Extinction

Extinction
By Douglas Preston

An SF novel about a resort where extinct prehistoric creatures like woolly mammoths have been brought back to life will no doubt have you thinking of Jurassic Park. It’s certainly the first thing visitors to Colorado’s Erebus Resort are reminded of, though they’re quick to say that Erebus is “Jurassic Park for real.”

Things get more real quickly when a couple of campers in Erebus are found brutally murdered. Then, when a pair of investigators start looking into what happened, a whole lot more is found going on beneath the surface of Erebus. “You’re playing God, and you’re going to go down in flames,” is an oft-heard warning in such tales, and it’s aptly applied again here.

Douglas Preston is a prolific author of pulpy thrillers, and with its mix of science and suspense Extinction reads like it could have been by Michael Crichton himself, which is high praise for pulp. The bad guys are quite bad, the plot has lots of nasty turns, and the whole thing is well worth checking out before you go see the movie that must already be in the works.

Limited Verse

Limited Verse
By David Martin

In the year 2099 prisoners are sent off-planet, their memories wiped and their understanding of language reduced to a vocabulary of 850 words known as New English. In order to preserve something of the glories of English poetry, one individual so “harmonized” translates an anthology of classic short poems. Years later, a pair of New English scholars have prepared an edition of the prisoner’s manuscript, complete with lengthy annotations.

That’s the clever conceit of Limited Verse, by Calgary poet David Martin. As the notes explain, there’s a history of radical experiments in how stripped down language can be and still function, from the Basic English of C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, to Orwell’s dystopic Newspeak and the avant-garde Oulipo movement. But will it work for poetry?

Seeing so many old, familiar favourites in new clothes leads us to consider what the essence of poetry is, and how much of its meaning and effect is changed with the change of a word.

There is an argument that restrictions are a spur to creativity, whether in terms of verse forms or the language itself. The translator feels this, even making the paradoxical claim at one point that “the more limits for my verse the more Freedom.” And while some of the transformations are choppy and even humorous, others have a charge of their own. “The best have dropped their nerve,” is New English Yeats, “while the worst are a heart-strong, burning engine.” That’s one way of making it new!

Pure Wit

Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish
By Francesca Peacock

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was an exception to the rule that writers, whatever their imaginative gifts, usually lead boring lives.

Cavendish was a remarkable character, obsessed with fame, who always wanted to stand out. And this she did. She survived England’s civil war in the 17^th century as an exile aristo and then went on to fashion a career as a writer working in various forms and genres at a time when female authors weren’t thick on the ground.

A new biography of Cavendish merits mentioning here as her Utopian fantasy The Blazing World, published in 1666, has a good claim to be a work of proto-science fiction. Though not widely read now, it’s a landmark speculative novel and Utopian fiction about a journey to another planet, informed by Cavendish’s political interests and her fascination with the science of the day.

Every text has a context, and Francesca Peacock brings that context to life in this fast-moving and revealing literary bio.

The Bezzle

The Bezzle
By Cory Doctorow

The Bezzle – the name comes from the time between an embezzlement and its discovery – is the second Cory Doctorow novel featuring freelance forensic accountant Martin Hench, and is a prequel to last year’s Red Team Blues.

While enjoying some downtime on Catalina Island in 2006, Martin and a friend disrupt a shady fast-food operation. Unfortunately, Martin’s friend is later thrown into a prison run by the rich guy who was behind the burger scheme, which then leads us into a complex plot built around the control of America’s for-profit prison-industrial complex.

If you’ve read much of Doctorow’s stuff you’ll know that the bad guys here are a billionaire class of greedheads with a distinct lack of empathy or concern for the public good. Digging deeper, however, we get a critique of the secretive worlds of tech and capital, and the ways the system can be gamed. Martin Hench is the hero such a world needs.

While there’s a fair bit of Doctorow’s usual black-and-white tub-thumping and background exposition, The Bezzle has a good story and offers a fresh perspective on what might be happening now, or will be soon, in the big business of criminal justice.

The Fabulist Play Cycle

The Fabulist Play Cycle
By Hugh A. D. Spencer

The fact that he’s both a fan and a scholar of science fiction plays into all of Toronto author Hugh A. D. Spencer’s work. For Spencer, SF isn’t just a genre or a tradition but also, directly and indirectly, his subject matter, what his books are about.

The Fabulist Play Cycle is a brilliant example, being a collection of three radio plays that track a group of writers living through America’s golden age of SF, followed by a fourth play in four parts that offers a coda.

