Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

“How can we trap them?” (p. 589)

Doctor Avrana Kern begins an ambitious scientific study. From her spaceship the Brin 2, she launches two vessels at a newly terraformed planet — “Kern’s World”, as she sees it. One vessel, the Barrel, contains a population of monkeys. The other, the Flask, contains a nanovirus that will affect the monkeys’ DNA, shaping succeeding generations of their descendants, encouraging the development of intelligence like humanity’s own. The hope is that one day the monkeys will be able to respond to, and converse with, Kern. 

But something goes wrong with the experiment. Instead of monkeys, the nanovirus sets to work on another population on Kern’s World: the spiders. Over thousands of years, alternating been chapters set on the planet and chapters involving the last human survivors of Earth, we follow what happens nexts…

This is an absolutely brilliant book, epic and thrilling and rich. It’s the sort of novel you want to hare through to find out what happens next and yet never want to end. It’s big on ideas and emotion. For all the enormous scale — it sprawls across space as well as time — it is grounded in compelling characters, human and spider. Their respective civilisations are very different from our own, yet we’re drawn in by relatable fears and desires, tensions and challenges.

One clever way in which we are ensnared is that Tchaikovsky retains a number of characters through the enormous span of the novel. Humans are stored cryogenically or by other means (it would be a shame to spoil exactly how), so sleep for thousands of years and then awaken for the next chapter, catching up as we do on what’s changed in the meantime. With the spiders, Tchaikovsky repeats a number of names among different generations, so we follow the adventures of various Portias, Biancas and Fabians, some the descendants of others. In effect, we inherit a connection each time. That in turn matches something the spiders can do in inheriting memories and “understandings”, so it’s a structural device that also helps us understand the psychology of these creatures.

The alien perspective rendered as normal and humanity seen as other is an old trick from science-fiction, one I first encountered in the opening chapter of Malcolm Hulke’s novelisation Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters (1974), which involves a similar clash between human civilisation and a species of intelligent “monsters” with just as much claim to the world. But the span of the novel, that long view of developing society and culture seen through a few long-lived characters so that each challenge is deeply affecting, is reminiscent of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. In some respects, this is the Mars trilogy with monsters, which I mean as the highest praise.

It all builds and builds to a thrilling climax and extremely satisfying conclusion. Really, I’m kicking myself for not getting to this sooner. I bought a copy on 24 August 2016 at the ceremony for the Arthur C Clarke Award for best science-fiction novel of the year, which it won; Adrian was kind enough to sign my copy. On the train home I found the opening chapter a bit dense (I think I was probably the dense one, and also a bit pickled), and the 600-page word count was daunting, deserving or proper attention and time. The result is that this book has sat patiently by my bedside, watching and waiting for me to be smart enough to respond.

The audio version is expertly narrated by Mel Hudson - who makes the various characters distinct and recognisable. I’m pleased to see she has also narrated the two subsequent novels in the series, Children of Ruin and Children of Memory. I will not leave those so long.

The Long Way Back, by Margot Bennett

In the year 3392, an automated grading machine decides that seven year-old Grame is fit to be no more than a "mechanical repetitive worker" for the rest of his life. Fourteen years later, on 15 March 3406, the grown-up Grame tries to appeal the decision, arguing that he has worked hard in his own time to learn high-end maths and physics. He longs to study cosmic rays.

The machine, he is told, is incapable of making mistakes. His only chance to escape the drudgery of his assigned position is to volunteer for a much more dangerous scientific job: joining a survey expedition to the post-apocalyptic ruin of Britain...

The basic idea here is a reversal of recognised convention: African explorers and scientists venturing into Britain, measuring native skull size and sizing up local resources such as coal and precious stones. First published in 1954, and republished by the Science Fiction Book Club in 1957 (the edition I've got here), it's playing with anxieties of the time in which it was written.

Colonialism is just part of that anxious mix. The implication is that British, European and American civilisation has been wiped out by nuclear holocaust. As well as fear of the bomb, there is a fear about Britain's reduced status in the world; here, radiation has led to mutation and British people are now just four feet-tall. Their achievements are all but forgotten, too. The Africans have a mangled idea of the history of these people, who they think were at war with the Romans under Napoleon, and whose heroes included "Crom Well" and "Quix Ot" (p. 17). 

The cave-dwelling Britons have no knowledge of or interest in history. They are parochial, timid and superstitious, most of them hostile to strangers or any suggestion of change. When one man suggests a better method of dental practice to save people from going mad with toothache, he is forced out of the community.

Grame and the other African explorers are no less short of foibles. They constantly squabble and fight, scientists governed by ego, desire and prejudice as much as by objectivity and logic. As in Margot Bennett's other, later science-fiction novel, The Furious Masters (1968), sexual attraction seems to make people more caustic with each another and sex is bound up with the threat of violence.

My pal Matthew Sweet explored The Long Way Back and the life of its author in his 2015 documentary for Radio 3, Memoirs of a Spacewoman, and wrote a piece about the novel for Unherd in 2020: "Was the British empire a curse?"; the comments under the latter made me think of the response to the dentist. Matthew calls The Long Way Back Bennett's "masterpiece" and likens it to Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a critique of empire. 

In addition, it reminded me of other, latter fiction set in post-apocalyptic Britain, such as The Bed-Sitting Room (1969) and Riddley Walker (1980), in which vestiges of the world we know now survive the nuclear holocaust but lose their sense and meaning. Towards the end of the novel, Grame and the surviving members of his team reach the ruin of a once-great city where, in a vast but partially collapsed building, they find the remains of an inscription in stone.

"'There are figures,' Valya said. 'They look like 1993, but I couldn't be certain.' She took out her notebook, and copied faithfully the letter J, followed by nine or ten blanks. They all tried to discover, by fingering, what the letters might have been, but most of them were no more than a roughness on the stone. On the last line, the indentations grew deeper, and Valya wrote carefully, '—e p—a—e —f —od pas— — — a— —und— — sta— — —ng.'" (pp. 184-5)

This, they deduce by filling in the blanks, once read "The place of god's passage and understanding", on which basis they conclude that the whole city was considered holy. It's a joke, I think, playing on a cliche in archaeology, where a site whose purpose is not known is described as having ritual significance.

But also, this is another reversal. The indentations surely once spelled out a relatively well-known phrase from the Bible, in Paul's letter to the Philippians (chapter 4, verse 7):

"The peace of god passeth all understanding."

They've failed to understand that there is no understanding, seeing certainty where there was none.

The novel ends with the surviving members of the expedition flying home - or, as the novel puts it, "flying into uncertainty", unsure of the reception awaiting them and with a looming threat of war. We finish with one of the Britons they've met, watching them go,

"with his heart rising up, while he dreamed of the future when Britain might raise itself, generation by generation, to become a nation that would conquer the earth." (p. 206)

Again, this dream is ironic because we, the reader, can see what conquest has wrought. Yet there does not seem to be much hope that the characters have learned the same lesson.

Speaking of hope, last night BBC Four showed the 1954 production of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, adapted by Nigel Kneale and directed by Rudolph Cartier. It begins with an introduction from BBC head of drama Michael Barry:

"To me, the most alarming thing in the play is the fact that it has no hope, and as the mortally ill author George Orwell preciously brought his one script south from Glasgow to London, he couldn't find it within him to give hope to the play."

