ASIM_issue_54 (30 page)

BLUE REMEMBERED EARTH

by Alastair Reynolds

Gollancz, 2012

ISBN 9780575088283

Reviewed by Simon Petrie

In
Blue Remembered Earth
, Alastair Reynolds’ latest widescreen SF offering, Geoffrey Akinya is the black sheep of an enormously wealthly African family, and a man for whom money holds importance only so far as it permits him to progress his independent studies on elephant socialisation and communication. As the story opens, Geoffrey is sent to the moon at the behest of his strongly business-minded cousins, Hector and Lucas, to retrieve a mysterious item from his newly-deceased grandmother’s bank vault. The item in question is disappointingly mundane, but it contains a riddle which soon ensnares Geoffrey and his artist sister Sunday, placing them at the centre of a nebulous but nonetheless deadly conflict of mid-22nd-century ideologies.

Reynolds is a master craftsman in modern SF. His combination of hard SF concepts, taut and tense plotlines, and plausibly detailed characterisation is seldom less than satisfying, and
BRE
again shows his skills to very good effect. The novel is expressed in a clean, relatively ornamentation-free prose—one of the Reynolds trademarks—which promotes accessibility without compromising quality.

If I have a quibble, it’s that, as the intended first volume in a trilogy,
BRE
is not completely self-contained, nor set up for a spectacular finish in and of its own right. There’s a sense, in places, that Reynolds is simply ‘showing off’ in arranging planetary or interplanetary backdrops for his plays of idea and character interaction which, in a couple of instances, might seem gratuitous. (It is, for me, most directly the aquatic sequences in
BRE
that spring to mind in this regard, though it’s entirely possible that other readers might well be captivated by the exuberance of Reynolds’ admittedly assured worldbuilding.)

Trilogies are a dime-a-dozen in fantasy. They’re not often attempted in SF (the principal example that occurs to me is Kim Stanley Robinson’s
Mars
trilogy), where the more widely-accepted approach is the continuing series which might, after one (Pohl’s
Gateway
) or several (Asimov’s
Foundation
) initial masterworks, devolve into self-satirising or otherwise disappointing sequels. I’ll be interested to see how Reynolds follows up
BRE
—can he avoid the holding-pattern sensibility embodied by, say,
The Two Towers
to produce a second volume as worthwhile and as mesmerising as Robinson’s
Green Mars
?

I hope he can.
BRE
is a largely fascinating and multi-faceted exploration of life in the fast lane, high, wide, and dangerous, a century and a half from now. I can recommend it as a solid and engrossing read.

As for whatever follows? Well, that’s clearly another story …

FALSE CHILDHOOD MEMORY SYNDROME:

Tin toys that never were

by Lewis Morley

Edited by Marilyn Pride

Published through blurb .com, 2012

Reviewed by Edwina Harvey

This slim, glossy book is filled with detailed colour photos of Lewis Morley’s artistic creations—sculptures made to resemble tin toys popular through the 1960s. His passion extends to creating the cardboard boxes the toys would have come in. Each one is a unique work of art, carefully weathered and aged to look like a treasure that’s been sitting on a toyshop shelf for the past 40 years just waiting for you to discover it. These creations convey Lewis’ sense of whimsy and humour, such as the Robot Rider, mounted on a dinosaur, as well as his sharp observations of the world, displayed through his $uper heroes series.

Morley is comfortable sharing his past with his readers, recalling how his father, sculptor and photographer Lewis F. Morley, used to bring home fantastic toys he’d found in the sales, how his mother encouraged his creativity, and how a family friend had a toy robot collection that no doubt sparked his young imagination. Though he mentions his movie special effects work only in passing, his popular
Peregrine Besset
comics have inspired their own sculptures, as has his Dad’s famous photo of Christine Keeler, the centre of the Profumo scandal of the 1960s.

If, like Lewis Morley, you have ‘an enduring love of childish things’, I highly recommend you take a look at this wonderful book.

