleator, Marco's Millions and The Boxes

2007-06-13T11:11:00.000-07:00

Marco's Millions. New York: Dutton Children's Books, Penguin, 2001.
The Boxes. New York: Duttons, Penguin, 1998.

(NB: these dates can't be correct as Marco's Millions comes first, but they are what I seem to have),

Marco's Millions
A science fantasy around time mathematics, but nothing terribly complicated.
Marco's sister is small, slight and frail, When she finds a time tunnel in the basement and dreams beckon her through, she sends her brave brother Marco instead, Marco is fascinated by distances and he discovers another world on the other side where bugs want him to travel on a mission for him to stop a black hole from collapsing. Although Marco's first three trips tell him that time runs faster on the other side, he doesn't get his calculations right and when he comes back after three weeks he discovers that the further in he went, the faster time has sped by. When he gets home his parents are dead, his sister is grown up but died in an accident leaving a small baby--Annie--and his youngest sister, always a pain in the neck, has become very unpleasant. He leaves on his travels and promises to check in on Annie.

The Boxes

Annie has grown up with Ruth, Marco's younger sister. Ruth is a stereoptypical lazy slob. Marco leaves Ruth two boxes and tells her not to open them. She does and one of the little bugs from Marco's Milions comes out The other turns out to hod a time clock--an organic mechanism. Annie and her friend Henry get caught up in the bugs' plans, in slow downs and speed ups, and that in turn becomes the object of desire of a construction company tryng to buy up the area.

The clock gets stolen, Annie and Henry get the bugs to ask for a slow down and get it back and Marco explains all. It starts well but this is not as good as most of Sleator's books: the science of time and gravity barely gets a look in and the explanation at the end is classic "I will now tell you who the murderer is."

In Between the Worlds: Joan Lennon, Questors. London: Puffin, 2007.

2007-06-13T06:47:00.000-07:00

Three children are plucked from their every day lives and take to The House in London. They find it's a "house between the worlds", and each of them has grown up in one of the worlds, but their mother is actually an agent of the house, although they have three different fathers. The three discover they were genetically engineered for a quest to save the universe (don't groan, it isn't written like that at all, and the quest has been engineered as well) but unknown to them their genetic engineering has been tampered with. The quest sends them back to each world in turn to find an object of power, and on the way they learn to see their own worlds through the eyes of others: the six nostrilled dragon is a delight and I couldn't resist a world in which "feral" warfare has been rejected in favour of "domesticated" warfare shaped by experience with crop rotation.

Oh yes, and while Bryn is a boy, and Madlen a girl, Cam is an it. On its world gender happens at puberty. What's the point of having gender earlier......?

It's well written in parts with the occassional clunky line. If I had to link it to any other books I'd say that Joan Lennon has been reading Isaac Asimov The End of Eternity and Diana Wynne Jones's Tale of Time City. Lennon is inventive rather than imaginative and she is very good at delivering some quite profound scientific ideas in among the jokes.

Not too sure of the age range for this book--maybe early teens with a lot for adult readers.

Teaching Baby Science: Jostein Gaarder, Hello? Is Anybody There? . London: Orion 1996.

2007-06-11T12:07:00.000-07:00

Translated by Sally Gardner.

One for the parents.

Narrator tells a little girl about how, when he was waiting for his baby brother to be born, an alien landed who looked just like a baby and who had to be taught all about Earth. Essentially, this is a marshmallowy, gooey book which is not even redeemed by the rather good science about evolution and speculation it tries to impart.

Survival the American Way: Susan Beth Pfeffer, Life as We Knew It. New York: Harcourt Inc., 2006.

2007-06-10T12:33:00.000-07:00

In this post-disaster story the moon is hit by an asteroid and knocked off its course. This results in tsunamis. volcanoes and fallout winter.

All of this is seen through the diary of one sixteen year old girl, Lisa, whose mother manages to be super-competent. The theme of this book is Family Comes First. This is the handbook for the good familialist survivalist.

The moment things look bad Mom takes the kids shopping and pretty much clears the supermarket. There is lots of advice on what to buy in these eventualities--canned food and vitamins take precedence, rice didn't show up, but it's what I'd buy. Then they retreat to their house and ignore pretty much the whole world except their neighbour, an elderly lady. The rest of the book shows us the infrastructure breaking down--no church, the hospitals collapse etc. etc. And over and over again the message is not to tell anyone else that one has food, to hunker down, look after the family, and prioritise which child will survive. Up to a point this is plausible: America is an individualist society, but it is rather useful that they are never attacked and so never have to think in terms of communitarian defense, and even more useful that they don't know their neigbours so never have to think of a close neighbour in trouble, and the schools close so they don't see their friends getting hungrier and hungrier (with the exception of the evangelical Christian who chooses to starve to death). In fact, they don't lose anyone important in all of this: they all get flu but live. And although Mom's boyfriend dies--he is a doctor in the local hospital-- somehow, while he is spoken of as a hero what comes over is two things: first that Mom was right not to move him into the house and make him family, because that would have jeopardised their own survival, and second that somehow, he was a bit of a fool in not putting himself first. Pfeffer would be hurt about this last bit it's not what she intends, but it is the subliminal message because over and over again, altruism is punished (and I mean that literally as Lisa is told off for every kind action she makes that reaches beyond "blood").

And the big joke?

At the very end they are rescued by the government and government food aid. Think about that... someone, somewhere, was thining about the community, thinking beyond their family, thinking about others. Had everyone in the the USA behaved the way this family behaves, there wouldn't have been anyone riding to the rescue.

A couple of small things about the book: if Mom had brought the plants in to the solar room *before* they died it might have helped. And I was interested to see at casaubonblog in the entry, "The Revolution Will Not Be Blogged, Either" (Sunday June 10, 2007, http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/06/in-collapse-how-societies-choose-to.html this comment;

A recent Ohio educational study suggests that the average American 10th grader runs educationally behind the average Amish 15 year old - and the Amish kid left school two years before and no only doesn't have a computer in her classroom, she doesn't have electric lights. Poor adults in Kerala who get their news not by television or computer (don't have 'em) but by weekly newspaper are overwhelmingly better informed than average American adults, according to Bill McKibben. An political research firm in the Netherlands found that Brazilian 10 year olds in favelas had a slightly better understanding of globalization than middle class Americans with computers.

This book bears out this kind of lost literacy: although there are sweeping comments about other nations already being harmed, and some even destroyed, after the intial stocktaking these countries disappear from the mental map. New York and San Francisco remain constant, but otherwise the world has shrunk to the home town and the United States. There are no places either between or beyond. This is so extreme that when Mom is trying to explain why volcanoes are a threat even when far away, she struggles to do so without reference to the 1883 Krakatoa explosion--presumably the readers can't be expected either to know about it, or to care--it's not in the USA after all, it's not family

On the last note: I have to deliver the book by December. I will start writing again next week, and reading has begun already. From today I'll try to blog at least every second day.

In Honour of International Pixel-Stained Peasant Day

2007-04-22T23:18:00.000-07:00

A section from my forthcoming book....

The Child Reader and the Reading Child

In the conclusion to a previous book, Diana Wynne Jones and the Children’s Fantastic Tradition I suggested that the apparent conflict between the demands that authors such as William Mayne, Alan Garner and Diana Wynne Jones imposed on the child, and the concept of the child reader as someone who had to be tempted and coerced into reading, could be explained very simply if one took out of that category “the Child Reader” that sub-set of children who, in contrast, have to have books forcibly removed from their hands in order to gain any nourishment, see where they are going, and otherwise interact with their surroundings. Despite all the interest in getting children to read, this child, who I dubbed “the Reading Child” is rare in either the childhood studies literature, education literature or children’s literature criticism.