The Long Way Back came out the same year as that TV adaptation. Margot Bennett was, like Orwell, in Spain during the civil war - there's even some suggestion that they knew one another while in Barcelona. I wonder how much their respective sense of humanity, or what Barry calls man's inhumanity to man, was forged there... 

I have more reading to do.

The Furious Masters, by Margot Bennett

This is a review of a comic science-fiction novel from 1968, sort of John Wyndham done as sitcom. Yet in poking fun at the mores and anxieties of its time, there are things here worth a content warning for sexual violence. 

Characters - male and female - repeatedly joke about rape and when one woman is stripped naked and murdered, it's played for comic effect. I'm not sure how much that's the author satirising misogyny of the period or being steeped in it herself and, given the overall light comic tone, I'm not sure how much that's on purpose. There's a lot going on under the surface.

At 3 am on 16 May, a sonic boom is heard across Yorkshire, trembling windows in Huddersfield and so terrifying the animals at a farm in Highfield-on-Moor that egg production drops by 40%. Two days later, farmer John Holman writes an angry letter to a government department to complain, believing the boom to have been caused by the RAF running exercises. The ministry denies any such exercise has taken place. 

Meanwhile, four precocious students from Oxford - Cressida, Robbie, Sue and David - go hiking across the moor and discover a strange object:

"The main body was a big, squat, metal cuboid, four feet high and over five across. On each side there were three-inch square slots, which on examination appeared to be filled with thick glass. The body was covered by a low pyramid, from which two long cup-ended tentacles projected at different angles. They looked very like aerials. A thick rod rose several feet above the pyramid to support two flat rectangular sheets of metal; one almost parallel to the ground, the other about ten degrees off the perpendicular." (p. 14)

They're soon joined by photographer Henry Brown, who takes atmospheric snaps of Cressida in front of this "spacecraft" and then hurries down to London to sell them to the papers. Soon people are queuing up to see the "Martian" lander, Holman fencing off his land and charging entry. News reporters come by helicopter, the police turn out in force, the local vicar has a moral perspective on all these proceedings, and even the Prime Minister is making pronouncements on TV about what he thinks is going on, based more on what he'd like to think than the evidence on the ground.

In all this frenzy, it takes a while for the students - and the reader - to spot the effects that this lander seems to have on those who get close it. They become more frenzied, angry, violent... The title of the novel refers to the "furious masters of lust and violence" that govern our behaviour.

We get our first clue to what's going on just after Henry photograph Cressida, thrilled by the possibility that these pictures will make him famous. They're also both hot from the walk and the sunny day, and the heat given off by the "spaceship". Henry suddenly changes tack:

"'I wa thinking to hell with fame and what's the hurry [to get to London] and I should pull you down and...' He put his arms around her and rubbed his face against hers. 'And make love to you on this fine bouncy grass.'" (p. 19)

Cressida initially seems keen but then a sheep bleats nearby and ruins the moment. Cressida admits that she likes Henry but thinks they should call the police to inform them about the lander. Henry persists: 

"I should have raped you [but] I'm over-civilised" (p. 20). 

Cressida laughs this off, but it's the first of many casual references to sexual violence. Later, this is linked to sexual liberation - or the lack of it:

"Cressida and Sue ran across the grass to the helicopter.

'Would you have minded being raped?' Sue asked in her shrill, clear voice, as they climbed on board.

'Yes.'

'With your inhibitions, naturally. I would have liked to be raped. It makes a nice change.'

'Being raped by one man is all very well. But I had two after me. And Sabine women aren't in this year.'" (p. 83)

The casual tone of all this is shocking, but surely a conscious choice by the author. In part, it's satirising sexual liberation. It's also not so different with the comments by members of the public from the time responding to the sexual assault depicted in The Forsyte Saga, which are included as extras on the DVD of that serial. But one big element of the novel is competing ideas about the cause of the increasing violence: whether it's something being done to us by the "spaceship" or something inside us all anyway that's been given an excuse to let rip. As Cressida and Sue have this conversation, is it a new or prevailing attitude?

As I said, much of the violence here is played for comic effect. When Cressida rebuffs Henry's advances, he resorts to attacking his own blown-up photographs of her. Another character makes a clumsy attempt to break into the bathroom when she's in there. In both cases, the threat is undercut by the inadequacies of these men. Later, as things get every more frenzied, another woman is stripped naked and murdered in a church as part of a kind of ritual sacrifice, but the vicar and congregation don sunglasses so as not to see anything rude.

A lot of these incidents feel like comic sketches. The novel is often funny and well observed, its targets including the press, police, church and civil service bureaucracy. There are some great one-liners:

"I must say Mars couldn't have chosen a more awkward time for the Minister." (p. 36)

But many of the gags are specifically visual in nature. Margot Bennett has a knack for conjuring vivid, strange images - such as this glimpse of the fauna of another world:

"Could the population of Mars, formerly supposed to consist of small snails, have devised a machine capable of driving human beings mad?" (p. 139)

Often, we "see" the comic events taking place, such as squabbles over who is in charge of a helicopter, or the top secret files raining down from an open window on to people rioting in the street. With its lively characters and set pieces, I could easily see this being dramatised - and perhaps Bennett, a prolific writer for TV, did so too. In fact, one reason I was so keen to read this novel is that it had been suggested to me that it originated in an idea Bennett may have offered Doctor Who. 

Her name is listed in two internal BBC documents, one from 28 February 1964 and one undated but probably from 2 March, with the idea to commission a four-part story from her to cover the potential loss of what ultimately became Planet of Giants. Nothing else is known about what Bennett's story might have involved.

If it was the seed of what became The Furious Masters, I can see why it didn't go any further as a Doctor Who adventure. On 20 February, story editor David Whitaker declined a story by another would-be writer, David Fisher, on the basis that it was set in the 20th century; the production team wanted Doctor Who to visit other times and places. We don't know much about Fisher's The Face of the Fire, other than it involved the effects of a machine discovered under the Wessex Downs. If this didn't meet with approval, the same was surely true of an idea from Bennett about the effects of a machine found on the moors in Yorkshire.

I'm continuing to look into this, and have in sight Bennett's other science fiction novel, The Long Way Back (1955) and her non-fiction The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Atomic Radiation (1964). Note that the latter is from around the time she was mooted for Doctor Who, so perhaps that will provide further clues.

See also:

• Me on The Man Who Didn't Fly, a detective novel by Margot Bennett
• Me on The Victorian Chaise-Longue, a science-fiction novella by Marghanita Laski, another author considered for the first year of Doctor Who
• Buy my biography, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television
• Memoirs of the Spacewomen, a 2015 radio documentary about the work of Margot Bennett, Naomi Mitchison and Rose Macaulay, presented by Matthew Sweet and produced by Allegra McIlroy

The Voice of the Dolphins, by Leo Szilard

Prompted by Richard Flanagan's Question 7, I sought out this "science-fiction" anthology by the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard (1898-1964). He's an extraordinary figure, the man who conceived and patented the idea of the nuclear chain reaction, inspired by The World Set Free by HG Wells (in which Wells coined the term "atomic bomb"). In 2015, I made a documentary about this, HG and the H-Bomb, where we spoke to Liza Jardine about her memories of "Leo", a good friend of her father's. But I didn't know that Szilard himself wrote sci-fi.

