Book Review | The Humans by Matt Haig

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It's hardest to belong when you're closest to home...

One wet Friday evening, Professor Andrew Martin of Cambridge University solves the world's greatest mathematical riddle. Then he disappears.

When he is found walking naked along the motorway, Professor Martin seems different. Besides the lack of clothes, he now finds normal life pointless. His loving wife and teenage son seem repulsive to him. In fact, he hates everyone on the planet. Everyone, that is, except Newton. And he's a dog.

Can a bit of Debussy and Emily Dickinson keep him from murder? Can the species which invented cheap white wine and peanut butter sandwiches be all that bad? And what is the warm feeling he gets when he looks into his wife's eyes?

***

You ask me, we spend an inordinate amount of our lives wondering what the meaning of life might be.

Yes, it's a crucial question, and I'm as ready as the next person to find the answer at last. But I do wonder if we aren't wasting our time thinking along these lines, because the meaning of life must be different for every living thing. Better to ask, instead, what it means to be human; to consider what makes us different from the primates we were, and everything else on Earth in turn.

Being human is all we know, of course, so it's hard to tell... to guess what sets us apart from (if not necessarily above) all creatures great and small. Love is a lovely answer, but other animals clearly have that capacity. Our ability to appreciate beauty is another easy idea, but who can say with anything resembling certainty that sheep aren't also in awe of this wonderful world?

Feel free to disagree, but I've seen them staring... sheep with eyes that could burn holes in souls.

I may be in no position to unpick these mysteries, yet I'd suggest that a large part what makes us us is our eternal quest to discover thus. That wondering what it means to be human, as Matt Haig does in his first narrative since The Radleys, may indeed be what makes the human experience unique.

"This book, this actual book, is set right here, on Earth. It is about the meaning of life and nothing at all. It is about what it takes to kill somebody, and save them. It is about love and dead poets and wholenut peanut butter. It's about matter and anti-matter, everything and nothing, hope and hate. It's about a forty-one-year-old female historian called Isobel and her fifteen-year-old son called Gulliver and the cleverest mathematician in the world. It is, in short, about how to become a human. 

"But let me state the obvious. I was not one." (p.3)

So begins The Humans. With an unnamed alien invader assuming the identity of Professor Andrew Martin, a mathematician whose study of prime numbers has attracted the unwelcome attention of a faraway race in possession of intellect and technology leaps and bounds beyond our own.

That said, the doppelganger—who we'll call Professor Andrew Martin for the sake of simplicity—still spends the first 50 pages of Haig's latest butt-naked and bingeing on stolen Pringles. He doesn't even get away with his ill-gotten gains: when he refuses to reveal his reasons, knowing that ignorance of human culture and customs is the very sort of excuse that'll land him in an insane asylum, the police arrest him with their usual elegance. Which would be no big thing, except Martin isn't simply visiting. He has work to do.

He's been embedded, we learn, because the Professor—before he was summarily replaced by an alien—made a discovery that could potentially change everything: he solved the Riemann Hypothesis; acquired a mathematical formula others have decided we lack the enlightenment to wield wisely. Martin himself is no longer a problem, obviously, but what about his family? What do they know? What then about his friends, and his colleagues at Cambridge? The visitors do not want to wipe us all out, but they need this knowledge—in whatever form—gone.

"Where we are from there is no love and no hate. There is the purity of reason. 

"Where we are from there are no crimes of passion because there is no passion. 

"Where we are from there is no remorse because action has a logical motive and always results in the best outcome for the given situation. 

"Where we are from there are no names, no families living together, no husbands and wives, no sulky teenagers, no madness. 

"Where we are from we have solved the problem of fear because we have solved the problem of death. We will not die. Which means we can't just let the universe do what it wants to do, because we will be inside it for eternity." (p.95)

Easier said than done, I dare say. Because in order to determine the extent of humanity's exposure to the aforementioned forbidden fruit, the replacement Professor will have to figure out what makes people tick... but in trying to pass for a person, he basically becomes one. And as a person, he starts to question his mission, which is to destroy everything that could lead back to the problematic primes, and everyone—up to and including Martin's wife and son.