If you know something of this history you’ll recognize, under different names, people like the famous magazine editor John W. Campbell Jr., the author Isaac Asimov, and Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. And it’s with regard to Hubbard that the story becomes most intriguing, as Spencer makes a link between the operations of popular or mass culture and a religious cult. In the case of “Mentotechnics,” Trekkies, and even political ideologies, there are true believers and then there are sell-outs and hypocrites. But in every cult there’s also a vision that creates its own reality, and not always in ways that are expected.

Machine Vendetta

Machine Vendetta
By Alastair Reynolds

Machine Vendetta is the final part of a trilogy called The Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies, so named because the lead character is a space cop (or prefect) named Tom Dreyfus whose job is to keep the peace among the Glitter Band, a loose federation of artificial habitats orbiting the planet Yellowstone.

You don’t have to know the previous two books to understand this one, as summaries of essential information are provided, but I’d recommend it as there is a larger narrative arc being followed with regard to the ongoing battle between a pair of superpowerful, highly-evolved AIs. Dreyfus and his fellow prefects in the Panoply are really up against it in a high-stakes and high-tech police procedural where people, computers, and even hyperpigs, may not be what they seem.

Alastair Reynolds writes smart books and you feel like you have to read them at speed just to keep up. His world building is so advanced that it seems that every page has some new gadget or big idea flashing by that needs to be taken on board. All of which means there’s lots here to enjoy in the thrilling conclusion to what has been a great series.

The Allure of the Multiverse

The Allure of the Multiverse: Extra Dimensions, Other Worlds, and Parallel Universes
By Paul Halpern

Given how hard it is for laypeople to understand advanced scientific theories, it’s no surprise to see those theories bastardized in the popular culture. Even today you frequently see the uncertainty principle, and even evolution, misused to the point where they’ve simply become metaphors.

The multiverse is the most recent example of this. From the Multiverse of Madness and Spiderverse of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to the dimensional hopping about of last year’s Academy Award-winning Best Picture Everything Everywhere All at Once, the multiverse is all the rage.

In the words of science writer Paul Halpern, this movie moonshine is “pure entertainment with little to do with scientific theory.” But if you’re interested in that theory, which remains highly speculative, Halpern provides an excellent guide to its history and the current state of the field. You may not be convinced that the multiverse is anything beyond a thought experiment, but this book is a great backgrounder for one of the hottest tropes going in today’s fantasy and science fiction.

The Tusks of Extinction

The Tusks of Extinction
By Ray Nayler

Anthropomorphism, or the instilling of non-human creatures with human attributes, has been in use since the first storytellers spun their tales around a campfire. And in The Tusks of Extinction, Ray Nayler brilliantly brings the practice up to date in an SF parable for our time.

Damira is a Russian scientist studying African elephants in the wild when she is killed by poachers, but not before she’s had her consciousness digitized. Years later, Russia has brought mammoths back to Siberia through a de-extinction program, but since the species has lost its genetic memory of how to survive on their own the decision is made to upload Damira’s mind into the herd matriarch so that she can show them how it’s done. Then, when hunters arrive, her leadership will have to be taken to the next level.

This is a short book but one packed with meaning. There’s a point Nayler is making about how all life is connected in ways we’re usually unaware of given our own species’ limitations. It’s only through a radical shift in perspective that we can see ourselves for what we are, minuscule creatures “embedded in a much larger world, a world which itself [is] just a point in something vast.” That something vast might be anything from the ivory trade to a kind of global consciousness that connects all life. So that when we finally come to ask how much of Damira’s humanity is left we can’t answer but only wonder what the question might mean.

Sunset, Water City

Sunset, Water City
By Chris McKinney

One of the things that’s been most impressive about Chris McKinney’s Water City trilogy has been its world building. In this final volume, which takes place ten years after the events of Eventide, Water City, he expands on that world in fantastical ways before bringing it all to an end.

We know we’re in a very different place right from the get-go, with the nameless former detective who has psychic powers barely surviving alongside his daughter Ascalon in a post-apocalyptic world where most of humanity have been turned into zombie “gardeners” waiting for the Rapture and controlled by an evil scientist who is basically now a god. Also part of the landscape is a continent-size landfill known as the Leachate where the violent residents all communicate in sloganspeak, a pastiche of twentieth-century ad lines.

With her father getting worn out, it’s up to Ascalon to find something in this world that’s worth saving, and then to save it. This is not a series you can just jump into but it’s a rewarding one that’s brought to an imaginative conclusion here.