It's a short, quirky collection, comprising the following:

pp. 7-12 "Nightmare for Future Reference" (1938) by American poet Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943), from the Selected Works of Stephen Vincent Benét

• Some time in the future, the unknown narrator addresses an 18 year-old who was one of the last to be born before, during the Third World War, the birth rate collapsed. 

pp. 13-68 "The Voice of the Dolphins" (1960)

• Written sometime after 1998 (p. 35), an account of the years 1960-85 and the way intelligent dolphins helped end the nuclear stalemate (for more on which, see below).

pp. 69-79 "My Trial as a War Criminal" (1947), reprinted from The University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 17, no. 1, Autumn 1949.

• During the Third World War, a virus kills American children and the country surrenders to Russia, whereupon Szilard, Henry L Stimson, President Truman and James F Byrnes are put on trial for their roles in the Manhattan Project.

pp. 81-94 "The Mark Gable Foundation" (1948)

• In 1960, the narrator is put in suspended animation and woken in 2050, where no one has teeth and women choose to impregnate themselves with the seed of a small number of celebrities. The narrator is now such a celebrity.

pp. 95-100 "Calling All Stars" (1949)

• A radio message from the planet Cybernetica warns of odd readings detected in the atmosphere of the planet Earth, from which the cybernetic people deduce biological inhabitants, evolution and nuclear war - and warn others to be wary.

pp. 101-107 "Report of 'Grand Central Terminal'" (1948), reprinted from The University of Chicago Magazine, June 1952.

• A report by aliens on their exploration of the extinct planet Earth, and their deductions about the life forms that once lived here based on aspects of Grand Central Station, such as the coin-operated toilets.

pp. 108-111 "Kathy and the Bear" (no date)

• The author relates two meals with four year-old Kathy and her mother at a hotel, and the child's conversations with a bear skin hanging there.

pp. 112-126 "The Mined Cities" (no date), reprinted from Bulletin of the American Scientists, December 1961 - vol. XVII, No. 10.

• A conversation between "A" and "B" in 1980, looking back on a convoluted system to avoid nuclear annihilation by having Americans mine a Russia city and be ready to blow it up (and themselves), and vice versa.

The title story seems to have been prompted by real-life John C Lilly claiming, in the year the story was written, that "dolphins might have a language of their own" (p. 15). We learn from Szilard that one of the few recommendations of the President's Science Advisory Committee to bear fruit is "a major joint Russian-American research project having no relevance to the national defense, or to any politically controversial issues" (p. 14). Instead, the Biological Research Institute in Vienna, established in 1963, focused on dolphin intelligence.

The institute quickly established that dolphins are highly intelligent. We learn, from a book published in 1998, that,

"the dolphins, who grasped mathematics, chemistry, physics and biology with ease, found it difficult to comprehend America's social and political system" (p. 35)

With the dolphins' help, the Vienna Institute develops a cheap food that has the side-effect of lowering birth rates and so solves the problem of over-population. From the licence paid on this best-selling food stuff, the institute has the financial backing to reshape the world. We follow the various, complex schemes and politics. Then, with the nuclear threat averted, questions are raised as to whether the dolphins really were intelligent - implying that the American and Russian scientists between them have duped and saved us all.

Within this fun wheeze, Szilard tells a sprawling future history, predicting the revolution in Iran if not the exact date, and poking fun at various subjects, often with the eye of an outsider. With its new-earned wealth,

"The first major investment made by the Vienna Institute was the purchase of television stations in a number of cities all over the world. Thereafter, the television programs of these stations carried no advertising. Since they no longer had to aim their programs at the largest possible audience, there was no longer any need for them to cater to the taste of morons." (p. 18)

I wonder if he had advert-free BBC Television in mind as the saviour of humanity. There are jibes on the way the two-party system in America favours minority rule since a few per cent of voters with some strongly held view on a particular issue can determine which of two candidates wins (p. 33). On the same page, he cites "Szilard's diary, recently published by Simon and Schuster" - that is, some 40 years after this was written - to show he was right all along about allowing China to join the United Nations.

There's something similar when an extended footnote details the way in which an article by Szilard in the February 1960 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was initially misunderstood.

"After his death, Szilard appears to have received some recognition, however, from his Russian colleagues, who names a small crater after him - on the back side of the moon." (p. 28)

Even the way he refers to the far side is a joke. In fact, there is a Szilard crater, named in 1970 and on the near side of the moon.

The playful and mischievous tone continues through much of what follows. In "My Trial as a War Criminal", the Russians develop a virus that predominately kills children. This was never to be used, and only kept in case of emergency. A later, more advanced virus was intended for use in war.

"It would not affect children at all and would kill predominately men between twenty and forty. Owing to the premature outbreak of the war, however, the Russian government found itself forced to use the stocks which it had on hand." (pp. 69-70)

This is grim humour from a man so closely associated with the development of nuclear weapons he then failed to contain, and well understood the bureaucracy involved in unleashing weapons of mass destruction. There's a similar caustic wit as he considers the option of a new life in Russia, having already lived in Hungary, Germany, England and the US. 

"When you are above fifty you are no longer as quick at learning languages. How many years would it take me to get a sufficient command of Russian to be able to turn a phrase and to be slightly malicious without being outright offensive?" (p. 71)

The twist at the end of the tale is that Szilard and his fellows escape the inevitable guilty verdict when the Russians fall victim to their own virus. That's a consistent idea in this book. These weapons are not something we use on other people; whoever unleashes them, we all lose.

The last story, set in 1980, was first published in The Bulletin of the American Scientists in 1961, and includes "B" asking "A" who first thought up the convoluted idea of "mined cities".

"B: Szilard had proposed it in an article published in The Bulletin of the American Scientists in 1961, but the idea may not have been original with him. His proposal was presented in the form of fiction and it was not taken seriously." (p. 120)

The argument then follows, and repeats almost word for word, some of what was covered in "The Voice of the Dolphins" - which Szilard then acknowledges, but says is a complete coincidence.

"A: I read The Voice of the Dolphins when I was ill in the hospital; I remember that it contained many rather crazy prediction, but what they were, I do not recall." (p. 126) 

It's a daft book full of complicated, intricate ways to prevent nuclear annihilation - none of them madder than the real predicament facing the world. I've read and heard a lot about Szilard and his rather odd perspective and humour - he was, says Richard Flanagan, one of the Hungarian scientists known as "the Martians" because they were so odd.

The blurb for this book refers to his "wry sense of humour and a heartfelt fear for the future of mankind". More than anything, there's a playfulness here, following any daft idea to its logical end. But what did Einstein, or President Truman, make of this strange fellow and his extended flights of fancy. I suspect he was exhausting.

Question 7, by Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan won the Booker Prize in 2014 for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which was in part based on his father's experience as a prisoner of war in Japan. He's also the author of Death of River Guide (1994), in part based on the author's own experience of a near-fatal accident while out on a kayak.