Though its specifics are assuredly absurd, The Humans' general premise is if anything all too human. Born, as the author acknowledges in an inspiring afterword, from a "dark well" of depressive tendencies, Haig's latest examines a fear I warrant we've all felt to a greater or lesser extent: the thought that we are alone in the world; that what makes us who we are also serves to makes us unlike anyone else.

Then again, no-one in the milieu of The Humans is more set apart from humanity than an assassin from another planet, and even he finds something to hold on to—something vibrant and violent that describes what makes each of our lives worthwhile. He develops feelings for the family he has accidentally inherited: for Isobel, Martin's long-suffering love, and Gulliver, their teenage tearaway.

I had a harder time caring for these puny humans than I ever did our extra-terrestrial narrator, I'm afraid. The Professor's wife and child fill their roles, but little more. Right down to their quirks, they're just too typical to buy into entirely. In all honesty I was more interested in Newton—a markedly more convincing character, also a dog.

Martin, however, develops in a very real way, going from the unwitting idiot at the heart of the first act's protracted farce to a sinister figure before becoming a real boy before our eyes, and taking on all the good and bad that decision denotes. His speech patterns may be stilted, his emotional awareness basic at best, yet his outsider's perspective gives him a refreshing lack of expectations. With "no reference points [and no notion] of how things were, at least here," (p.59) some of the insights resulting are remarkable.

Contemplating a Mars bars, he concludes that "This was [...] a planet of things wrapped inside things. Food inside wrappers. Bodies inside clothes. Contempt inside smiles. Everything was hidden away." (p.13) Later on, courtesy a copy of Cosmopolitan, he ruminates about belief:

"Even before I had fully discovered the concepts of astrology, homeopathy, organised religion and probiotic yoghurts I was able to work out that what humans may have lacked in physical attractiveness, they made up for in gullibility. You could tell them anything in a convincing enough voice and they would believe it. Anything, of course, except the truth." (p.87)

The Humans is as serious a story as it is endearing, as ordinary as it appears aberrant. It's thoughtful rather than provocative, funnier than anything else I've read in 2013, and truly touching, ultimately. The introductory silliness goes on a little long, and I do wish Matt Haig had invested more meaningfully in a number of the narrative's more contrived characters, but in every other respect this is a book that will remind you of what it means to be human.

And that's a beautiful thing, I think.

***

The Humans
by Matt Haig

UK Publication: May 2013, Canongate
US Publication: July 2013, Simon & Schuster

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Book Review | The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey

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The 1st Wave took out half a million people.

The 2nd Wave put that number to shame.

The 3rd Wave lasted a little longer. Twelve weeks... four billion dead.

In the 4th Wave, you can't trust that people are still people.

And the 5th Wave? No one knows. But it's coming.

On a lonely stretch of highway, Cassie runs. Runs from the beings that only look human, who have scattered Earth's last survivors. To stay alone is to stay alive... until she meets Evan Walker. Beguiling and mysterious, he may be Cassie's only hope.

***

When they came, everything changed. 

But the Arrival did not happen in the blink of an eye. It took weeks for the mothership first glimpsed at the outer reaches of our solar system—as yet a speck among faraway stars—to glide its way to its intended destination: Earth. 

Humanity spent this time speculating. Watching endlessly looped footage of an alien eye in the sky until we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that we were not alone in the universe. What had brought these unexpected guests to our corner of the cosmos? No one knew. All too soon, they would. In the intervening period, a lot of pointless posturing, a surplus of purposeless panic. But in truth, nobody had a clue what to do. 

"We figured the government sort of did. The government had a plan for everything, so we assumed they had a plan for E.T. showing up uninvited and unannounced, like the weird cousin nobody in the family likes to talk about.  

"Some people nested. Some people ran. Some got married. Some got divorced. Some made babies. Some killed themselves. We walked around like zombies, blank-faced and robotic, unable to absorb the magnitude of what was happening." (p.19-20) 

Would it have mattered, at the end of the day, if people had been better prepared? Who's to say? What happened next would probably have happened anyway. 

Long story less long, the aliens waged war. Their first strike took out our electronics, and to them, the half a million casualties that came of this incident was simply a happy coincidence. After all, billions more would be dead within days. 