One reason for the absence of the Reading Child from the literature seems to be related to the insistence that children are not a market. This idea has a number of origins: it descends from the days when books were expensive and most people’s access to reading was through the local public or private lending libraries, and furthermore when the librarian’s control over child readers extended to control of tickets and of book choice. As an idea it has also been supported by Jacqueline Rose’s hugely influential work, Peter Pan and the Impossibility of Children’s Literature. Jacqueline Rose’s primary argument was that because fiction for children is not written for children, then children are unusual in having the impressions and understandings of their condition shaped and imposed upon them by others not from their own community. Up to a point, I agree with this statement but what I do not agree with is the corollary, that appears to have turned into a mantra that “children are not a market” and which I see everywhere. I want to unpick both elements of this mantra as a step towards my discussion of what science fiction for children has done, and is doing, where it’s catchment area is, and why it may not even have one.

I will start with Rose’s idea, because I think it has reinforced what was essentially a social and economic situation that even by 1930 had holes riddled throughout. Rose’s idea that children have no literature because children do not write literature, can be challenged from two directions: the first is simply that the exceptionalist model does not hold water. Writers are a tiny minority of the reading public—and many writers do not in fact read very much. If we consider who writes, then male writers are disproportionately represented in the sense that there is a higher proportion of male writers of fiction than there are male readers of fiction (the non-fiction numbers look different). The class make-up of writers is substantially middle-class, but the make-up of readers is not so easy to discern (and is confused by what people will and won’t admit to doing with their leisure time, an issue to which I will return. ). As the number of books on the market by Black writers remains relatively small, one must assume that most Black readers are reading books by white people. Similarly, gay and lesbian readers have long taken their reading pleasures where they could. To turn around and suggest that literature written by an outsider yet marketed to this group somehow excludes the notion of the literature belonging to the reading group is problematic because it excludes two notions: one, that readers are quite capable of putting a book down if it does not appeal, and that this is true also of children, and also that readers are quite capable of subverting a text to their own needs (see Sheena Pugh, 2006, on the range of slash fiction available) and that this too is quite within the reach of the child reader (see Crago and Crago’s work with their own child Anna). As it happens, there is increasing evidence of what children do want to read in their own writings, as the study of “writing by children” is expanding, and as publishers have decided that very young writers are a saleable commodity. The results are complex in that some children hate reading other children’s writing, while Christopher Paolini’s Eragon (2002) became a best seller. But when we study the printed writings of child authors, what we find in terms of content is not very different from what is on the market.

Rose’s exceptionalist model is fundamentally tied to Patrick Brown’s assumptions about the reader’s “proper” interests. To understand what’s wrong with this we need to get a grip on the idea that reading has always been a minority passion. A recent New York Times survey of children’s reading habits led to a degree of discussion the children’s literature discussion list, Child_lit about what was a “heavy” reader, and it was a shock to realize that there is a huge gap between the child who reads one or two books a week, and is considered by non-readers to be a heavy reader, and the reading practices of those who identify themselves as heavy readers whose total between the ages of 12 and 18 was closer to sixteen a week (a number of books which also has consequences for the idea of a children’s market). This revelation should persuade us to separate the functional requirements of literacy from the pleasure activity of reading.

Living in an economy that requires a functional level of literacy to survive, imbued as we are in our own culture of reading, surrounded as we often are by other readers, it is really difficult sometimes to grasp that being A Reader is as much an active hobby as being a fencer or a stamp collector. Reading for pleasure, so often communicated as a natural thing to want for our children, should be reconstituted as the equivalent to learning a sport. Seen that way some oddities show up in the literature about how to get children to read. All the literature I have read concentrates on the content of the books/comics/magazines being offered to children. Only in the field of picture book criticism have I seen any discussion of children’s understanding of the aesthetics of sound (see Chapter One, "U.S. Laureate of Nonsense: A Seuss Poetics” in Philip Nel’s book, Dr. Seuss: An American Icon, 2004), and the idea that one might enjoy reading for the sheer pleasure of getting better at it, just as one enjoys playing the violin for the sheer pleasure of getting better at it is utterly absent from the criticism of the process of reading. Seen that way, the notion of reading as a natural interest starts to disappear, and with it, the notion that there is a natural interest in certain types of reading begins to disappear.

This leads me in two directions, both of which will be important for this book. The issues of narrative complexity, or what children can cope with, and the issue of whether the values that readers ascribe to the texts they choose are valid or not.

Narrative complexity

Narrative complexity and the Reading Child is remarkably understudied. There is some work on the development of complex story telling technique (add in refs on child development) and Cragos and Cragos very carefully tracked the development of complex narrative understanding in their daughter, Anna. But most of the work on what children can and cannot absorb is to be found in the study of picture books where it is very heavily value-laden. The tension that exists is between those who see children’s lack of pre-conceived narrative structures as a state of ignorance and a distraction, and those who see the same lack of pre-conceptions as potential to be exploited and stretched.

Although it is a little unfair to cite as his current opinion a text written in 1998, Perry Nodelman’s Words Without Pictures: the Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books (1988) is an exemplar of the idea that the purpose of picture books is to teach children to focus on a particular understanding of narrative in which the “significant” is central to the frame. Nodelman cites McLuhan’s idea that non-literate people do not sift out the irrelevant but scan each image as if they were pixels; “Anyone who has watched young, preliterate children with little experience of books scan pictures in just this way, and consequently focus their attention on what are meant to be insignificant details, will appreciate the extent to which pictorial perception depends on this learned competence.” (7). For Nodelman, the focus on the centre of the frame is a gain in competence. In contrast, Helen Bromley sees the diffuse focus of young children both as a positive asset, and as something to be exploited by the clever author. In “Spying on Picture Books: Exploring Intertextuality with Young Children” (1996) Bromley asked children to identify the stories and rhymes that they recognized in The Jolly Postman. The children’s acknowledgement of their own pleasure in recognition, and their awareness that these inter-textual elements worked alongside the main narrative, Bromley described as, “theorizing their practice as readers” (103). Another text, Not Now Bernard, was rewarding for what was found in the corner of the page, “One group of children discovered that Elmer (the patchwork elephant) was to be found on the toy shelves of the badly behaved Bernard” (105). Similarly Morag Styles in Children Reading Pictures: Interpreting Visual Texts (2003) pointed out that however detailed her own analysis, small children regularly spotted things she had not (x). Styles also cited B. Kiefer’s 1993 observations, “Noticing details seems to come first and, so strong is the urge, that children often see features that adults miss and, Kiefer suggests, sharing ‘secrets with the illustrator may in turn help children become more sensitive to the artistic qualities in picture books... I found that they developed more critical thinking not only about cognitive factors but also about aesthetic factors and that this awareness was different depending on the age of the child.’(1993)”(Styles, 48) Styles, observing that older children no longer seem to disparage picture books, wonders if “ times may be changing and that increasingly older children are more responsive to visual texts than they were, and that this might be because children had grown up in a much more visual world” (xi) an idea with which David Lewis (2001) concurs. In particular, Lewis argues that picture books inculcate, “'double-orientation, the ability to look in two directions at once”, either text and picture at variance, or picture and picture (68). Lewis, Styles, Kiefer and Bromley all argue for a mode of reading that appears to be lost with age, an ability to see a wider concept of narrative in which the central tale may be enhanced by what is seen in corners or, with some texts, the central narrative or counter-narrative may actually be constructed by the “text” buried in the corners. While picture book artists and authors seem comfortable with the idea that children’s open-ness allows greater narrative complexity, many writers and editors working with the older market seem to assume that the ability to handle narrative complexity is acquired only with maturity, and that “narrative complexity” is inherent on Nodelman’s idea that there is a central narrative which should be focussed on. Again, there is little discussion of this problematic in the critical work, but some authors have addressed it: authors such as Daniel Pinkwater, Aidan Chambers, Anne Fine, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones and Tim Wynne-Jones (no relation) have all discussed the willingness of child and teen readers to cheerfully accept and “read” complex narratives which baffle adult readers. The issue matters here because when we discuss whether writing sf for children (who we assume to have a pre-scientific view of the world) is possible, one of the limiting factors frequently offered, is the issue of whether the reader can handle the world-building, cognitive estrangement and narrative complexity of modern science fiction. In chapters 2 and 8 I will be pointing out how essential this mode of reading is to the reading of science fiction, but also how relatively little of this technique we see in the science fiction written for children and teens despite the evidence, from work with children and picture books and from the developmental theorists that such complexity is within their grasp. Here though, the issue links to how we understand what children value, because it is clear that if we have an idea what children should get out of the act of reading, it can be hard to value evidence that something else is being gained as well as, or instead of.