This new book is non-fiction but revisits the real events behind these two novels, connecting them to - among other things - the history of Flanagan's native Tasmania, the invention of the nuclear bomb and the love life of HG Wells and Rebecca West. It's about the way reality informs fiction and fiction informs reality, and the way the past is present in the now. It's a remarkable, rich and vivid flit through all sorts of bits of history, at once directly, movingly personal and yet about us all.

Flanagan cites in his acknowledgements one key influence: the essay ‘The past is in the present is in the future’ by 18 year-old Sienna Stubbs, which describes her Yolŋu culture's understanding of a fourth tense, beyond past, present and future, in which what was and is and will be are all happening at once. So, all these years later after the real event, Flanagan is still 21 and trapped in his kayak, facing imminent death. And HG is still snogging the teenage Rebecca West. And the bomb is still being dropped on Horoshima.

Some of the history here I've already dug into, having made a Radio 4 documentary about how HG Well's novel The World Set Free, in which he coined the term "atomic bomb", inspired Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard to conceive the chain reaction component that would make such a thing a reality; but the Wells book also made him realise the terrible consequence of such a device used on an urban population. We seem to have worked from several of the same sources, and I'm glad to see that Flanagan, likewise, sees Szilard as both a pivotal and fascinating figure (whereas he makes a single, fleeting appearance in the film Oppenheimer).

Flanagan delves further than we did in our documentary (where we had just 42 minutes, and covered some other ground) to explore the circumstances in which Wells wrote The Wells Set Free and the women he was involved with at the time, as well as pursuing what happened to Szilard and addressing his own efforts to write science-fiction. I've got a copy of Szilard's book on its way and will report back in due course.

So it's a fascinating story being covered here, and yet also beautifully, succinctly told in short bursts that make it difficult to put down when you could just do one more short section. Yet it's also often viscerally shocking, whether detailing the impact of the bomb on Hiroshima or the genocide in Tasmania, or the denouement in which he recounts in detail his experience on the river. Also shocking is his meeting the men who held his father captor, asking one old man to hit slap him in the way he'd slapped the prisoners in his charge. Or there's the racism, sexism and cultural condescension faced while a student at Oxford (p. 231), and then this:

"Meanwhile, the Bullers wandered the Oxford streets, dressed absurdly as themselves or offensively as Nazis and after dinner had the whores in. The Buller B—who would be prime minister wanted me to be his wingman when he ran a second time for Oxford Union president, one more whore. I told him I couldn't stand the Union, that I wasn't a member, and why, in any case, would I bother? B— said when I ran he would help me if I helped him and so I repeated my original answer and B— fif-faf-fuddled because he really had no answer, no one did, he was charming and you couldn't believe a thing he said..." (pp. 233-4)

The DNA of Doctor Who - The Philip Hinchcliffe Years

I've just received my copy of this handsome new book, to which I contributed an essay on the 1975 Doctor Who story Planet of Evil and what it draws from classic works of science-fiction.

The obvious influence, of course, is the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet, which the BBC broadcast at 6.35 pm on Wednesday 6 November 1974 - just right to inspire the development of the Doctor Who stories that became Planet of Evil and The Brain of Morbius. I dig into that and also how the same film influenced early Doctor Who as well as other sci-fi such as Star Trek (citing the excellent ‘Gene Roddenberry’s Cinematic Influences’ by Michael Kmet from 2013) and Star Wars (see the 2012 Wired interview, ‘Ben Burtt on Star Wars, Forbidden Planet and the Sound of Sci-Fi’ y Geeta Dayal).

Hinchcliffe says on the documentary made for the DVD release of Planet of Evil (by my friend Ed Stradling) that he suggested the ‘flying eye’ drone seen in the story, having read of something similar in a science-fiction story at the time. The Dictionary of Surveillance Terms in Science Fiction at the Technovelgy site helped me suggest some candidates for that story.

I also mention Isaac Asimov’s own timeline-of-the-future for his various short stories and novels, which I drew from ‘A page from Isaac Asimov’s notebook’, Thrilling Wonder Stories, vol. 44 #3 (Winter 1955), p. 63.

Edited by Gary Russell and published by Gareth Kavanagh at Roundel Books, you can buy The DNA of Doctor Who - The Philip Hinchcliffe Years from the Cutaway Comics site.

Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer

Gosh, this is good — and thrilling, disturbing and difficult to put down. Annie Bot is all told from the perspective of a robot owned by 34 year-old Doug Richards. She’s a “Cuddle Bunny”, mentally and physically programmed to please him. Sensors score his displeasure our of 10, and we get a constant running total. The same is true of Annie’s own libido. Keep Doug happy and she will be happy, too… but he keeps giving out mixed signals. 

Slowly, Annie learns to understand him — and herself.

“It occurs to her, eventually, that Doug and all the other humans talk about their lives with a myopic intensity, sharing singular, subjective opinions as if they are each the protagonist of their own novel. They take turns listening to each other without ever yielding their own certainty of their star status, and they treat their fellow humans as guest protagonists visiting from their own respective books. None of the humans are satellites the way she is, in her orbit around Doug.” (p. 215)

Effectively, the book picks up where The Stepford Wives ends, told from the perspective of one of the robots. We’re often ahead of Annie in noting and processing things. For example, there are Doug's bookshelves: 

“For fiction, he is long on Poe, Grisham, Wolfe, L'Amour, Hemmingway, Nabokov. There's a paucity of female writers and writers of color.” (p. 152)

Or there's a character they meet and seem to get on with, until Doug and Annie discuss the conversation later.

“'Could you tell she was trans?' he asks ... She waits, expecting him to explain why this is relevant, but he doesn't add anything more.” (p. 164)

Some things are innocuous, some feel more like red flags. The effect is that we're on the watch-out, too, for warning signs of his anger. One key, early clue to put us on our guard is that we learn Doug had Annie built to resemble his ex, only that Annie is less black. He’s also controlling (something his ex seems to have noted, too) and when Annie doesn’t please him there are punishments.

But Doug has also allowed Annie to be ‘autodidactic’, and the more she experiences and reads, and the more that Doug treats her unfairly — or even with cruelty — the more she comes to question the strictures of her existence…

Fast-moving and suspenseful, this is also a novel of big ideas. Annie is just one of a whole world of robot slaves, including ‘Stellas’ for domestic housework, ‘Hunks’, ‘Nannies’, ‘Abigails’ and ‘Zeniths’. Then there’s the industry to support these machines: commercial interests, scientific research and even a robo-psychologist who helps humans and their robot partners — Dr Monica VanTyne is more counsellor to them both than engineer fixing robots in the style of Asimov’s Dr Susan Calvin.

We cover a lot of ground, touching on the ways different people are affected by or implicated in this system. I’ve just read Alex Renton’s Blood Legacy so was very conscious of the parallels with slavery. But I think this is also a novel in a particular tradition of sci-fi.

Earlier this year, I went to an event where Jared Shurin talked about his new Big Book of Cyberpunk. That includes a long and insightful introduction in which he grapples with what cyberpunk actually is, but at the event itself he suggests that the US and UK tended to have their own distinctive kinds of stories. In the UK, those stories were often railing against Thatcher - the punk attitude to the fore. In the US, a lot of stories tended to focus on the knotty philosophical question of “Can I fuck my robot?”