Cassie and her family got off lightly: they survived. For a little while, at least. Seeking safety in numbers, they hole up in a camp commanded by an old soldier, but when his buddies from the army arrive, they come bearing Others. Cassie's dad dies violently before her eyes, and she has no choice but to hide when her baby brother is taken away in a repurposed school bus. 

An experience like this is apt to do one of two things to you. It may break you—make you more afraid, make you an easier target—or it might make you. Cassie comes into her own as a part that latter category. The awful things she's seen harden her: 

"When I first came to the camp, I heard a story about a mom who took out her three kids and then did herself rather than face the Fourth Horseman. I couldn't decide whether she was brave or stupid. And then I stopped worrying about it. Who cares what she was when what she is now is dead?" (p.108) 

Having resolved not to be some little lost girl in the world, our lonesome leading lady learns how to fight, how to shoot, how to kill. She means to use these skills to save her missing sibling Sammy, assuming he's still alive. Sadly, a sniper with other ideas spots her, putting paid to Cassie’s plan. But she does not die. She wakes up in the care of a beguiling farm boy called Evan Walker. A fellow survivor... or so he says. 

I'm sure I need not add that there's more to this young man than meets the eye. 

The subsequent sequence seems straight out of Stephen King's Misery—neither the first nor the last narrative that Rick Yancey's new novel recalls. At points, I was reminded of The Passage; there are some very I Am Number Four moments in store; an entire section inspired by Ender's Game; and—inescapably I dare say—The Hunger Games comes up. Cassie is not quite Katniss, but to begin with, they're certainly similar. 

The 5th Wave is a hodgepodge, in short: an amalgamation—however canny—of bits and pieces borrowed from other books. But somehow, it works. Somehow, it makes for an exhilarating reading experience, as relentless and harrowing and inspiring as any of the fictions aforementioned. 

I'd ascribe its success to character and narrative in equal part. The plot is perhaps a little predictable, but it moves like a man on fire, allowing us truly few opportunities to dwell on what's next; even when we see something coming, there's another twist waiting in the wings. The nature of the titular fifth wave, for instance, is far from the revelation intended, but when the hammer finally falls, it's still shocking. As Cassie concludes, "There's an old saying about the truth setting you free. Don't buy it. Sometimes the truth slams the cell door shut and throws a thousand bolts." (p.310) 

Yancey isn't afraid to take his tale to some dark places, either. In fact, in the first chapter, Cassie murders a man by accident, which sets the scene for a procession of tragedies both unimaginably massive and indescribably minor. The effect these have on our protagonist is tangible. She may begin an innocent, but she becomes something far less simple than this, and her development, though accelerated, is never less than credible. I dare say I'd take Cassie's complexities over the meandering of the Mockingjay any day. 

The 5th Wave is primarily Cassie's narrative, but there are other characters, of course. First and foremost, let me introduce you to Zombie: 

"There is the snow, tiny pinpricks of white, spinning down.  

"There is the river reeking of human waste and human remains, black and swift and silent beneath the clouds that hide the glowing green eye of the mothership.  

"And there's the seventeen-year-old high school football jock dressed up like a soldier with a high-powered semiautomatic rifle [...] crouching by the statue of a real soldier who fought and died with clear mind and clean heart, uncorrupted by the lies of an enemy who knows how he thinks, who twists everything good in him to evil, who uses his hope and trust to turn him into a weapon against his own kind." (pp.318-319) 

I'll let you find out how this happens first-hand, but Zombie is a fine counterpoint to Cassie. He doesn't have her depth, however his perspective proves crucial, offering an alternate angle on the alien invasion—plus he's better supported than our central character, by Ringer and Dumbo and Teacup among others... including a little boy known as Nugget. 

Whenever there's a lull in the principle plotline, Zombie's part of the overall arc is more than able to take the strain, and it's insidious stuff, ultimately; as discomfiting in its way as Cassie's strained relationship with her so-called saviour. Meanwhile waiting for these disparate perspectives to meet somewhere in the middle is obscenely appealing. 

Without giving anything else away, let me say I love how Yancey resolves it all. The 5th Wave is the beginning of a trilogy, so spanners are surely in the works, but the finale is so satisfying that I'd be perfectly happy if the series ended here. 

The 5th Wave is a fair way from original, admittedly. If you're looking for new ideas, you're not likely to find them here, I fear. That said, this is no ignominious knock-off, more a fearless fusion of initially familiar futures, bolstered by smart, commanding characters and an admirably alarming narrative that chills as often as it thrills. 

