Canine Noir

Irontown Blues, John Varley

A long time in the making, this is the latest in Varley’s rather loose series of novels and short stories set in the “Eight Worlds”, easily one of my favourite science fiction worlds. Set (almost) entirely on the Moon, or “Luna” as its residents invariably call it, the tale begins as full-on noir with a private detective, Bach, interviewing a seeming femme fatale, under the sleepy gaze of his faithful hound, Sherlock. Most of the rest of the novel serves to reverse the reader’s expectations from this kick-off, with the noir slowly evaporating as the true nature of the “crime” is slowly – very slowly – revealed, and with Sherlock, actually a genetically-enhanced dog, becoming a key narrative voice (aided by an interjecting translator). This latter turn works better than one might expect, and getting into it takes up the time that one might otherwise expect a noir tale to require. Here, the tale is really rather slight in the end, and it leans rather heavily on the heavy-lifting done by earlier novels, although with a contemplation of post-traumatic stress. It’s also disappointingly light on the Invaders, Varley’s mysterious gas giant aliens who’ve effectively evicted humanity from Earth. So a much thinner read than his earlier “Eight Worlds” works, but not without charm, including, most obviously, a real love for dogs.

Success and "failure" of Arrival

We finally caught the increasingly non-recent science fiction "thinker" (and 2017 Oscar nominee) Arrival. While I'd whole-heartedly recommend it for fans of the genre, nit-picker that I am, I have a few reservations as well. So this is less a review, more a niggle. Needless to say, spoilers ahead for those who've not made the journey so far.

First, what it gets right. Build-up is great, with only fleeting glimpses of the alien spaceships until the big reveal in a beautiful, cloud-wreathed valley in Montana. Their unworldliness begins with their design, as largely featureless geometric shapes, and is nicely underscored by the short distance they effortlessly "hover" above the Earth's surface. The aliens themselves are also handled well, if a little too much like squid, both in general appearance and in their use of extruded "ink". Making their audio extraneous for communication (an early misstep by their interrogators), and their language written yet initially indecipherable as communication works really well. And I liked what ultimately came to be their "gift" and why they made it, although it's mentioned so fleetingly that many may miss it.

What mostly-works but slightly-doesn't is that the film is one of those that makes more sense when you reflect on it afterwards. That's a good thing in my book, but I can well imagine that most people will leave this film utterly perplexed by what they've just seen. It's all there to make sense of it, but it's presented rather subtly at times, and often in an order that requires reflection to make sense of. For instance, a central conceit of the film (and a very clever one) is that Sapir-Whorf is true at a deep and fundamental level, but it's quite gently introduced to the viewer at a point where its relevance is opaque. And the consequence of this is illustrated by out-of-order glimpses of a child in what appear at first to be past memories, but which turn out latterly to be something else. However, the viewer is slightly misled by the presentation of some of this material upfront, seemingly as backstory, when it would arguably make more sense to introduce it latterly (narratively, perhaps, but maybe not emotionally).

My only "proper" reservation is, as ever, time travel - technically, I guess it's not exactly time travel, but, well, ... It's nowhere near as blunt as Interstellar (a film I forgave on a second viewing), but messing with the space-time continuum is a sure-fire way of getting my hackles raised. Especially here, where the film has its cake and eats it by allowing agency and then kind-of suggesting fatalism. However, it is still one of the cleverest uses of time-bending in film, so despite my hackles, I'm much more forgiving here.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, it really is one of the smartest science fiction films in recent years (or decades, even), presenting the sort of deep ideas that, while not uncommon in literary science fiction, rarely make it off the page. It does all of this gently and subtly without any of the distracting pace and action routinely misused in conventional "science fiction" films. And it does it while blending a human story of love and loss in with the central MacGuffin. Two thumbs up for sure.

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P.S. I should just add that, with their relationship with time, the aliens reminded me of my favourite aliens, the Invaders of John Varley's novels. Although the Invaders still win because of their disinterest / disdain in humanity.

The Invaders?

Time for another entry (and the final one to date) in John Varley's ongoing Red Thunder / Red Lightning series, Rolling Thunder. This was actually the first of the series that I received (a 2008 Christmas present), but I thought that I'd better reader the preceding novels before getting to it.

Again advancing in time by a single generation, Rolling Thunder is narrated by Patricia Kelly Elizabeth Podkayne Strickland-Garcia-Redmond, or Poddy for short. As her mouthful of a surname implies, she is the grand-daughter of Mannie Garcia, narrator of Red Thunder, and one of the first humans to walk on Mars. The novel begins with her stationed in a consulate office in California, screening then routinely turning down applications from "Earthies" to emigrate to her home planet, Mars. Though tensions between Earth and Mars have eased since the events of Red Lightning, the planets still regard one another suspiciously, especially since Mars now controls the "squeezer" technology that has made space accessible to humanity. However, Poddy's life is less concerned with interplanetary politics than with slaving away under Earth's gravity, far away from her family and friends on Mars.