See also:

• Me on Kindred by Octavia Butler

The Death of Consensus, by Phil Tinline

A lot of this excellent history of British politics over the past century was already familiar to me. In some cases, that's because I've heard the radio documentaries Phil Tinline has produced that fed into his book; in the latter third of the book, I was sometimes an indirect witness to the things he discusses, as until 2017 I was a parliamentary reporter in the House of Lords.

The wheeze of the book is that Britain has had mass democracy for just about 100 years, in which it has "lurched from crisis to crisis", with decisions and ideology shaped by what people most feared. Tinline explores these nightmares in three weighty instalments: 1931-45 (fascism, bombing, mass-unemployment), 1968-85 (hyperinflation, military coups, communist dictatorship) and 2008-2022 (the crash, Brexit and lockdown).

As well as digging into the history of each period, each section illuminates the next. For example there's p. 268, when in the early 2010s the Conservatives identify ways to win votes in the traditionally Labour-voting north of England. Here we understand from having read the previous section why the mooted "northern powerhouse" fell short of offering an actual industrial strategy: those involved had personal memories of such things falling flat in the 70s. That in turn illuminates recent claims that one party or other will return us to the 1970s, the nightmares still haunting today's political imagination. It's more that supplying the context; you feel the visceral fear.

This is just one of a number of fascinating connections. Tinline also has an eye for telling detail. Not only does he show how the stage play Love on the Dole made vivid the plight of unemployment in the 1930s, but he spots a great example of the disconnect from those in money and power. Having toured the north to great acclaim, the play finally opened at the Garrick Theatre in London on 30 January 1935, but in the programme,

"Opposite a list of the play's settings--'The Hardcastle's kitchen', 'An Alley'--is a full-page ad boasting that the Triumph-Gloria has won the Monte Carlo Rally (Light Car Class)." (p. 51)

I was also taken by the description of Naomi Mitchison's River Court House on "a short, quiet street right next to the Thames, closed to vehicles at both ends" in Hammersmith. Here, guests coming for drinks and to forge a bold new future included Aneurin Bevan, Jennie Lee, Ellen Wilkinson, Douglas and Margaret Cole, William Mellor, Barbara Betts (later Castle), Michael Foot, EM Forster and WH Auden.

"No ideological cul-de-sac was ever so elegant." (p. 55)

Or there's the vivid portraits of key figures in this densely populated story, such as,

"George Lansbury, the mutton-chopped-whiskered Cockney pacifist, who had long served as the Labour Party's righteous grandpa" (p. 36). 

This deft kind of writing enlivens what could otherwise be a dense subject; a political history that is fun. 

Though familiar with much of the thesis, a lot of the context provided and the details of politics were new to me. There were other things, too. For example, in the mid 1970s,

"To write her early, hardline foreign policy speeches, Thatcher recruited the historian Robert Conquest, a former communist who, in 1944, had witnessed Stalinists promise to uphold Bulgarian democracy, only to destroy it." (p. 201)

I already knew Conquest's name, but as editor (with Kingsley Amis) of the science-fiction anthologies Spectrum, once a staple of second-hand book shops and a formative influence. In them, I first read Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" and Clarke's "The Sentinel", two among so many gems that seemed mad and wild and free. It's strange to look back at the contents of those anthologies now and realise they're on the more conservative side of SF. This book about political nightmares has made me think about the blinkers on dreams.

It's strange, too, to see a reference to the event held in Manchester in June 1968 to mark the centenary of the TUC, in which,

"The Prime Minister [Harold Wilson] joined 100,000 trade unionists for a day of celebrations including a parade, a carnival, brass bands, a male voice choir, primary-school dancers from the Lancashire coalfield, fireworks and a pageant." (p. 149)

Only recently, I was digging through the original paperwork related to this event held in the archives of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain. As chair of the guild at the time, former Doctor Who story editor David Whitaker recommended former Doctor Who producer John Wiles as a writer for the pageant. When that didn't work out, Whitaker met with the TUC's Vic Feather (who features a lot in Tinline's book) with Doctor Who writer Mac Hulke, who then produced an outline for the pageant with former Doctor Who story editor Gerry Davis. When the TUC didn't like this and decided to press on without the involvement of the Doctor Who cavalcade, Hulke insisted on still being paid in full - for a script he'd not even written. And he was, after years of disgruntled back and forth. See my book for the whole story.

Anyway. The Death of Consensus is an insightful, enjoyable history that helps to make sense of where we are now. In fact, published in 2022, it finishes on something of a cliffhanger, with Boris Johnson still Prime Minister. I'd be interested to know what Tinline has made of events since publication. We're still caught up in a nightmare but is it quite the same one?

Dune Part Two

A week ago I took the Lord of Chaos to see Dune Part Two at the cinema, him having caught up on the first part just the night before. It's been churning away in my head all this time.

The thing that really strikes me is what a sensory film this is, the bass continually rumbling our seats and muscles, and then lots of tingling ASMR. That's all in tune with the wonders seen on screen, everything ever more epic. Combined, this is a feast for the senses, a film you less see as feel. The plot is also continually intriguing, and the result, a bit to my surprise, captivated his lordship for pretty much the almost three-hour run.

The serious tone of it all makes it easy to mock - some have pointed out that the plot if basically, "He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy", set on a planet of cocaine. The Lord of Chaos was also tickled by Kieran Hodgson's bad movie impressions.

True, the villains are all a bit straightforwardly wicked - black-and-white characters from a black-and-white world. Where the film really works, I think, is in the nuance elsewhere: different factions within the Fremen, the Bene Gesserit endeavouring to play all sides at once, and a sense of complexity and richness in the peoples depicted that meant, even though I know the novel, I wasn't quite sure how it would all turn out.

Some notable things in the book (and 1984 version of the film) are not included here, and I wonder if those will feature in Part Three - and so won't spoil them here. I'll also be interested to see if a further instalment still feels like Dune if set more extensively on other worlds. 

• Me on the novel Dune by Frank Herbert
• Me on The Making of Dune (1984) by Ed Naha
• "The sleeper must awaken: inside the mind of Dune", my essay for the Lancet Psychiatry

The Principle of Moments, by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson

Asha Akindele ensures life in the Lower Quarter of planet Gahraan in the year 6066, just about managing not to speak out against the Emperor - a crime punishable by death. In London in 1812, time-traveller Obi Amadi is keen to rekindle his relationship with Prince George, the heir to the throne. Asha and Obi don't yet know that they're part of an ancient prophecy, involving a third "hero"...

I loved this sprawling, rich science-fiction fantasy that hurtles back and forth through time with zip and imagination. The characters and their worlds are well drawn, their lives full of heart-wrenching choices that make for thrilling drama. There are lots of basically good people, trying to do the right thing despite knowing it will hurt others.

A lot of epic space opera features quotations from invented histories to add scale to proceedings. Here, we soon learn that the historian whose work frames much of the adventure - Ishoal Nisomn, ex-acolyte of the Aonian Archives - disappeared in mysterious circumstances. That mystery then becomes an extra thread of the story in a way that works really well.

I'm generally not keen on plots about prophecies where characters are destined to fulfil particular roles or do particular things. That tends to mean they resist but then accept a pre-ordained path, so lack agency of their own. But here, the prophecy is woolly enough, and open to enough interpretation, that we're never quite sure how things will play out.