I say roll on the next wave of Rick Yancey's YA invasion, because the first phase is tremendously entertaining.

***

The 5th Wave
by Rick Yancey

UK Publication: May 2013, Penguin
US Publication: May 2013, Putnam

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Book Review | The Serene Invasion by Eric Brown

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They are here... and we are not ready.

It's 2025 and the world is riven by war, terrorist attacks, poverty and increasingly desperate demands for water, oil, and natural resources. The West and China confront each other over an inseperable ideological divide, each desperate to sustain their future. Then the Serene arrive, enigmatic aliens from Delta Pavonis V, and nothing will ever be the same again.

The Serene bring peace to an ailing world, an end to poverty and violence—but not everyone supports the seemingly benign invasion. There are forces out there who wish to return to the bad old days, and will stop at nothing to oppose the Serene.

***

It's easy to say violence is everywhere today. Easy to assert that its effects can be felt in the real world and those we lose ourselves in alike. That its prevalence is evidenced in the video games we play as much as the news we watch, by way of the books we read no more or less than the things each of us experience.

We could also talk, for a time, about the climate of fear and the war economy it contributes to. We might additionally consider the stigma attached to sex versus our acceptance of violence in every sphere of society. But let's leave all that for someone smarter than I. I'm here to review a book, in any event... albeit a book which addresses, in a sense, many of the aforementioned questions.

The Serene Invasion's premise is simple yet suggestive, plain yet potentially progressive. In 2025, aliens invade. But strangely, they don't wage war on the world. Instead, the Serene park their ships in the skies and unilaterally impose peace. By manipulating the strings of existence or some such thing, they make it impossible on the quantum level for any human being to hurt another. Every sort of violence imaginable simply ceases.

Lucky for some. At the time of the Serene's arrival, Sally Walsh—an English aid worker volunteering in a clinic in Uganda—was about to be executed by terrorists, live on internet television. In New York, James Morwell, CEO of a Murdoch-esque evil empire, was poised to put his personal assistant in his place with a baseball bat to the face, whilst Howrah station rat Ana Devi was mere moments away from being raped.

But one of the first people to sense the presence of the Serene is Sally's partner Geoff Allen, a freelance photo-journalist. Flying out to Africa to cover a story, time seems to stand still for him. He imagines that he's abducted by aliens—and, par for the course, probed. Initially, he writes the experience off as a plane food-induced hallucination, but when he finally hears what has happened to the world—sees the Serene's monolithic ships with his own eyes—he understands it must have been more than that.

For once, it was. Indeed, Geoff and Ana Devi are soon inducted as representatives of the Serene, meeting with their amicable new overlords each month to help pave the way for the world to change in step with the new order imposed by the invading aliens. Not everyone is over the moon that they're been robbed of their right to wrong, after all. Take the director of Morwell Enterprises, practically all-powerful before the Serene's arrival, now cruelly neutered:

"He genuinely believed that when the Serene had imposed—without consent—their charea on the people of Earth, humanity had been robbed of something fundamental. Not for nothing had mankind evolved, by tooth and claw, over hundreds of thousands of years. We became, he reasoned, the pre-eminent species on the planet through the very means that the Serene were no denying us. It was his opinion, and that of many eminent social thinkers and philosophers, that the human race had reached the peak of its evolution and was now on an effete downward slope, little more than the pack-animals of arrogant alien masters, 

"Violence was a natural state. Violence was good. Violence winnowed the fittest, the strongest, from the weak. The only way forward was through the overthrow of the Serene and the subversion of the unnatural state of charea." (p.179)

Eric Brown spends the larger part of The Serene Invasion illustrating how humanity reacts to the charea via the perspectives aforementioned. A wise decision, I think; there's a touch of tension towards the end—a perfunctory plot against the Serene's secret go-betweens, instigated by the monstrous Mr. Morwell, obviously—but otherwise the author is evidently aware that the conflict animating this standalone narrative must be internal rather than external.

An intimidating task, and alas, the cast of characters who shoulder this bothersome burden above and beyond their usual duties aren't... fantastic. In point of fact, they're rather bland. Geoff Allen and Sally Walsh rarely feel like real people, and instead of developing them, Brown takes to skipping ahead a decade—and another and another—to showcase new and apparently improved versions of his heroes.