1. Many working class women did not used to admit to reading because it implied a negligence of household duties. Then, if they did, it would be couched as “well, I like a romance” or “just Catherine Cookson”. Groundbreaking research on women’s working lives in the 1960s—need ref—revealed that far more women held paid jobs than anyone had realised, because women were under-reporting either from guilt or a feeling that part-time work was not real work. In the field of reading studies there are indications that several groups may be under-reporting their reading patterns, of which I would suggest young males and older women are the most likely categories. Alison Follos makes similar points.
2. Both Paolini’s Eragon and Austen’s Love and Freindship are intimately connected with the content and tropes of the genre they chose.
3. There are other problems with Nodelman’s discussion of primitive art, generally he seems to have ignored all the work by art historians on religious narrative art, and by anthropologists and pre-historians on artefact such as cave paintings.
There is a picture book called, Elmer the Patchwork Elephant by David McKee which has spawned eighteen sequels.

Therapising the Future: Keaney, B. (2006). The Hollow People. London, Orchard Books.

2006-12-21T03:59:00.000-08:00

Bea is the daughter of doctors on an island mental asylum, Dante is an orphan and a kitchen boy, his mother suicided in the asylum.

The world is very strange, very ridid. There is no social movement up and down the hierarchy. At the age of twelve people start taking Ichor and stop dreaming, stop being imaginative.

When Bea and Dante become friends they upset the order, discover that they live in a drugged tyranny and that Dante's mother was a resister. A prisoner who can manipulate doors in the world helps them to escape to the Ruined City where the resisters hide out. Then it gets all mystical: Dante's mother had wanted an "Odyllic" solution to the world's ills. Dr. Sigismunde opted for drugs. So we get a dreamy "Force" v. evil machinations. By the time Dante is recaptured and we realise we are at the beginning of a series, it's all feeling very Destinarian and very Star Wars.

Morphing Hurts: Applegate, K. A. (1996). Animorphs: The Invasion. New York, Scholastic.

2006-12-21T03:53:00.000-08:00

A fairly typical story in which a bunch of kids get gifted powers from aliens in order to fight other aliens they are told are evil. But this is Applegate so first, we get to see the second bunch being evil (taking over brains), and second, the people they set out to rescue die, the elder brother of the primary character dies, and at the end one of the kids gets stuck as a hawk. His home life is shit and he quite likes being a hawk, but even so.... not quite what you expect at the end of a cutesy humans with the power of animals story,

Stupid is as Stupid Does: New Heroes: Sakkara by Michael Carroll (London: Simon and Schuster, 2006)

2006-12-13T00:16:00.000-08:00

A disappointment. The sf equivalent of the fantasy middle-book journey is the training school. At least in Star Wars they kept it to the first fifth of the movie.

Kid superhero Colin accidentally reveals his real identity. He and all the other new heroes are taken off to Sakkara, a base in the American desert. There they train, are called out to battle an old villain called Dioxin, and come into contact with the Truetopians who encourage the lawful to live in gated communities which they control.

The book is, unfortunately, riddled with stupid. Ok, one of the superheroes will turn out to be a traitor who can control minds and hence make people overlook the obvious, but in order to make this book readable it might have been better had the readers been let in on this earlier--although that might have turned it into a comedy. It's a mystery why they all agree to do what Josh tells them. It's a mystery that they ask so few questions. Diamond sets off in search of her family without ever questioning the convenience that they had suddenly been in the news. No one on the base ever considers that if most terrorist attacks are on a specific community, but using the name of the heroes, there might be funny business coming from the specific community. I think even a ten year old could spot the conspiracy theory yet these very intelligent people do not.

I'll stick with the series because the first was so good, but it feels now as if that were a pilot and this is book one in a long running series where stupidity will keep the plot spinning.

Speaking Out: Odin's Queen by Susan Price (London: Simon and Schuster, 2006)

2006-12-11T01:35:00.000-08:00

In the first book, Odin's Voice, Kylie the Bonder became Odinstoy Godspeaker, while Affroditey spoiled child of selfish parents became Kylie the Bonder in the same family as the first Kylie. At the end of the book Odinstoy and Affey ran to Mars, taking with them Odinstoy;'s son, Apollo, who had been apropriated by her employers. See here for the write up.

Now Odinstoy arrives on Mars with Affey and Apollo, renamed Odinsgift. They have arrived with Odinstoy dressed as a man but not denying that she is a woman, and Affey listed as her "sister and wife". On Mars Odinstoy causes consternation by hugging a bonder in the greeting party, and questioning why Mars's Odinites have bonders--they have never really thought about the problem. From there she and Affey go to a small provincial non-conformist town where Odin worshippers have retreated to escape the discrimination of the Church of Mars--a graeco-roman pantheon which claims all other gods as merely aspects of its own.

While Odinstoy is off exploring Mars and its underbelly, Affey screws up. Lonely, still spoilt, hating Odinsgift who is a sullen, none too bright child, she gets involved with a young man who promises to marry her. Much later it will turn out that he is a spy for the Church of Mars and unfortunately, Affey has spilled the beans: in a tv interview the head of the Church of Mars reveals that Affey is an escaped bonder and that she and Odinstoy have kidnapped Odinsgift (the law saying that he belongs to his genetic father who is free). Affey and Odinstoy run, taking wiht them Odinsgift and John, a bonder boy who Affey has bought and Odinstoy has freed. They take refuge in a maintenance tower protected by the young of the suburb, but when the stand off comes, it is Odinstoy who walks out of the airlock--a seeming impossibility as the lock is programmed to remain closed if it cannot detect breathing technology.

Some of the allegory is a bit heavy handed. Affey is betrayed by Jason/Judas who is in it for the money. Odinstoy walks out of the airlock because she knows that Odin has finished with her, she is no longer the toy of Odin. When she is gone, myths about her disappearance rise up quickly. But the story remains powerful because Price gives the relationship between Affey and Odinstoy momentum of its own.