The Principle of Moments is the first book in The Order of Legends and I'm keen to see where things go next.

BSFA Award longlist

My book David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television is one of 24 titles longlisted for best non-fiction (long) in this year's British Science Fiction Association's awards. It's a thrill to be noticed, and to be included in such auspicious company - including several mates.

Voting is open to members of the BSFA, who can select up to four works per category. There will then be a shortlist, and winners announced at the Levitation Eastercon event over the weekend of 29 March - 1 April. Details and voting form at the BSFA site.

What with life and lockdown, I've been a bit out of the loop with all things BSFA, though I used to regularly review books for its magazine Vector and attend its events in London. In September 2015, I was the subject of one of those events, interviewed by Professor Edward James, who'd overseen the Masters degree in science-fiction I did 1997-98. 

Here's an on-its-side recording, from that ancient bygone age.

Titanium Noir, by Nick Harkaway

The idea of mashing up detective fiction and sci-fi isn't new. Isaac Asimov did it in The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun in the 1950s (the latter of which I reread last month). As a kid, I was a big fan of Robo-Hunter in 2000AD, in which hero Sam Slade is a space-travelling version of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade.

As I've argued before, I think science-fiction and the detective story share a lot in common anyway, not least in the way we read them. We follow a plot but we're also looking for clues - in the detective story to work out whodunnit, in sci-fi to understand how this world operates differently from our own. We also read (and write) such stories with a knowledge of what's gone before in the genre, so judge each new work on its ability to follow conventions while both avoiding cliche and adding something new.

Titanium Noir is much closer to a Dashiell Hammett style thriller, with narrator Cal Sounder a world weary, wise-cracking gumshoe acting as a buffer between the police and super-rich elite called "Titans" in a gritty near-future. When one of the Titans is found dead, apparently having shot himself, Cal can look into things on a softer, less formal basis than the police, but also without the protection that goes with carrying a badge.

What makes this world different from our own is that the super-rich can afford injections of Titanium 7. As we're told early on,

"It's a rejuvenation treatment given by infusion. It turns the body's clack back to pre-puberty, then runs you through it at speed. It's also used to stimulate regeneration of severely damaged organs and limbs. It really does make you young again, but since it starts with an adult body, it also makes you bigger, hence the name [Titans]. Oh, and it's so expensive almost no one has it. Strictly for the speciation rich." (pp. 10-11)

There's obviously something in this akin to IVF which also jump-starts the body like putting it through puberty again. As with IVF, the result is painful and takes months to recover from. But Titans then live extremely long lives.

There's a stark division between the Titans who've received T7 and the mass of ordinary, little people who haven't. We see the impact of this on one particular relationship where one party is a Titan. But there's more nuance here than a simple divide between haves and have-nots. Over decades, some Titans have had more than one infusion - each one making them bigger, stranger, something else. There are gradations of Titan, separate from one another, and also families and attachments and conflicts between different groups.

Newly created Titans are also strong and horny, so specialist establishments cater for titanic sex, while the media revels in gossip (and recordings of) the ins and outs of who is doing what to who. Many ordinary people are keen to get in on the action, and to modify themselves to look more like Titans while unable to afford T7. From this one medical intervention has developed a whole culture.

This all makes for a richly drawn environment in which the plot neatly twists and turns. The novel rattles along, zigging and zagging with everyone under suspicion - even the narrator, whose loyalties we're not always sure of. The final reveal of the killer hinges on something we've been told early on - a nicely played clue that seems obvious in retrospect but took this reader by surprise. And it's all wrapped up in 236 pages - a quick, exciting and satisfying read.

Dashiell Hammett used Sam Spade in several stories, and also created other heroes who featured in multiple adventures (ie the Continental Op, Nick and Nora Charles and secret agent X-9). It would be fun to see Cal Sounder in further adventures, exploring more of this world - and Sounder's changed position within it given what happens in this book. But that will have to wait, as first Nick Harkaway is writing a George Smiley novel.

See also:

• Me on Silverview by John le Carre (and completed by Nick Harkaway)
• Me on The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

The Philip Hinchcliffe Years - The DNA of Doctor Who

A Kickstarter has been launched for the first in a new series new series of large-format books on the creative team behind Doctor Who. This first volume examines the years 1974-77, as overseen by producer Philip Hinchcliffe.

From Morbius to Krynoids, Eldrad to Wirrn, ROUNDEL PUBLISHING takes an in-depth look with unrivalled access to the architect of some of the most revered years of Doctor Who's history! 

Available in softback, hardback or deluxe hardback options including the option to receive signed copies, exclusive art prints and even the chance to get a personal message from Philip himself! 

The book is edited by Gary Russell and designed by Will Brooks, with essays on each one of the Doctor Who stories from the period and insights from Hinchcliffe.

I've written the essay on Planet of Evil (1975) and the way this adventure and the production team at the time more generally borrowed from classics of sci-fi. Other contributors include Louise Jameson, Graeme Burk, Hannah Cooper, Matt Dale, Hayden Gribble, Toby Hadoke, David J Howe, Robin Ince, Alex Kingdom, Emma Ko, Trey Korte, Aaron Lowe, Sophia Morphew, Kim Pfeifer-Adams, Mick Schubert, Kenny Smith, Matthew Sweet, Matthew Toffolo and Ian Winterton. 

The Kickstarter runs until 30 November. See the site for loads more details - and to bung us some cash.

The Naked Sun, by Isaac Asimov

Agoraphobic detective Elijah Baley is sent to the wide open spaces of the planet Solaria to investigate a murder. This is a planet where people don't mix in person, only by remote "tridimensional" video link (think Zoom but in 3D), and there's no sign of a murder weapon. It's a classic locked-room mystery but it takes Baley's outsider's perspective to spot the obvious factor that everyone else overlooks...

It's been fascinating to reread this classic sci-fi murder mystery first published in 1958, which I originally read in my teens. I don't think then that I knew of its obvious influence on the 1977 Doctor Who story The Robots of Death. And I hadn't made the connection before to Baley's frequent exclamation "Jehosophat" and the 1983 Doctor Who story The Five Doctors. When, in that, the Third Doctor exclaims "Jehosophat", I'd thought it showed his intimate knowledge of the past - a reference to the fourth king of Judah in the Old Testament. But used in the same manner that Baley says it, it's a word from the future.

More extraordinary is how modern some of this novel seems. There's a lot on the psychological impact of not meeting in person but communicating remotely, with which we've all got first-hand experience thanks to lockdown. Asimov's view is that the technology enables a phenomenon that becomes self-enforcing: the less people interact in person, the more horrified they are by the prospect of doing so, leading to a whole culture of isolation. Baley, as visitor, becomes attuned to their horror at the very notion of physical contact. Just the suggestion of proximity, the thought of touch and breath and smell from other bodies, can lead to extreme reactions - in line with some recent conversations I've had with friends about how slow we've been to resocialise. 