Although officially conscripted in the Navy of the Martian Republic, Poddy's first love lies in composing popular music, and she jumps at the chance to form a "military band" to provide entertainment for the Navy bases located on the various moons of Jupiter. Poddy's first stop is Europa, where Navy scientists have spent years studying bizarre "living mountains" that grow where the moon's icy crust is thinnest. She becomes intrigued by the periodic, low frequency radio emissions that these strange crystalline organisms emit, and begins incorporating them into her compositions. As her tour takes her away from Europa and around other satellites of Jupiter, the band's reputation gradually takes off, first within the Navy bases, and then on the net. However, disaster strikes Poddy on her return to Europa where the mountains have begun to become more active. A routine journey over the surface of the moon is catastrophically curtailed when the mountains launch into space. Poddy is saved by the time-freezing "stopper" technology developed by her genius "uncle" Jubal, but remains trapped in stasis under the Europan ice for almost a decade before even her highly-connected family can finally rescue her.

This intervening period has been very kind to Poddy, whose compositions have come to dominate the music charts, and have made her very, very rich. But, by stark contrast, they have been very unkind to the Earth. After leaving Europa, the crystal mountains defied expectations by first visiting the high atmosphere of Jupiter before settling into the oceans of Earth, unable to be opposed by any weaponry that humanity could dream up. Now, for ends that no-one understands, the mountains are transforming the Earth's climate, rendering it uninhabitable for the humans still there. Through another "uncle", the former astronaut Travis Broussard, Poddy discovers that Jubal, Travis' cousin, has been brought out of "stopper" storage to try to come up with a solution for the deteriorating situation. However, he cannot find any way to tackle them, but instead uncovers a strange side-effect of the "stoppers" that Poddy has also experienced. Though ostensibly timeless, both Jubal and Poddy have dreamlike experiences that point to consignment in a "stopper" somehow exposing human minds to the perceptual continuum that the crystal mountains experience. Linking the mountains to a regular series of extinction events on the Earth, Jubal comes to understand the vastly different time-scales that they perceive the universe on. This realisation convinces Jubal that all of the efforts of humanity directed at the crystal mountains are no more than those of an insect against an elephant. Faced with such an unaware and unyielding foe, humankind and the resources that support it are destined to be squeezed to breaking point. Travis accepts Jubal's interpretation and, making use of Poddy's vast riches, plans a new future away from the perilous solar system.

Unlike the earlier two novels, this one significantly ups the science fiction content of the series. The crystal mountains and their glacially-slow perception of time certainly qualify in the "aliens" department. Similarly, the near-future and near-Earth antics of Red Thunder/Lightning are replaced with more exotic locales from the outer solar system and interstellar travel. This all stacks up in the plus column for me.

However, also unlike the earlier novels, this one has a few entries in the minus column. None of these are significant, and they really reflect my own pet peeves in books. For instance, in making Poddy a musician, Varley needs to describe her music so winds up indulging in name-checking of (I presume) artists that he likes, peppered with a few artists yet to be born. This, and other music-related flim-flam, just doesn't appeal to me, since the writing seems less about the fictional character and more about the author. Challenging for the fourth wall. I think Varley also drops the ball with his late-in-the-game romance for Poddy. While I'm certain that he didn't intend it this way, I couldn't quite overlook the notion that this might be a bit of wish-fulfilment on his part. That's an unkind reading, but I doubt I'm the only person to join those dots.

All that said, the plus column still wins out. Much as with the earlier novels, Poddy is generally a well-realised narrator, one who's fun to be around. I could have done with less (or no!) music in the novel, but as this isn't a common motif in novels, it's still interesting. I certainly appreciated the extra science fiction, although I did spend much of the novel labouring under the self-inflicted misapprehension that the crystal mountains were the Invaders of Varley's future-set Eight Worlds.

Finally, I don't know if Varley intends another novel in this series. The ending here moves things away from much that's familiar, so any successor novel will be shifted even further to the science fiction end of the spectrum. While that would appeal to my tastes for space aliens and other stars, it might also move the series too far from its realistic, near-future origins. As "juvenile" novels dealing with characters, language and events that are halfway plausible, the earlier two books serve as "gateways" to science fiction for younger readers averse to diving into fantastical futures. I guess we'll see. I'm really hoping that he turns his attention to the long-promised, and Eight Worlds-set, Irontown Blues.