Affey really is in love with Odinstoy. In her world, men were what you did as a career. She has no training for anything other than being a very expensive wife. She doesn't cheat on Odinstoy for pleasure, but for security and wealth. This may seem abhorrent, but as Price portrays it, its actually quite sensible. And more interesting is that Odinstoy is brutal and violent. If Affey runs to Jason it is in part because Odinstoy is an abuser with the best of excuses "I do this for Odin". Price manages to avoid lecturing but there are many, many uncomfortable moments.

Trusting our Children: Prose, Francine. After. New York: Harpercollins, 2003.

2006-12-10T11:43:00.000-08:00

Francine Prose is a well-known US novelist for adults, but I didn't know that and the book's opening gave all the impression of "amateur sf" ie heavy on the allegory and with alll the worldbuilding technique of a suburban tract builder. Then I came across, Reading Like a Writer and fell in love, spotted this book on the to be read shelf and decided to give it a go.

It doesn't start promisingly but builds into a very satisfactory bit of sf whose "what if" begins "what if our distrust of teens deepens...?"

There has been a massacre at a high school in a different state. Suddenly there is a new head teacher, kids are being frisked for weapons and more and more things become forbidden. As parents acquiesce, the rebellious students are picked off. Eventually the progatonist and his friends go to check out the school that was the original victim, and discovers all the students have been taken away. With the help of the few parents who haven't been reading the letters home, they head for the hills.

A boy, a dog and a rocketship: Murphy, Mary and Mark Oliver. Foley and Jem. London: Magi Publications, 2004.

2006-12-10T10:18:00.000-08:00

A picture book for children up to about seven I think.

This is partially a story of a boy, his dog and space.

Foley loves his dog Jem but as he grows older his interest in space grow. He builds a rocket and sends Jem to Mars.
But Jem has grown more miserable over the years, he has felt himself losing Foley's love to the rocket ship and to space. He doesn't want to go to Mars. But he is a good dog and learns to operate the space suit, and eventually he takes the rocket up to Mars. In space he realises why Foley is so fascinated by space. On Mars he sends back pictures. He misses Foley and back on earth Foley finally misses Jem.

Then Jem goes for a walk and round the corner on the other side of Mars he discovers Martians who look a lot like dogs. He takes one last picture, of hmself in the space suit, and sends it back to Foley, with the message that he'll send the rocket back. The rocket explodes on entry, and Foley looks at the photo, and feels sad, "But at least he is happy on Mars."

One night a puppy approaches Foley on a hill. He calls her Judy and loves her properly.

"And Jem? He really was happy on Mars, happier than he would have though possible. Just like any dog would be."

The paintings are bold and joyous, and unusually the little boy grows into an adolescent. The growing space-wonder of the boy can be read on his face and his bedroom is full of technical drawings of rocket ships and a telescope--the rocket ship he builds will be a real mechanical thing. By the time it is built he has trajectory calculations on the walls, but we can see that Jem does not share his enthusiasm, the dog looks ever more depressed. But in space, Jem is captured by its beauty, this is not an anti-exploration, stay home book. And Mars is exciting to Jem, it's Foley who decides Mars, with its "rocks and cracks and sand" is not interesting after all. Although Jem does find aliens, it's actually Mars that comes to interest him, Jem acquires a sense of wonder and Foley loses his. A bittersweet book.

Isolated City Worlds:Storm Thief, by Chris Wooding. (London: Scholastic, 2006)

2006-12-06T09:55:00.000-08:00

Rail and Moa are ghetto urchins thieving a living when Rail holds onto a find that that the Thief mistress wants. He and Moa run, and find out that the technology will let them through doors. On the way to sanctuary they pick up Vago, a golem/android who has escaped from a master he ended up with after a Probability Storm.

Rail and Moa live on/in Orokos, a city island in the middle of the sea. Orokos is the only place in the world where there are humans, but it's a hell hole in which the wealthy live in the city and the poor are crowded into walled ghettos. Every so often a probability storm sweeps by and changes things, sometimes inoccuously sometimes in ways that reminded me of Sean Williams Galveston. In the meantimes the Revenants sweep through, fatal aether ghosts that the Protectorate attempt to keep confined. The Taken (humans ridden by the Revenants) are fatal to the touch.

As Rail and Moa run they take us through this world and into an underworld where gehtto dwellers seek to build ships to find out if there is land over the horizon. When they are captured they are forced into helping the Protectorate break into an old Fade technology building to turn iff the central computer. Once there they are greeted by an Obi-wan figure (named Ben) who tells them that the city was a walled utopia in which humans went stale. All that they live with was deliberately designed to make humans active once more. Man cannot cope with utopia, da dah da dah....

They break the computer., the golem rescues them and they arrive at the walls in time to join the fleet of ghetto people. Vago ends up at the bottom of the sea but the children survive.

This ought to be a good book. Chris Wooding writes well, and there is plenty of pace and adventure. Rail, a boy who must use a breathing mask since his lungs were paralysed by a Probability Storm, is well conceived. But as I've sort of hinted at, there are too many places where this book feels familiar.

The city feels like the walled city in Julie Bertagna's Exodus. Rail and Moa feel like Reeve's Tom and Hester, and Vago is far too much like Reeve's Shrike. The ending is too close to the ending of Mortal Engines.

So, a good book, but...

Taking Time by the Tail: Gideon the Cutpurse by Linda Buckley-Archer (London: Simon & Schuster, 2006).

2006-12-05T04:25:00.000-08:00

There are two books here, the story of two children stranded in the past, and the story of scientists trying to get them home. The first is handled well, the second has problems.

Peter and Kate are in Kate's father's laboratory when they fall against what is supposed to be an experimental anti-gravity device and find themselves in England, in 1763. They are rescued by Gideon, once a cut-purse for a high class criminal, and now a steward. Gideon takes them to join the family he now works for, but when Gideon must leave to protect his brother (who has come under the sway of Gideon's old employer, Lord Luxon) the children also travel to London to try to retrieve the machine from the tar man.

Meanwhile back in the twenty first century, Kate's father is talking to Nasa about what might have happened and there is a country wide search for the children, complicated by the fact that their ghosts keep showing up.

Back in 1763 Kate and Peter have discovered they can "blur"into the future, but that they are always snapped back. This forces them to confess all to the Parson and the family they travel with: this is one of the things that makes the book work so well,. Having bitten that bullet and made a clear decision as to what can and can't be told, Buckley-Archer is in a position to use the fact of time travel rather than get hung up on the consequences although that haunts the book. Kate and Peter approach the problem logically, and eventually use their blurring technique to rescue Gideon from the scaffold.

If this entire book was set in the past I'd be recommending it as a picaresque--eighteenth century London is wonderfully depicted and I can forgive the coincident meetings--but the contemporary material lacks either the literary panache or the content confidence. First the writing of these sections is laboured and old fashioned. We are told what people feel, and furthermore, all the adults are simply role-holders. Peter's father is not a person. Neither is Kate's mother. The characterisation of the Parson and of Mrs.Byng in the eighteen century, even of the Detective Inspector in the twenty first, show that Buckley-Archer can write adults, but for some reason she has chosen to leave the contemporary parents as ciphers. This rather ties into the next issue, which is that Archer has committed the (for me) unforgiveable sin of children's literature paternas ex machina. At first I thought this applied only to the dashing, if incomplete, rescue from the past by Kate's father at the end, but when I thought back I realised that although Peter and Kate leave clues for people, and aid Gideon in various ventures, actually, they are quite passive. The book is rightly titled because once you clear away the time-travel issue, this book is really about Gideon.

All of that said, I did enjoy it, but I think the right audience for this book is going to be nine or ten, whereas sorting out the characterisation of the parents would have given it greater appeal.