AVENGER’S ANGEL

by Heather Killough-Walden

Headline Publishing, 2011

ISBN 9780755380374

Reviewed by Edwina Harvey

Okay, I admit it, I’m attracted to men with wings. So I was immediately drawn to the cover of this paranormal romance.

Four favoured Archangels were sent to Earth over two thousand years ago by The Old Man (aka God) to live among us humans while they searched for four perfect women, their soulmates, or archesses. In modern times one is a famous movie star acting in vampire films, one is a rockstar and a genuine vampire. The other two are a little more modest, working as a cop and a firefighter in New York City. They have a minder, and live in a mansion which is not only bigger on the inside than the outside, but also has the ability to transport them just about anywhere they need to go. They also have a few enemies to be dealt with.

Think “Seven Wives for Seven Brothers”, take away three and add a whole lot of paranormal powers. The first Archess is found after 2000 years of searching. She works in a bookstore and leads a simple life if you discount the fact she has the ability to heal the sick and summon storms. It’s never explained why the Angels are immortal, while their Archesses have human parents.

Misunderstandings and melodrama take up a great slab of this book, with not much attention paid to romance-building, let alone anything saucy going on. The ‘good stuff’ doesn’t happen until page 275, and isn’t particularly convincing. It was around page 400 before there was finally the mention of wings. There’s a suggestion that the next Archess has been located in Brisbane, Australia, at the end of the book, which suggests the next in the series might have an Aussie setting, but I found this book promised much but failed to deliver.

THE COLD COMMANDS

by Richard Morgan

Gollancz, 2011

ISBN 9780575084872

Reviewed by Simon Petrie

It seems quite ungracious, in my mind, to conflate Peter Jackson’s vision of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth—across three, soon to be five, movies—with the fantasy world which Richard Morgan has constructed in
The Steel Remains
(2007) and last year’s
The Cold Commands
. Ungracious because, quite clearly, Morgan’s high-born, low-living anti-hero Ringil Eskiath is no Aragorn, nor is his steppe-nomad drinking buddy and partner-in-crime Egar the Dragonbane in any way analogous to Gimli. And yet I cannot but picture Ringil as anyone other than Viggo Mortensen, nor Egar as otherwise than an appropriately-accented John Rhys-Davies. (It’s when I get to the third principal character in Morgan’s skewer-sharpened fantasy, the half-breed engineer Archeth Indamaninarmal, that I run into visualisation difficulties. Orlando Bloom? No. Cate Blanchett? Clearly not. Sir Ian McKellen? Not even close. But I digress ...)

Actually, no, I don’t digress, not entirely. If Morgan’s world, for me, evokes Tolkien in some sense, it’s a measure (a) of the limited quantity of epic fantasy which I’ve absorbed in my half-century on this planet, but also, and more importantly, (b) of the detail and scope of Morgan’s fantasy worldbuilding. The world of
TSR
and
TCC
is a world with history, strife, rampant inequity and inequality, problems great and small in every crevice: wars, political intrigue, idealogical disputes, slavery, invasion. Whatever one might think of the foreground action, the backdrop is fascinating. What Morgan has concocted here is something like the fantasy analogue of hard SF, detailed, compellingly plausible, wonderfully grainy. (Is it appropriate to talk of ‘hard fantasy’?)

The Cold Commands
seems at once a better and a less perfect book than its predecessor,
The Steel Remains
. Better in that Morgan feels more assured in his world this time around: the swordstrokes carry a weight that was not always evident in the earlier book, the characters have accreted into something yet more three-dimensional than they were previously, the sexual encounters less arch, less in-your-face, more real. Less perfect in that the second book is less compellingly propulsive, less dangerous than the first: if one arrives at the end of
The Steel Remains
with a sense of ‘bloody-hell-what-was-that?’, the reaction to
The Cold Commands
is more likely to be ‘so-is-there-more-to-come?’ Which is not to say that
TCC
disappoints, more that it sometimes loses its way. But the vista, at all times, remains fascinating, and for that I commend it. If you like your fantasy with grit, and if you can resist the temptation to populate your mind’s eye with LOTR outtakes while you read it, you’ll find a lot to like in Morgan’s latest.