His villain is equally underdone: James Morwell is just a bad dude through and through, with no redeeming qualities at all. His counts among his hobbies semi-regular sadomasochism and the systematic abuse of everyone around him in the intervening periods. He takes his frustrations out on a rubber effigy of his father and rules his evil empire with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

That said, Morwell still betrays more of a personality than the previous pair put together. Only Ana Devi is legitimately interesting, especially as regards her relationship with her runaway brother Lal—and she too is short changed by the lacklustre last act, when it all gets a bit Ghandi.

So don't come for the characters. And though the narrative has more to recommend it—the pitch is particularly powerful—The Serene Invasion's story is slow, and brought low by transparent protagonists and an inherent lack of drama. Significant issues, but this isn't a bad book by any stretch. I enjoyed the diversity of its ever-shifting settings, and as ever, the author exhibits an accomplished sense of wonder, describing the more extraordinary moments of the entire affair with flair.

On balance, the best thing about Brown's ambitious new novel is how thoroughly he investigates his premise. The societal changes brought about by the charea are elaborate, and firmly in the fascinating camp. Take drug and drink dependency: "Largely, a class and income linked phenomenon. Cure poverty, joblessness, give people a reason to live, and the need for an opiate is correspondingly reduced." (p.155) I was never especially invested in Geoff and Sally and their quest for a happily ever after, meanwhile Morwell's machinations seemed like so much meaningless reaching from the first, but I read on anyway, because humanity's reaction to the Serene's blanket denial of violence is as strange as it proves true.

Eric Brown has to be one of the hardest working genre authors in the industry, releasing at least two books each year for as long as I can recall. This is certainly not his best effort in recent memory—without question, The Kings of Eternity is—but for all its problems, The Serene Invasion is more than merely interesting. As a thought experiment it's unequivocally gripping, and Brown's got the follow-through down too.

***

The Serene Invasion
by Eric Brown

UK & US Publication: April 2013, Solaris

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Cover Identity | Serene Invasion by Eric Brown

Recently, Solaris unveiled the cover art of Eric Brown's next novel. It's nothing new, but for what it is it's very well done indeed. I'm a fan!

 

 

The evil alien face on the spaceship is a nice touch, too. But it might just be a spoiler, because according to the synopsis, the Serene are supposed to be benign:

It's 2025 and the world is riven by war, terrorist attacks, poverty and increasingly desperate demands for water, oil, and natural resources. The West and China confront each other over an inseperable ideological divide, each desperate to sustain their future. 

And then the Serene arrive, enigmatic aliens form Delta Pavonis V, and nothing will ever be the same again. 

The Serene bring peace to an ailing world, an end to poverty and violence — but not everyone supports the seemingly benign invasion. 

There are forces out there who wish to return to the bad old days, and will stop at nothing to oppose the Serene.

I've had my ups and downs reading Eric Brown's work, all of which I've documented here on The Speculative Scotsman. When he's on, as in Engineman and The Kings of Eternity, hoo boy is he on! But when he's off - see Guardians of the Phoenix and The Devil's Nebula - his prose can be a chore, and that's putting it politely.

 

Still, I soldier ever onward, in the hope of rediscovering the wonder Stephen Baxter speaks of in the quote adorning the cover image above. Serene Invasion could be awful, of course, but it's equally likely to be awesome. I'll be reading it either way... next April.

Book Review | Caliban's War by James S. A. Corey

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We are not alone.

On Ganymede, breadbasket of the outer planets, a Martian marine watches as her platoon is slaughtered by a monstrous supersoldier. On Earth, a high-level politician struggles to prevent interplanetary war from reigniting. And on Venus, an alien protomolecule has overrun the planet, wreaking massive, mysterious changes and threatening to spread out into the solar system.

In the vast wilderness of space, James Holden and the crew of the Rocinante have been keeping the peace for the Outer Planets Alliance. When they agree to help a scientist search war-torn Ganymede for a missing child, the future of humanity rests on whether a single ship can prevent an alien invasion that may have already begun...