Knowledge is Power: Michael J. Daley, Shanghaied to the Moon. New York: Putnam & Sons, 2007.

2006-12-03T00:59:00.000-08:00

I first met Michael J. Daley with his utterly perfect book, Space Station Rat.

He has been kind enough to send me a proof of this book, and I'm just delighted, It has all the qualities of SSR, and yet is quite different.

Stewart is a bit short for a thirteen year old. He also has a scar on his hand he doesn't remember getting, nightmares and regular appointments with the Counsellor. His Dad is a computer geek, as is his elder brother, but he wants to go into space, like his mother, even though he saw her shuttle crash. The problem is that he can't get the hang of Astro navigation and his Dad won't sign the form for extra coaching, even though he has only a year left to qualify.

When a visit to the Counsellor goes horribly wrong, Stewart signs up with an elderly bum who claims to be a spacer, and ends up on a rickety rocketship to the moon where he will be asked to use a very small, old fashioned space suit, to find something the spacer wants retrieved.

During the trip Stewart's world comes unravelled. Without the mnemonic suppression devices he's been subjected to his memory unravels and he realises that his mother did not die quite the way he had been told, and that he had actually been there, she had died in part to save him. He also realises that the bum is an old friend of his mother's and the hero of the docu-vids to which Stewart has been addicted. This is not the hero worship moment you'd expect. What Stewart learns is this:

"The best don't always make it home."

Sounds soppy I know, but Daley is a rigorous writer. Shangaied to the Moon is stuffed full of information on engineering and astro-navigation as it currently and may one day exist, but it is also stuffed full of work ethic. Stewart is highly talented but there is none of this rubbish about "innate talent winning out". He practices and practices, and when he does get his memory and skills back, he discovers he had the skills because he practiced and practiced when he was younger. I hope this doesn't sound odd but its the work ethic that makes the book dense, the engineering information on its own doesn't. It's something about the engagement between the two. This equation, talent plus practice = ability is a truth more essential to children's fiction than is sometimes admitted (and lies behind the success of endless streams of ballet books).

Stretching Out a Good Story: Bruce Coville, My Teacher Glows in the Dark (New York: Harper Collins, 1991).

2006-11-28T01:20:00.000-08:00

I wrote about the last of these a while back. Basically Coville has taken Heinlein's classic, Have Space Suit, Will Travel, spread it over five books and given all the interesting things to do to the adult aliens.

I like Coville's work but this series is dismal in the way it renders kids mostly as observers.

The Friends You Meet: O'Brien, Robert C. The Silver Crown. London: Victor Gollancz, 1973.

2006-11-26T23:13:00.000-08:00

Not at all sure this is sf. Ellen wakes on her birthday to find a crown on her pillow, She takes it to a park and when she comes home her family is dead and the house burned down The policeman who tries to help her is killed. She sets off to walk to Kentucky to find her aunt Sarah. She meets Otto who lives with a lady in the woods and wrecks trucks. This section is a classic braacelet fantasy in which Ellen collects assistance and we learn about Ellen.

When Otto is captured she goes to the dark castle and finds everyone conrolled by the black paths, made of malignite (which is a classic fantasy conjuration), and working out how to terrorise the world, with no particular goal in mind. The best scene of the lot is the one in which she sits in on a class on terrorism. I don't think O'Brien meant this one to be the scene I would have remembered for two decades.

Eventually Ellen rescues her crown from where she had left it and puts it on, and the silver crown turns out to run the Heironymous machine which had enslaved everyone in the castle, including the "King". Ellen destroys the machine.

The accoutrements of sf are there: the Heironymous machine spawns an industrial complex to produce more of itself, and to spread itself through the world, but the structures and themes are of fantasy -- destiny, mastery, control and free will.

Mud, blood and electricity. John Christopher's The Prince in Waiting Trilogy

2006-11-25T05:10:00.000-08:00

It's a very long time since I read John Christopher's Prince in Waiting Trilogy (The Prince in Waiting (1970), Beyond the Burning Lands (1971), The Sword of the Spirits (1972). Set in a balkanized England cut off from Wales by volcanoes and from Scotland by distance, this is a tale of the Principality of Winchester and specifically of Luke, second son of Robert who is elevated to be Prince.

Luke is nominated by the Seers to be Prince-in-Waiting, but over the years the very things that make him useful to their mission to bring back science will undermine Luke: is honour, his stubbornness mean that he can't give way, and when he ends up in an Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot triangle, he cannot bend and brings down everything around him.

This is a very macho book. Luke is a soldier and he tells the world from a soldier's point of view. It's very effective, but does mean that we never really get to see the development of science, and what we do see is mostly in terms of weaponry. Other uses for technology are mentioned but stay out of sight. What does come over strongly is the idea that one cannot control the social and political consequences of new tech.

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory...: Levithan, David. Wide Awake. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2006.

2006-11-24T05:57:00.000-08:00

There has been a Presidential election, the Gay Jewish candidate won and the conservatives are up in arms. But this is a bit further into the future and the evangelicals have split. The Jesus Freaks are more concerned with community and kindness, leaving homophobia to others.

But the election is challenged in Kansas and Duncan's boyfriend decides to go and join the many who refuse to let this election be stolen. Most of the book is about the personal relationships on the bus, and on Duncan's anxiety that he cannot live up to his boyfriend's more radical spirit. It's also about Duncan's belief that the relationship is forever and Jimmy's rather more mature approach. As with Boy Meets Boy (a wonderful utopian novel about a high school) Levithan's protagonist is rather young for his age.

The book is heavy handed on the future politics and oddly conservative about monogamy (one of the girls is having an affair and the idea that she is in love with both of her girlfriends is treated with hosility), but it's worth mentioning here as the only book I've read which both envisages teens taking a realistic part in major change, and which can see a future that doens't look just like ours or even an extension of ours. This is a fight back book, not an If This Goes On....

When I was a lad, we had to use slide rules: Anderson, M.T. Feed. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press, 2002.

2006-11-24T05:43:00.000-08:00

A variant take on a very popular book.

Titus goes to the moon where his head chip is damaged by a virus. He recovers but a new friend, Violet, doesn't. She recieved her chip late, and her brain reacts by turning to mush. Most of this book is about Violet dying and the inquity of having all information on hand. ie not having to work. Although the book is extremely effective, it's actually one with Charles Sheffield's Jupiter sequence (faux Heinlein) in basically writing off teens and being quite hostile to teen culture. It also doesn't ever really speculate about the possibilities of the head technology, it sees it only as supporting lazyness, not as making it possible to do more.

For Sapphire and Steel Fans: Richards, Justin. Time Runners: Freeze-Framed. Time Runners. London: Simon & Schuster, 2007.

2006-11-24T05:24:00.000-08:00

Strong on the time travel, weak on anything resembling ethics and politics this is the story of Jamie Grant who slips through a crack in time and becomes a time-runner. The time-runners turn out to have caused the crack in time through which Jamie fell but that's ok. Jamie joins the time-runners to oppose the sinister Darkling Midnight. I never did figure out quite what DM wanted but I suspect I'm not really supposed to because I might agree with him. Good and Evil here seem to rest on the possession of twinkly versus deepset eyes. Yet it's quite a good book with the issues of time-travel dealt with well. Richards has made things difficult for himself by deciding that a person can visit a time as an outsider only once with complex effects.

Make sure you are holding your friend's tentacle so you don't get lost: Willis, Jeanne. Dr Xargle's Book of Earthlets Pictures by Tony Ross.