Extending from this horror of contact, the Solarians struggle to say the word "children" because of what their existence implies; without quite spelling it out, there's an implicit aversion to sex. A key distinction is made on Solaria between "viewing" (remotely) and "seeing" (in person). On page 51, murder suspect Gladia Delmarre steps out of the shower in front of a shocked Baley and thinks nothing of it herself because he's not physically present. On page 118, Baley is quick to stop another woman, Klorissa Cantoro, from undressing in front of him. This stuff, I think, is titillation for the adolescent, male and straight audience assumed to be reading, but any reading is overshadowed by the author's own dealings with women.

"Asimov, who described himself as a feminist, casually groped female fans for years." Astounding, by Alec Nevala-Lee, p. 12.

The women here are certainly objectified. At no point is Baley at risk of seeing male Solarians naked as it would not have the same effect. Also, Solarians recoil at the duty to marry and have children, but there's no suggestion that some of them might do so because they are anything other than heteronormative and sexual. For all the outlandish rules of this society on another world, it takes for granted various social norms that seem rather parochial now.

I'm also stuck by what feels incongruous for a futuristic story: Baley smokes a pipe. Perhaps that's in line with something he says on page 183: "having eliminated the impossible, what remains, however improbable, is the truth." But for all he might be moulded in the form of 19th century detective Sherlock Holmes, only transposed to the future, The Naked Sun is bound up in anxieties of its time.

We're told, for example, that the imposition of marriage and procreation keeps the population stable, and that the murdered man is a fetologist, working to screen and improve the genetic stock on explicitly eugenicist lines. 

"And no one would believe me capable of so seriously psychotic an act as murder. Not with my gene make-up. So don't waste accusations on me." (pp. 126-7)

That idea of purity among the minority elite on Solaria plays against the slave-class majority: we're told (for example, on p. 191) that robots outnumber humans 10,000 to one. The analogy in the book is to the helots, the Ancient Greek people subjugated by the Spartans. But there's surely a more contemporary resonance in what's being described here, to civil rights in the US and anticolonialism abroad. More than proximity, there's a greater terror to this elite - that this majority might become conscious of this gross imbalance of power.

"But what if some human threatened to teach the robots how to harm humans; to make them, in other words, capable of revolting?" (pp. 190-1)

An age ago, when I did my master's degree in science-fiction at the University of Reading, one tutor suggested a good way to grasp the workings of any given utopia: look at how children are raised in it. One thing that's striking now is that Baley (and perhaps Asimov, too) takes for granted the old saying, "spare the rod, spoil the child": it's seen as fundamentally problematic that robots, programmed to never harm humans, won't inflict "discipline" on the children in their care. The implication is that such discipline is physical, i.e. beating the child. 

Just as troubling, we see that children on Solaria instinctively play together in person and need touch and affection (the latter supplied by robots), but are gradually taught to isolate themselves from one another. They are taught to recoil from one another - and to depersonalise others. On page 134, we learn one small boy views Baley as an inferior kind of human because he is from Earth, and therefore someone who, like robots, can be the target of arrows.

This idea of how people can come to be seen is central to a book about exposure under the titular naked sun. Given the careful distinction between "viewing" and "seeing", it's notable that Baley's partner R. Daneel Olivaw is not recognised for what he really is. The Solarians assume (and at one point someone's life depends on thinking) that he is human, when he is a robot. The Solarian robots do not have names and each has a specific function. Yet for all they are treated like appliances, they have feelings - upset if a human does their jobs, or if a human is hurt. Olivaw is a more complicated case: the Solarians unwittingly treat him as a person - but so does Baley, for all he knows the truth. He might be a bit dismissive of and irritated by this robot, but no more so than he is with other humans. Olivaw has some agency but The Robots of Death takes the logical step not taken here: that robots are an oppressed people deserving liberation.

(One day, I'll return to what was meant to be a lockdown project of watching particular episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I have things to say about Data's evident personhood and the repeated efforts by his own employers to deny it.)

Other things are striking about The Naked Sun. The women characters are rather two-dimensional (for all we view them in 3D), Baley is often cross and difficult for no particular reason, and there's no great concern at the end that his actions lead to someone's death. For all it's a murder mystery in the classic style, with various different suspects all (viewed) together at the end as the detective puts his case, I didn't feel we were encouraged to play along in making sense of the evidence and guessing whodunnit.

Yet most striking is Baley's conclusion. He's a maverick loner on an alien world where he doesn't fit in. When he returns to Earth at the end, the suggestion is that his experience means he no longer fits in at home. A lot of classic science-fiction I've read is about maverick individuals, their will pitted against the wider, impersonal system. There's something of that here: in a final twist, Baley makes a decision not to punish one guilty party and to have framed someone connected to but not actually guilty of the murder. 

But that's not what Baley concludes here. He tells his superiors that the people of Solaria have given up,

"something worth more than atomic power, cities, agriculture, tools, fire, everything. [They've given up] The tribe, sir. Cooperation between individuals." (p. 195)

The analogy is to the scientific community, where peer review can point out faults and lead to better progress being made. But I'm struck by this rejection of the individual in favour of the collective. It's surely a rejection of elites living in seclusion and luxury in favour of something more equitable - even socialist.

Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beauman

Biologist Karin Resaint has just completed a comprehensive study of a strange, rare fish; she thinks the Venomous Lumpsucker might be intelligent enough to hold a grudge. Mark Halyard, meanwhile, is a mining executive trying to profit from extinctions. He's not the only one: extinction is big business in this bleak near future.

"Every year, a certain number of extinction credits were allocated at no charge by the WCSE [World Commission on Species Extinction], while others were auctioned off, and afterwards they could be bought and sold on the open market. The idea was that the supply of credits would be gradually ratcheted down, so the price would creep up until they were pretty much unaffordable, and people would simply have to use their ingenuity to avoid driving species to extinction.

"Unfortunately for the endangered species of the world, on the night of the Mosvatia Bioinformatics dinner the price of an extinction credit stood at just €38,432." - p. 22.

When someone sabotages the system, these two unlikely characters end up on a quest to find the last surviving examples of Resaint's unusual fish...

Smart, funny and brutal as hell, this brilliant book is packed with big ideas. A lot of them follow from the basic wheeze of extinction credits - with attempts to exploit or cheat the system or, for example, the impact of extinctions in making food taste blander. But there are also other big ideas thrown into the mix, such as the fungal infection that changes people's appearance so much that computer systems don't recognise them as human. Again, we see multiple impacts of this and explore ways it can be exploited. Every few pages there's some new, smart idea. It's a rollicking, intelligent read.

I can easily see why this won this year's Clarke Award (for the best science-fiction novel) and is a Sunday Times Book of the Year. Top marks also to John Hastings, reading the audiobook version and making the different characters distinct. I've just bought a copy of the paperback to give as a gift.

The Disinformation War, by SJ Groenewegen

This gripping, near-future political thriller is published by Gold SF, the newish imprint of Goldsmiths Press that aims to discover and publish new intersectional feminist science-fiction. The author is a friend and I get mentioned in the acknowledgments for having been a sounding board for some of the ideas explored in the book, so I can't exactly give an objective review.

It's the story of three people: online social justice warrior Kayla who IRL struggles with social interactions; intelligence analyst Libby who has become the target of a right-wing hate campaign; and Derek, a major-general in the army who is torn by the disparity between his orders and his oath to uphold the law. They're thrown together because of a shocking new scheme developed by the Home Office and private enterprise.