***

In Caliban's War, the planet Ganymede is frequently referred to as the "breadbasket" of the galaxy. For generations, it has provided a crucial foothold for humanity's expansion into the stars. It's like an oasis in the desert: no-one owns it exactly, but everybody needs it equally. Its practical value, then, is unparalleled, and its political capital is accordingly incalculable, so when things on Ganymede go suddenly sideways because of a firefight between opposing forces and a single apparently alien interloper, all of the major powers from across the vastness of The Expanse take a stance.

Some see a grave threat. Others, an opportunity for untold profit. However, with all-out hostilities in the offing, one potty-mouthed politician finds herself fighting for peace. "Caught up in this smaller, human struggle of war and influence and the tribal division between Earth and Mars," (p.383) not to mention the noncommittal Alliance of Outer Planets, Chrisjen Avasarala - assistant to the UN's undersecretary of executive administration - is one of three new narrators introduced in Caliban's War, and she will have a pivotal part to play in the coming months.

In the interim, brilliantly, she's going to swear like a sailor.

Meanwhile, on Ganymede itself, we meet a disparate pair of POV characters. Gunnery Sergeant Roberta Draper - Bobbie to her friends and fellow Martian Marines - is the sole survivor of the gruesome ground war that sparked the space battles which rage in the fire-speckled skies. Haunted by the things she saw, she's shipped off to Earth to tell her incredible tale, where she finds an unlikely ally in Avasarala.

And then there's Prax, an unassuming scientist whose immunocompromised daughter is kidnapped during the planet-wide panic that follows the first shots. Our estranged single father is heartbroken, but pragmatic: Prax understands that "he and Mei were a pebble in space. They didn't signify." (p.108)

To one man, though, they matter — perhaps more than anything else. That would be the captain of the Rocinante, James Holden, and for spoileriffic reasons I'd really rather not get into, his is the only returning perspective from the inaugural act of The Expanse. The other half of that equation, Detective Miller, is much missed over the course of Caliban's War, and though his presence is certainly felt, his actual, factual absence from the narrative gives this second salvo a fairly different flavour from the first.

Caliban's War picks up roughly a year after the shocking climax of Leviathan Wakes, with humanity reeling from the revelation that we are not, after all, alone. Somewhere out there an alien intelligence exists, and our species’ situation has slipped from bad to worse, because it doesn’t mean to make nice with its new neighbours.

Ever since the events on Venus, Holden and his crew - namely Naomi, Alex and Amos - have been running odd jobs for the OPA, and the dirty work they've been doing has taken a toll on all involved, though the captain most notably. "He'd turned into the man [Naomi] feared he was becoming. Just another Detective Miller, dispensing frontier justice from the barrel of his gun." (p.352)

Inasmuch as this frequent fear cheapens the legacy of a fantastic character, it also serves to add a compelling dimension to Holden's formerly one-note nature, and the other crew members of the Rocinante are decently developed as well. The child abuse involved in Prax's narrative strikes a surprising chord with Amos; Alex kinda falls for Bobbie; and Naomi is no longer so sure about her feelings for Holden.

The real meat of this superb sequel lies elsewhere, however. With Avasarala - who shines an unflattering light on the politics of tomorrow - and Prax in particular, who offers insight into the family of the future and a layman's slant on the sprawling galaxy of The Expanse. I'm afraid that Bobbie, beyond her involvement in the battle which kicks off Caliban's War, seems something of a spare part, but Prax and Avasarala give this sf series a new lease on life, demonstrating the setting’s inestimable potential at the same time as realising a few of its most fascinating aspects.

Caliban's War can also lay claim to a powerful sense of momentum thanks to its co-authors' impressive storytelling diversity. When the book's four perspectives resolve into two greater tales, and then these two become one, the impulse to pump your fists in pleasure is almost irresistible. The pace is breakneck from the start, and though Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck run into a touch of trouble trying to sustain said for all 600 pages of this unstoppable object, by and large it gets exponentially faster. Markedly harder. I’d go so far as to say better — and Caliban's War is pretty brilliant to begin with.

Which is not to say our allied authors don't miss the mark occasionally. There's Bobbie, obviously. But you should also be aware that there's some rather tiresome dialogue in the cards, as well as an overabundance of laughably transparent politics, and a couple of at best cartoonishly characterised bad guys. Last but not least, Caliban's War attempts to reproduce one of the most memorable moments of Leviathan Wakes, but the hellish descent our refreshed cast of characters must make is substantially less impactful that it once was.