2006-11-24T01:46:00.000-08:00

If you only ever buy one sf picture book for your child, this is the one to buy. It just can't be beaten.

An alien teacher stands in front of his class and prepares them for the school trip to earth where they are going to meet earthlings. The lecture is full of creative misprision, and I can't write out the whole book, but here is ny favourite example:

[picture of baby wrapped in brown paper]

To stop them leaking, Earthlets must be pulled up by the back tentacles and folded in half.
Then they must be wrapped quickly in a flufy triangle or sealed with paper and glue.

Catch the 9:15 rocket from Paddington Space Station: Reeve, Philip. Larklight, or, the Revenge of the the White Spiders!

2006-11-23T11:51:00.000-08:00

Or to Saturn's Rings and Back! A Rousing Tale of Dauntless Pluck in the Farthest Reaches of Space. As Chronicl'd by Art Mumby with the Aid of Mr. Philip Reeve. Trans. And Decorated Throughout by Mr. David Wyatt. London: Bloomsbury, 2006.

A Victorian Aether Romance in which Newton discovered the Chemical Wedding and the Briitsh Empire rules the space-ways. Arthur Mumy and his sister Myrtle live in Larklight, a house in space which points all ways (see the map "This Way Up" on all four sides -- although it should probably be sixteen). There mother is missing, presumed dead. Their father is a xenobiologist.

One day, spiders invade and the adventure begins. It takes Art and Myrtle to Mars where they are captured by the pirate Jack Havelock who turns out to be a very young man. They are split up. Art goes with Jack to the Spiders where they rescue Art's mother and discover that the Spiders are the Old Ones who once ruled the galaxy and that Mother is the Shaper who billions of years ago helped the planet to form (nice comments about "What ABout God?"). Then they go to Earth where the Crystal Palace has been turned into a Spider Automaton, and they arrive (in Larklight) in time for Myrtle to rescue them all. Art is very funny on the subject of Myrtle and Jack.

And it all ends up happily on a note of high adventure.

Gripping stuff. Suitable for any fan of empire tales and aether romances.

The Pipes, the pipes they are a freezing: The Highway Men by Ken MacLeod (Dingwall, Sandstone Vista, 2006)

2006-11-23T11:42:00.000-08:00

Jase, Euan and Murdo are conscripts. In the war against terror and cold, they are the ones fighting the cold, laying pipes and lagging houses.

By accident they get caught up with a bunch of squatters, living in the hills in the Highlands, and end up smashing up an army operation. It ends with them joining up with the squatters (and as with many of MacLeod's books, there is more than a hint of a man led by his heart rather than his head).

The book is slight because it's meant as an intro reader, for those who don't read fast, but it's meaningful: MacLeod opted to give a slice of story, an episode in a war, rather than try for a longish short story and it works very well. The future is clear and MacLeod does a good job of seeing it from the bottom rather that the top. In terms of the books remit it has two very specific things going for it: first the protagonists are older than average--very early twenties perhaps--and second they are very, very competent. Working class, not too bright, but very competent. We don't see that combination anywhere near enough in sf (whre most working class men turn out to be super-duper engineers).

Some other reviews:
http://www.bestsf.net/reviews/macleodthehighwaymen.html
http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2006/05/the_highway_men.shtml

Yellow Peril 1990s style: John Marsden

2006-11-23T11:26:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow, When the War Began (1993)
The Dead of Night (1994)
The Third Day, the Frost (1995)
Darkness, Be My Friend (1996)
Burning for Revenge (1997)
The Night Is for Hunting (1998)
The Other Side of Dawn (1999). Sydney: PanMacMillan.

Asians invade Australia and teens take to the bush. Some of them die. They become guerrila fighters. More of them die. They blow things up spectacularly and escape. Then several of them are sent back as operatives to help undermine the invasion. Australia is partially liberated with the Asian invaders keeping part of it.

The good stuff is that the kids learn huge numbers of practical things, and the most successful is the farm girl who already knows how to skin a sheep. The problematic stuff is the token Asian teen who is there so we can't call the books racist--which they are--and the utter absence of Aboriginals. The idea that whites are invaders themselves is rather glossed ove

Water is Life: godless, by Pete Hautman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).

2006-11-23T11:18:00.000-08:00

Jason Bock is trapped in a fairly typical, godfearing midwestern town. On the spur of the moment he decides that water is so important that worshipping the water tower makes as much sense (if not more) as worshipping Christ. For him it's a joke. He recruits his best mate, the rather nerdish Shin, the violent, unpredictable but sf reading Harry, and a girl, Magda.

Things all come to a bad end. Harry breaks his leg, Magda chooses Harry instead of (as might be expected in teen fiction, the protagonist), and Shin tips over from weird to pyschotic.

Yet at the end Jason, ostracised, weired out and in debt up to his ears, is pretty happy and relaxed, having made the first step away from family and community.

This isn't an sf book as such, but both Jason and Harry are sf fans, Jason knows enough to reference Shin's obsession with snails to Sturgeons "Macrocosmic God" and the creation of the water tower as god, and the creation of the Chutengodians, is all done with a sharp eye to the Scientologists. This is a very knowing book, and the protagonists see themselves within a world in which sf exists (and you'd be amazed how often sf is absent from sf-nal worlds).

Wearing a silver foil helmet; The Lurkers, by Charles Butler (London: Usborne Ltd., 2006)

2006-11-21T11:31:00.000-08:00

Verity can always see the truth. When her hyper-active, super intelligent brother is seduced by aliens who drain his intellect and his enthusiasm for life, she is the only one who starts to see the odd things happening. The aliens want to use her brother as a gateway to the world, and he is keen to be it.

The book ends with them all locked in a chapel with Verity fighting off the Lurkers., She succeeds, but only partially, and like any good horror novel there is an indication that they will be back.

The book works as sf because of Verity's rational response: she notes, records and analyzes. If there is a problem it is that there is slightly too much emphasis on her powerful will, but that is not utterly unusual as an sf conceit (fans are slans!?)

Mad enough to have a dog called Igor: , by Jim Benton (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005)

2006-11-21T10:57:00.000-08:00

Franny K. Stein is a mad scientist. She's also about nine. She makes lots of things, does lots of experiments and keeps her family both proud and terrified. But when she wins the school science fair with a time machine (so you can eat your cake and have it) her middle name is revealed as Kissypie and the whole school laughs, She travels back to the past (we see her making her bringing a teddy bear to life) and changes her name to Kaboom but when she goes into her own future, her teen self is not just mad, but evil., They fight but draw, and Frannt goes back to the past to change not her name, but her reaction to being laughed at. This turns out fine. But annoyingly she also goes home and tidy's up her room and I can't see the logic in that at all.

A lovely book, especially if you've ever thought of putting the wheel-turning properties of a hamster to mad purpose.

Dino Chase!; Dinosaur Time, by Michael Foreman (London: Andersen Press, 2002).

2006-11-21T02:14:00.000-08:00

Tom's mother buys a new egg timer which looks like a saucer and tells him "This is not a toy, don't play with it". But he can't resist and in his hands it starts to wink, and the world spins round and he finds himself in a world of dinosaurs who chase him. He falls into a next and off a cliff and finally stops still long enough to use the timer, when he finds he has brought an egg with him and it's hatched, and is stuck in a bucket so he sticks the timer on the bucket and sends the little dinosaur home, and its mother looks at the timer and says, "This is not a toy, don't play with it". But he can't resist and in his hands it starts to wink, and the world spins round and he finds himself.......

