Tag: science fiction

Colly Campbell – The Capricorn Sky

book coverThe Capricorn Sky

Colly Campbell (author page)

Stringybark, 2020

There’s a lot to like in The Capricorn Sky but unfortunately there’s more than a little to dislike, too. Let’s get the negatives out of the way first.

It’s Campbell’s first novel (nothing wrong with that) and it’s self-published. The book’s unpolished design (fonts, text spacing, margins, etc) sends up the first warning signals and suggests immediately that it has missed out on the benefit of experienced editorial eyes and hands. Furthermore, Campbell has chosen to write in an invented future English in which hyphenated words are replaced by camelCase, “qu” by “qw” (qwite, qwiet, etc), and there are other neologisms and re-spellings. He probably intended that it would help place the action where it’s set, at the end of this century. It’s a tactic which can work well in the hands of an experienced writer (Burgess’s Clockwork Orange and Hoban’s Riddley Walker come to mind) but this reader, for one, found it merely distracting.

And that’s a pity, because Campbell has set a good story in a worryingly plausible future North Queensland.

Continue reading “Colly Campbell – The Capricorn Sky”

Dyschronia

cover of Jennifer Mills novel DyschroniaI was going to add my comment on Dyschronia to the dystopian fiction reviews collected here but decided that it deserved its own space on the blog, and perhaps on our bookshelves.

It’s a Australian novel from an author new to me, Jennifer Mills. Both its setting and its mood reminded me of Randolph Stow’s Tourmaline (1963); so did the quality of the writing, which you may take as high praise since I have always liked Stow. But this is very much a novel of our own time, not the early sixties: pollution, corporate amorality and climate change are the existential threats to the fragile township and its residents.

It’s a challenging but rewarding novel and I look forward to reading more of Mills’ work. Most of the rest of what I would have said about Dyschronia has been said in this review in the SMH, so I will leave you in Gretchen Shirm’s capable hands.

 

Selected dystopias

As I’ve said before, SF is valuable for its freedom to conduct thought-experiments, which often illuminate our present by showing us futures which may arise from it. Utopias beckon us along a particular path, while dystopias hold up warning signs saying, “Wrong way – go back.”

In recent weeks I have read three new SF novels which offer such warnings. Continue reading “Selected dystopias”

Classic SF and Fantasy re-issues

Huxley’s Island, which I discussed a few days ago, is one of many books from the fifties and sixties which are reappearing on the shelves of our bookshops and libraries, possibly in response to the fact that their original readers, baby-boomers, are now retiring and have time to re-read books they loved when younger.

Whatever the reason, I enjoy seeing them. Many of them bring back good memories and, more importantly, many of them are still very good, relevant books. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, for instance, were transformative for me in my late teens and I have been recommending them ever since to anyone who (similarly) needed shaking loose from conventional morality or unthinking sexism.

lord-of-lightGollancz has two parallel ‘Masterworks’ series, science fiction and fantasy, both conveniently listed and described on The SF Site (although this list on the publisher’s site may be more up to date). They are not all briliant but the overall quality is high enough that the series logo is a recommendation, i.e. anything in either collection is worth a second look. Having seen the Harper Perennial Modern Classics listing on Amazon (and no, I don’t know why the publishers don’t have such a list on their own site) I am inclined to treat that branding the same way. If I had to make recommendations, inevitably personal and from an incomplete knowledge of the offerings, I might begin with …

Then again, I might just recommend ‘anything by Le Guin.’

always-coming-homefisherman-inland-sea

The Stone Gods

The Stone Gods - coverThe Stone Gods

Jeanette Winterson
Hamish Hamilton, October 2007

Jeanette Winterson is a fiercely intelligent writer and this is her response to climate change, much as The Word for World is Forest was Ursula Le Guin’s response to the Vietnam war.

The cover may be restrained but The Stone Gods is as zany, in part, as anything Douglas Adams ever wrote. It is also sweetly romantic, raunchy and searingly polemical – The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy meets Rubyfruit Jungle and Collapse.

Superficially it is a love story replayed against our remote past and our near future but lurking just beneath the surface is a savage attack on the myopic corporatism which insists on business as usual while the global environment goes into toxic shock.

It’s a wild ride. The protagonist, Billie Crusoe, is female in two of her incarnations and a sailor marooned on Easter Island in the third, and her beloved is sometimes a robot. In one incident in the post-apocalyptic near future, bikie vigilantes rescue Billie from corporate thugs disguised as Japanese tourists. The confrontation escalates, and a few hours later members of the lesbian vegan rock band are handing out assault rifles.

Review by Malcolm Tattersall, 2007, revised and extended for Green Path 2016.