In a sense, then, Caliban's War is more of the same, but the same good thing, it bears saying. And thanks in no small part to the perspectives of Prax and Avasarala, and the new angles on this universe they offer, it's different enough from its predecessor to stand apart, if not alone — some knowledge of book one is practically a prerequisite. That said, last year's Leviathan Wakes got this action-packed series off to a stellar start, so if you haven't read it already... well.

Profoundly affecting and intellectually stimulating space opera The Expanse is not, but space rock, as exemplified by Caliban's War, is at least as awesome. Bring on the encore performance!

...

This post was originally published, in a slightly altered form, on Tor.com.

***

Caliban's War
by James S. A. Corey
 

UK & US Publication: June 2012, Orbit

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Film Review | Prometheus, dir. Ridley Scott

I really need to stop listening to the internet.

The internet, if I'm reading it right, does not approve of Prometheus. That's why it took me a month to get to the cinema to see it, despite the hype, and my initial excitement. Because after Alien 3, Alien: Resurrection and the two loathsome films in the Aliens vs Predator franchise, I did not need another crushing disappointment in a series I'd come of age in abject awe of, and according to the fast-gathering critical consensus, then the me-too fan reaction that followed in its footsteps, that was all Prometheus was.

Culled from the conclusions collected by Metacritic: "Alien's poor relation" is "hardly a masterpiece," but at least "it's not boring." Instead, "it's clumsy revisionism," "derivative and passe," even "overreaching." One reviewer goes so far as to suggest Prometheus a pale shadow of Brian de Palma's Mission to Mars.

Seriously, Slant Magazine? Why don't you shove that assertion up your angle?

The most honest opinion of the lot comes from the Austin Chronicle, whose pet critic admits that Prometheus is "a glorious mess well worth seeing, but light-years away from what fans were expecting," and that, if you ask me, is the issue underlying almost every inch of moaning about this movie: namely, unreasonable expectations.

So let's be clear here. Prometheus is indeed an Alien prequel. It occurs in the same world. It involves, eventually, the exact antagonists. But think on this: none of the original sequels, right through to the rubbish ones, were mere reiterations of the previous films' principles. Each of the Aliens has a mood of its own... a different genre descriptor and a characteristic slant on the continuing narrative. Why, then, does it appear that what people wanted from Prometheus was Alien all over again? And how is Prometheus' inevitable failure to effect the same sublime sense of terror as the first and finest instance of the franchise anyone's problem but our own?

Better that critics had taken issue with those aspects of Prometheus that underwhelm independently rather than the above array of issues outwith it. Damon Lindelof's script, for instance, co-written with The Darkest Hour's Jon Spaihts, has a tendency towards the obvious: there's some truly terrible banter, and some of the narrative's supporting characters are ripped right out of the Alien playbook. In more prominent roles, Charlize Theron and Guy Pearce and Idris Elba do what they can with what they have, but what little they're given to work with is so crude and/or transparent that it's practically laughable — they're completely wasted.

Meanwhile, a week on from my trip to the cinema, I'm still not sure what to make of Noomi Rapace as our scientist protagonist Elizabeth Shaw. She's certainly no Sigourney Weaver... but let's leave that aside, because as established, Prometheus need not be Alien to be a fine film in its own right. Even then, though, Shaw came across as too passive a protagonist to command the audience's attention. At the outset she's a believer, and Rapace at least carries her character's faith, but shortly after the crew of the spaceship Prometheus touch down on the promised planet, she seems more sheep than shepherd. Furthermore, she's saddled with a borderline offensive arc. Rather than a strong female hero in righteous remembrance of Ripley, Shaw, for the most part, is a demurring woman who wears very little, and suffers from some very gender-specific issues.

One last niggle before I get to the good bits: though the vast majority of the visual effects are excellent - indeed, in a rare turn, I even appreciated the 3D - a few stand out in their amateurishness. During the silica storm, a flying doll put me in mind of that dreadful shot from Spider-man. The Engineers - formerly known as space jockeys - aren't so awful, but they are, I'm afraid, wholly inappropriate to the Alien aesthetic. (If you've seen a few of Tool's terrific music videos, you'll have glimpsed these massive babies before.) And when the snake-aliens first "interact" with our cast... oh, don't even get me started!