And yes, it does feel that whirlwind.

Keep your leash on darling: Baby Brains by Simon James (New York: Walker Books, 2004.

2006-11-21T02:01:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure it's the business of either children's books or science fiction to stomp on ambition and enthusiasm.

Baby brains is a very special baby who from the moment he gets home reads the newspaper. The next day he demands school and after sampling that he demands university and a week later is a surgeon in an operating theatre. Then space scientists ask him to go into space. He does, but realises he "Want my Mummy!"

"From that day on, Baby Brains spent most of his time at home doing the things that most babies do. Except, that is, at weekends when he still liked to help out at the local hospital."

Yuck.

Salad fixings: Tomatoes from Mars, by Arthur Yorinks an Mort Drucker (New York: Harpercollins, 1999)

2006-11-21T01:56:00.000-08:00

pictures by Mort Drucker

Told in War of the Worlds rhetoric, giant tomatoes arrive from Mars. Only Professor Shtickle (drawn to look like Einstein) can save the planet. He tries communicating but it fails. Then he has an idea while making a salad. He gets out a spritzer, fills it with olive oil,, vinegar, basil and a little garlic, and sprizts the tomatoes. They scram. The world is saved.

This one's for adults really as the true pleasure is in the caricatures.

Spiffing show old chum: Captain Raptor and the Moon Mystery by Kevin O'Malley, illustrateed by Patrick O'Brien

2006-11-21T01:35:00.000-08:00

New York: Walker Books, 2005

A space opera in which dinosaurs are intelligent and the aliens are human. Captain Raptor goes out to meet the aliens, prevents bloodshed and helps find their lost drive. There is honour and glory and stiff upercuts. There are also different specieis of dinosaurs happily conversing with each other (and vegetarians serve with carnivores)/

The whole is brilliantly illustrated as a comic book and if it weren't it would be a thin thing. I confess to enjoying it rather a lot.

Swinging in the Stars: Hush, Little Alien by Daniel Kirk (New York: Hyperion, 1999.

2006-11-21T00:57:00.000-08:00

Daniel Kirk rewrites ""Hush, Little Baby, Don't Say a Word..." with words about the planets and stars and universe. There is one illustration that takes us from sf to fantasy, when the milkway is portrayed as gigantic baby bottles, but apart from that, the pictures of aliens large enough to treat humans as soft toys are rather lovely.

Hush, little alien, don't say a word,
Papa's gonna catch you a goonie bird.
If that goonie bird flies to far,
papa's gonna lasso you a shooting star.
If that shooting star's too hot,
Papa's gonna find you an astronaut!
If that astronaut should fight,
Papa's gonna bring you a satellite!
If that satellite gets away,
Papa's gonna take you to the Milky Way!
If that milk has got no cream,
Papa'sgonna buy you a laser beam!
If that laser makes things melt,
Papa's gonna get you a new tool belt.
With that tool belt on your hip,
you're gonna build a rocket ship.
And when that rocket ship takes flight,
Papa's gonna give you a kiss good night!

American Girl in Space: Amelia Takes Command by Marissa Moss (Middletown, WI: Pleasant Publications/American Girl, 1999)

2006-11-21T00:36:00.000-08:00

A bit sad because the "frame" of this book is a girl dealing with a bully, but the central part--spent at space camp--is not skimped on so the book does work as sf.

Amelia is being bullied at school. When her friend Nadia asks her to come to Space Camp she decides to go. She competes with three boys for the place of commander on the simulator and wins, to the boys's shock because they hadn't thought her in the running. We get a lot of description of what she has to learn, in such a way that we can choose to learn it too, and when things go wrong on their "flight" Amelia takes command and makes decisions about how to maneouver the rocket.

The book ends with a return home, a maths test, and telling off the bully. This seems the most important bit, but I did find the time at space camp well done, and I can imagine some girls getting hooked on that bit, even though Amelia doesn't seem to carry it home with her (her last thoughts are of her grandma's Depression diary).

Tiptoe through the Martian ice flowers: Mrs. Moore in Space by Gertrude L. Moore (London: Cassells, 1974)

2006-11-21T00:09:00.000-08:00

If you haven't seen this it's worth a trip to abebooks.com. Although there is a new edition availble if you aren't fussy about such things.

Gertrude Moore drew these pictures in the 1960s and 1970s, when the likelihood of life on the solar planets had already been discounted. They are sharp, funny, especially satyrical. Painted in sepia tones, they are caricatures of vaguely humanoid, mermaidly creatures living ordinary lives on different planets.

Another Day at the Office Dear: Man on the Moon (a day in the life of Bob),

2006-11-20T23:52:00.000-08:00

by Simon Bartram (Dorking, Surrey: Templar Publishing, 2002)

A picture book.

Bob works on the moon, He gets dressed in the morning and gets in a rocket and goes to the moon where he jumps about to entertain tourists in their rockets, and then gives a talk on moon rocks. He eats his sandwiches. He assures people there are no aliens on the moon. In the background we see aliens dancing, and when Bob checks the moon for rubbish before he leaves for the day, we see them hiding in in a hole in the ground.

Man on the Moon is brightly coloured and fun, but it presents the future as dull and ordinary. It probably will be, but it's a not a lot to aim for.

Philip Nel, Dr. Seuss, an American Icon. Continuum 2004.

2006-10-22T21:46:00.001-07:00

I can't recommend the book as a whole for anyone except Seuss obsessives: it's a bit stodgy, and has what I'd think of as "the wrong kind of detail". At one point he makes a patronising comment about another critic who can be excused because "he is a historian" but the main flaw here is the inability to sort the important from the unimportant, so that huge amounts of information is given, only for the reader to be told it had no impact. No historian would make that kind of mistake.

But that said; Chapter One, "U.S. Laureate of Nonsense: A Seuss Poetics" is quite possibly one of the best discussions of poetics in children's literature, I've ever read. Brilliantly written, with a humour and passion lacking in the rest of the book, it has just gone on to my reading list for a creative writing module. Apart from anything else, Nel explains the basic terms of rythm and metre in an easily referable form, and then shows us how this, plus the process of Seuss's editing, produced classics such as Green Eggs and Ham -- which I did not know was written to a fifty word palette.

--

I've failed to blog for a while because the processing of the survey has so swamped me, as has the increasing sense I wasn't about to meet my deadline (I've written half the book, but the chapters don't require equal amounts of work). Yesterday I bit the bullet and asked for an extension. If the publishers agree, then normal blogging will resume on November 1. I actually have a backlog of books read but not yet annotated.

Robert A. Heinlein, Have Space Suit Will Travel, 1958

2006-10-02T23:47:00.000-07:00

Just to note that this was not as I thought first published as a juvenile, but appeared first in Fantasy and Science Fiction and then as an Ace paperback.

No way home: Fireball by John Christopher (Puffin, 1981)

2006-09-16T02:10:00.000-07:00

Two boys, one British and one American, are swept up by a fireball and landed in the Roman Empire. Except it's 1981 and Christianity is a minority religion.

Christopher does a good job of explaining why the world hasn't changed much -- little incentive, stable worlds are actualy more common--and of detailing the boys' rivalry (they are cousins). He also makes it clear fairly early on that they aren't going back, which helps contextualise their decision to aid a Christian revolt.

Brad (the American) shows the Bishop stirrups and long bows. This is the one implausible bit because longbow wood has to be seasoned, and learning to use a long bow *fast* is not a short job (see Bowman of Crecy). Even making arrows is a skilled trade (frankly, a better choice might have been the crossbow, there's some argument that Crecy was a fluke).