It's an exciting, involving story, the early parts reminiscent - in a good way - of the bleak, near-future and political consciousness of the "War" trilogy of Doctor Who New Adventures books by Andrew Cartmel in the 1990s. But the later part of the novel is concerned with hammering out the practicalities - and clash of personalities - in agreeing exactly how to combat the sinister vested interests behind a tide of disinformation. 

Often, science-fiction presents this kind of thing as an engineering problem: it just needs someone to properly identify the fault for a solution to be found. My experience is that, even when everyone has the most well-meaning intentions, there's rarely a "Eureka" moment in politics and it's more often an uneasy, imperfect compromise. People are a bit messy.

In that sense, the latter part of this novel reminded me more of the end of John Christopher's Tripods trilogy, in which the war against the aliens is followed by a more complicated peace among humans, and our hero goes off to become a member of the new government. Except it does more than that, presenting a draft manifesto plus notes and discussions about how this work might be taken forward. It all feels very timely - a novel addressing the bleak now.

Trouble with Lichen, by John Wyndham

There's a masterpiece in blurbage on the back of this Penguin edition:

"It was Diana Brackley who put the milk out for the cat; who dropped a speck of lichen in it by mistake; who noticed how the lichen stopped the milk turning.

But it was Francis Saxover, the famous biochemist, who carried on from there; who developed Antigerone, the cure for ageing; who then tried to suppress a discovery which was certainly in the megaton range.

And so it was Diana Brackley who went to town with Antigerone in one of John Wyndham's gayest and most satirical forays into the fantastic.

'If even a tenth of science fiction were as good, we should be in clover' - Kingsley Amis in the Observer"

It's a remarkable feat, a big science-fiction idea about the way science can affect social change, drawing, I think from the impact of penicillin and of the Suffragette movement, and all conveyed here as light romcom. Brian Aldiss famously criticised Wyndham for writing "cosy catastrophe", but this is all-out fun. 

Antigerone slows the biological process, so those who take it do not age. The trouble of the title is that there's only enough of the lichen to make this wonder drug for at most 4,000 people. The result is lots of debate on the ethics of announcing the discovery, let alone deciding who might share its benefits. 

Diana is a brilliant character, a young, determined woman with a habit of shocking people by saying the wrong thing - or rather what she thinks. At eighteen, she's asked by a schoolteacher whether her parents are proud of her academic success. Diana responds immediately that her "Daddy's very pleased", but can't say the same for her mother.

"'She tries. She's really been awfully sweet about it,' said Diana. She fixed Miss Benbow with those eyes again. 'Why is that mothers still think it so much more respectable to be bedworthy than brainy?' she inquired. 'I mean, you'd expect it to be the other way round.'

Miss Benbow replies, carefully, that "comprehensible" might be a better word that "respectable", and suggests the possibility that, "when the daughter of a domestic-minded woman chooses to have a career she is criticising her mother by implication".

"'I hadn't looked at it that way before,' Diana admitted thoughtfully. 'You mean that, underneath, they are always hoping that their daughters will fail in their careers, and so prove that they, the mothers, I mean, were right all the time?'" (pp. 12-13)

Diana soon has a career as a brilliant scientist who also likes to look good, and sees no contradiction in using the cutting-edge science she's developed as a beauty treatment for other women. In fact, she sees how the cosmetic aspects of the new discovery can advance the feminist cause. It's not exactly what you expect from a male sci-fi writer of this vintage.

Several of the traits Diana exhibits align with what we'd now think of as autistic and it's refreshing to read a decades-old book that celebrates such diversity. They make her a better character and better person. Sadly, Saxover is less engaging and there's little to explain Diana's long-lasting attraction. His attitude to other women doesn't exactly do him any favours - over pages 25 and 26, he lists the young women who have caused chaos at his laboratory by falling for the men, the women the ones at fault.

Other things are discomforting from a modern perspective. There's a racist joke on page 196 and a general ease with the idea that resources in China should be for the exclusive use of people in the UK. This may be part of the satire. As the situation gets ever more serious, with moral quandaries leading to kidnap and murder, the lightly comic love story gets a little tangled.

"There could have been bloodshed even something like a civil war,"

says one character on page 200, justifying a rash course of action. But there has been bloodshed: this speech comes just 18 pages after an old watchman, Mr Timpson, is killed by the blow from a cosh, a man called Austin is hospitalised and Saxover barely survives a planned arson attack on his home.

I think that mismatch is down to the effort to bridge different forms: science-fiction with the satirical, fantasy on the cusp of what's credible. It's a balancing act, and one that doesn't wholly work in this instance, but it's fascinating to see tried in this way. In fact, that balance is what Wyndham talked about in a 1960 interview for the BBC magazine programme Tonight at the time of publication. How boggling to see him justify this approach and discuss the mechanics of genre on the equivalent of The One Show. 

In conversation with Aamina Ahmad and Eli Lee

Last week I hosted an event for the Writers' Guild of Great Britain with the last two winners of our Best First Novel Award - Aamina Ahmad for The Return of Faraz Ali (Sceptre, 2022) and Eli Lee for A Strange and Brilliant Light (Quercus, 2021). You can see the full thing here:

Countdown to the Moon #771

This afternoon, I had a long chat with Nathan Price on his Countdown to the Moon project, discussing Artemis, the TV coverage of Apollo and then all sorts of other stuff. I've had lots of this kind of thing rumbling through my head for a while, so enjoy my attempts to put it into some kind order...

The things I held up at the beginning are:

The Moon - A celebration of our celestial neighbour (ed. Melanie Vandenbrouck, 2019), which accompanied the National Maritime Museum's exhibition The Moon

Doctor Who: Wicked Sisters (2020), in which Dr Who meets early lunar colonists all making the "great leap" in giving up their Earth citizenship. Oh, and some Sontarans.

Blake's 7: No Name cover and blurb

Big Finish have released the cover and blurb for Allies and Enemies, the trilogy of Blake's 7 audio plays out this December that includes my story, No Name:

From the start of the rebellion to its brutal conclusion, Arlen has hunted for Roj Blake.

Cally fights beside her. Jenna Stannis works for her. Space Commander Travis is her mentor. As she plays each side off against the other, how will Arlen decide who are allies and who are enemies?

Saurian Major by Lizbeth Myles 

Saurian Major is a key Federation communications hub. Federation Officer Arlen undertakes an undercover mission to destroy the rebel factions that threaten it. The last person she expects to find is an Auron outcast among the humans. Will the mysterious Cally disrupt her plan?

No Name by Simon Guerrier 

Everyone on Vanstone is hiding something. That’s why they are there. Hiding from her own past, Arlen wonders what has brought Roj Blake to this remote outpost. Has Arlen uncovered a buried secret? And what does Space Commander Travis want on Vanstone?

Sedition by Jonathan Morris 

Jenna Stannis knows that smuggling guns will help free Solta-Minor from the Federation. And she suspects that’s not the only reason why Arlen wants her help. But Jenna doesn’t know who else is on the planet. How can Travis have survived Star One?

The cast includes Sasha Mitchell reprising her role as Arlen from the final TV episode of Blake's 7. The director is Lisa Bowerman. Produced and script edited by Peter Anghelides. Cover art by Mark Plastow.