On the other hand, some of Prometheus' effects-heavy scenes are astonishing. From the monumental opening sequence, as powerful as it is picturesque - props to the Isle of Skye for looking so like an alien landscape - to the grisly, Cronenberg-esque emergency procedure Shaw undergoes in the middle of the film; and from the unbound wonder of the Engineer's chamber after it's been "activated" on through the explosive climax planet-side, Prometheus is as visually stunning as it is aurally bombastic.

Presence-wise, Michael Fassbender as the android David steals his every scene. He brings an impression of of wide-eyed innocence tempered by a sparkling sort of intelligence to the token role, rendered so simplistic in the script, and though I dare say there's little question as to whether he's one of the good guys or a calculating company man to the last, Fassbender's nuanced performance elevates the entire affair. Without him, one can only wonder what would have become of Ridley Scott's return to his roots.

That said, the film's legendary director equips himself magnificently, considering. In fact, for my money, Prometheus is Scott's most impressive movie since Gladiator. Here, his eye for grandeur has never been better, and his capacity to startle is on fine form; the threatening sense of tension he establishes may fall somewhat short of that dominating the original Alien... but then, doesn't everything?

And the script, for all its aforementioned faults, has an absolutely fascinating idea at its heart. Prometheus is a philosophical rumination on the origins of the species: an account of how humanity came to be, by way of some evil aliens. If you're interested in a film that'll make you think, Prometheus has that. Prometheus is that. Days later, the questions it asks, and the daring implications it makes, are as alive in my mind as they were while I was sitting in the cinema.

Prometheus is very far from a perfect film, but let's not hate on it simply because it isn't Alien. Ask yourself: is that really what you wanted? Or just what the internet, in its infinite wisdom, led you to expect?

The Scotsman Abroad | Weird Spaces, Familiar Faces

Another week, another edition of The Scotsman Abroad.

I really do get about these days, don't I? :)

Today, anyway, I'm here to tell you all about The Devil's Nebula by Eric Brown — the inaugural installment of Abaddon Books' latest shared world, Weird Space.

And... it's basically okay. Fun, vehemently, but eminently forgettable.

I wish I could be more enthusiastic about The Devil's Nebula - my friend and fellow Eric Brown admirer Mark Chitty certainly seemed to enjoy it, and to a certain extent, I did too - but in the end, I was left feeling largely underwhelmed.

Anyway, my full review went live over at Tor.com late last week. Here's a snippet from it:

Riding high on the contrails of The Kings of Eternity, perhaps his most excellent effort to date, as well as his least conventional, Eric Brown returns to known space in The Devil’s Nebula, to revisit some familiar faces. Ahoy there, evil aliens!

Principally an introduction to Weird Space, which is to say Abaddon Books' latest shared world setting, The Devil’s Nebula is a novel as fun and undemanding as – and not a lot longer than – any episode of Farscape or Firefly... though I fear it goes in want of the wit and the warmth that made those gone but not forgotten science-fiction series so smart and remarkable.

And the width. Because this is not, shall we say, a narrative concerned with fundamental questions of "life, death, existence, non-existence. The arbitrary nature of the universe; the chaos, the order." There’s no harm in that, of course, no inherent foul; after all, not every novel need occupy itself with deep and meaningful experiences. Instead, The Devil’s Nebula’s core focus is on interstellar antics — such as the near miss with which it begins, when deep in enemy territory, the cast-offs who crew The Paradoxical Poettouch down on Vetch-controlled Hesperides.

(continue reading)

Ultimately The Devil's Nebula could have been better, but problems and all, it still makes for a reasonable start to Weird Space. Decent enough that I'll at least read the next in the series, Satan's Reach — though coming off this kinda sorta disappointment, I'm rather more interested in Eric Brown's next next novel, which is to say The Serene Invasion.

But what about you guys? Anyone got a favourite shared setting? Suggestions for which other worlds I might be inclined to walkabout one day?

I've heard good things about Wild Cards over the years, for instance - and George R. R. Martin's involvement does tend to suggest there'll be something special about it - but I've never been sure where to start, or if I should even bother. Thoughts?