The Christians win, even taking Rome. At which point the Bishop demands forced conversions using "the pendulum' (Straight out of Poe) to enforce it) Simon, Brad, a gladiator called Bos and a pagan caled Curtius (who refuses to convert) set sail for the new world. Simon goes only when he realises the girl he loves has long been betrothed to a man he loathes, and that he doesn't understand the social structure at all.

Chance Fortune and the Outlaws By Shane Berryman (Tor Starscape, August 2006)

2006-08-15T23:46:00.000-07:00

reviewed by Sherwood Smith.
Josh Blevins and his pal Eddie knock at the door to the home of a mysterious old guy who just moved into their neighborhood in Littleton, Tennessee. Josh pulls out a comic, points to the cover, and says, "I'm sure he's
Captain Fearless!" When he appears, Josh begs to be trained . . .

And a few years later, after intense training involving the learning of languages, many forms of self defense, and playing chess while doing several other tasks including standing on his head, Captain Fearless deems it time for Josh to apply to Burlington Academy for the Superhuman--the superhero training school. Josh's one problem is that he has no superpowers, but with all that training, surely he'll get in? No. He's turned down. He throws a fit--says he's a failure just like his father--but Fearless says they'll go storm the academy and force them to interview Josh. When this fails, Josh throws a far bigger tantrum, resolving it abruptly just before Fearless comes to him with good news--he pulled some strings and Josh is in!

At the academy, he picks his new superhero name, Chance Fortune, and his costume. He makes friends and enemies on first meetings--relationships that don't change. This includes his immediate attraction to Psy-chick, who becomes his girlfriend. His other friends end up in his fight team, the Outlaws, and the enemies comprise the fight team most feared in the school, the Invincibles, led by the arrogant, cruel demi-god Superion, whose single-minded evil makes Draco Malfoy look like Spongebob Squarepants by comparison. Chance's challenges in superhero training result in many attacks by Superion that are nearly lethal, but there seem to be no consequences. Meanwhile at the end of the year the standings in the fight
team competitions have the Outlaws versus Invincibles as rivals for the trophy. Meanwhile, there is something suspicious going on in the academy. Teachers and students alike seem to be turning into blank zombies, but no one seems to notice until almost too late. Can Chance save the day?

The audience for this book is probably the nine to twelve crowd. The writing is uneven, sometimes funny, other times klunky and confusing. There is little about what superheroes actually learn outside of the combat games, and characters are pretty much single-trait, either nerdy good guys or nasty bad guys. Josh goes in with mega-special training, but at each crisis he
seems to forget it all, after which he hates himself. Midway through we finally see him stand up to a bad guy and then help a friend, which starts a chain reaction that rescues the teammates from annihilation, after which we are told that Chance is a natural leader. We know who will win, and who will solve the problems besetting the school--though the solutions are imaginative. These somewhat simplistic plot elements will please a middle grade reader who loves comic book pacing and characterization, but I am not sure would work for a more sophisticated teen reader.

However this is Berryhill's first book, the beginning of a series about Chance Fortune. His wacky ideas, obvious love for the métier of comics, and his flashes of humor show promise.

Thinking About Time: James Valentine, Jumpman Rule 2; Don't Even Think About It!>, (Sidney: Random House, 2003)

2006-08-07T08:36:00.000-07:00

In this second book Jules and Genevieve are dragged into the future because someone is messing about with time and breaking the very first rule. "Don't touch anything!"

It turns out that Quincey Carter One is using their old friend Theo Pine Four to cover up Carter's plans to rescue lost things from Earth's past... pizza for one.

Genevieve ends up dumped in the past and although she has to be rescued by Jules, she's gets herself to the position where she can be rescued. Jules and his brain have conversations about being a teenage boy which are delicious in their painfulness. Theo turns into a little less of a brat (but he starts from such a high level that he has a long way to go).

The joys of the book are the construction of a deep future. We only get to see the surface but Valentine continually drops hints that there is so much more out there. I also like the way he handles the tension between a high tech society and the tendency of most of its citizens to be users, not makers. As with the first book, there is also quite a lot of time spent just thinking about the nature of time and time paradoxes.

2006-08-02T22:46:00.000-07:00

Oisin McGann's Small Minded Giants has just been released (earlier than I was told to expect). My review is here but you could just go buy the book!

The questionnaire is now closed.

2006-07-31T13:07:00.000-07:00

The Science Fiction reading questionnaire is now closed. Thank you everyone who filled it in. I hope the book will be published in 2007 and I will advertise here when it is.

Blogging will continue sporadically and may well speed up in September when all my other obligations have been met! Expect notes on some well loved anthologies at the end of this week.

Where have all the Juveniles gone? To Galaxies, far, far away.

2006-07-27T12:34:00.000-07:00

Given that a goodly part of my book will be saying "they don't write juveniles the way they did in my day", it seemed incumbent on me to consider where Juvenile sf might have gone to?: its values, concerns, and also the market. I know that many people go straight to adult sf at the age of thirteen, but is there still an "introductory" market?

The obvious place to look, is tie ins. Tie ins aren't what they once were. Novelisations of movies/tv are now something separate, and tie ins, though set in the same world, often aren't even about the original characters. More and more, tie ins are recogniseably independent contributions to Shared Universes, a concept with a long and respectable tradition in sf.

So for the rest of this week I'll be reading a random selection of tie ins (random as in, bought on a quick trip to Forbidden Planet in London.

First up:

Republic Commando: Triple Zero by Karen Traviss. Karen is one of my favourite sf writers so it seemed to be a good place to start.

Traviss is a working class lass from a naval town, and when she took on the franchise she deployed a lot of that basic experience of the grunt's eye view to take a long, hard look at the Jedi and their clone warriors. What's it really like to be one of a thousand clones? How do you create morale? Through fear, or through culture? Are you still human? In what ways do you recognise your brothers? How do you grow up to be a man when you know you are going to die soon? And how the hell do Jedi get off producing a bunch of slaves in their nice, ethical galaxy?

Small questions? Well, obviously not. But they are thrown out casually, tiny but integral elements in a frenetic tale of search and destroy, spy hunting, and counter-terrorism, all embedded in a set of coming of age tales.

Is this an entry level text? I think so: for all the hand-waving, hard sf, the real interest is in tactics, politics and some of the issues above. There is nothing a teen couldn't cope with--and frankly, I suspect a teen would find the complexity far less daunting than I did--and what little romance there is, is handled tactfully; I especially liked it because it was set within friendship-turning-to-love (and not lurve) and because there were Consequences.

Last thought: what's that new prize for class and sf? This book ought to be considered.

Book update

2006-07-26T02:18:00.000-07:00

I've been a bit quiet because I've been downloading surveys. If I'd known how many I was going to get, I would never have used gmail.

As of today, I have 890 surveys. If you know anyone who might be interested in contributing to the research, the link is still to the left, and will be there until July 31st.

Thank you everyone.

Danny Dunn and the Smalifying Machine by Jay Williams and Raymomnd Abrashkin (London: MacDonald, 1969)

2006-07-25T07:31:00.000-07:00

Danny and his friends Joe and Irene get caught in the Professor's machine and made very small. The book stands out only because being small is so realistically depicted: almost being blown away, the surface tension of water making it hard to get a drink. Also that both Danny and his friend Irene actively want to be scientists.

Alien worlds

2006-07-18T22:34:00.000-07:00

A good post here on literature for gay and transgender children and teens.