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In passing, I have to remark that the Invaders are among my favourite of aliens in science fiction literature. They turn up at Earth, note that we're messing up the planet for sentient organisms such as whales and dolphins that share their three dimensional view of reality, then shutdown our technology to stop us from causing any more trouble. They don't wipe humanity out, although they do end civilisation on Earth, and they leave the solar system colonies intact. And then, when humanity mobilises against them from Luna, they throw us another lifeline, singularity technology, to take us out of the solar system before they get seriously annoyed. They combine a respect for other sentient intelligences with truly alien perceptions of time and space. And, as a biologist bemoaning our entry into an environmentally calamitous Anthropocene, I'm a sucker for all that. That, and representing a reminder that our self-perception may be somewhat self-aggrandising (to say the least), makes them a memorable creation.

"Mars sucks"

Back to Mars with John Varley again, this time in Red Lightning, the sequel to his earlier novel, Red Thunder.

Set one generation after the events of Red Thunder, the novel is narrated by Ray Garcia-Strickland, son of the central character and narrator of the earlier novel, Mannie Garcia. While Mars represented the High Frontier in Red Thunder for Mannie and his friends, now it's an over-rated tourist trap: great for a few weeks holiday, but unbearable if you're wedded to it by virtue of your father being among the first to set foot on it. Much like his grandmother does on Earth, Ray's father now runs a hotel on Mars, and Ray and his sister serve as its unpaid staff. But it's a disorganised destination for the tourists who have over-run it, and there's only one place worse as far as Ray is concerned: Earth. But life isn't all bad, where else can you surf down from a moon to the surface of a planet? However, a relativistic impact into the Atlantic Ocean causes disaster for the eastern seaboard of the US, and contact is lost with Ray's grandmother, forcing Ray and his family into a rescue mission from Mars. Not as difficult as it sounds given the squeezer drives created from the force field "bubbles" developed by Ray's "uncle" Jubal, but post-impact Florida is a lawless wasteland while the authorities struggle to restore order. But the known difficulties of the anarchy in Florida pale compared to those when the family returns to Mars. Unnerved by the impact, and by the disappearance of Jubal from his Falkland Island laboratory/prison, a shadowy military force descends on Mars to pressure Ray and his family for information. In the ensuing civil unrest on Mars, its citizens discover, for the first time, a new unity and patriotism. While once the children of Earth, they are now Martians.

Again, much like Red Thunder, this is very much a "juvenile" novel in the tradition of Robert Heinlein. As well as easing up on the more mature elements of sex and violence, the novel has a very straightforward narrative. Also like the earlier novel, it's skilfully written from the perspective of a late teenager and, along with the interplanetary travel, deals with many of the issues that affect young adults the world over. So I'm guessing that it's much more appealing to a younger demographic - not that my reading of it is any way indicative of this.

If there's a downside to the novel it's that, like its predecessor, it's much lighter on science fiction content that Varley's trademark Eight Worlds novels and stories. There are no aliens, no AIs and none of the biotechnology that characterises these "further-future" stories of Varley. The most (only?) science-fictional part is the "squeezer" technology that underlies the societal backdrop of Red Lightning, but this, and the "stopper" technology that appears late on, is described in only vague terms. That said, this is almost certainly a conscious and wise choice by Varley - all too many authors come unstuck when they over-dissect the (typically shoddy) science.

Nonetheless, Varley instead makes the novel rather relevant to some very contemporary themes. The consequences of the impact on Earth have a resonance with both the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, and the flooding of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Meanwhile, the subsequent security crackdown on Mars has uncomfortable echoes of the hasty and illegal measures implemented by the West in the so-called "war on terror". Through these and other contemporary parallels, Varley makes this novel highly relevant to life in the early 21st century. But, to his credit, he doesn't do it with a sledgehammer, he more or less just lays things out for the reader to tease out.

On top of all of the above, Varley's writing is a lot of fun. As with Mannie in Red Thunder, Ray in Red Lightning is a credible and enjoyable guide to take in the future with. Varley's good on language with his protagonists, and you really feel with the books that the narrating characters are both young, and are doing a lot of growing up at the same time. He's also pretty funny at times. One of my favourite lines comes early when Ray, commenting on his father's writing style in Red Thunder, remarks that he won't be copying Mannie's "condescending" way of transcribing Jubal's Cajun speech in Red Lightning (OK, so you had to be there).

Another minor hit for Varley I reckon. While I prefer his more conventional science fiction (and Varley's hardly really conventional), there's a lot to like about this novel, and it's plenty to be getting on with till he returns to the Eight Worlds.

Martian adventure

A bit of a light read this time, Red Thunder by John Varley, one of my favourite science fiction authors.

In near-future Florida, a group of teenagers watch the launch of Ares Seven, America's hasty and high-speed riposte to a Chinese mission already well on its way to the red planet. On the way home from the night launch, Mannie and Dak, and their girlfriends Kelly and Alicia, take in an illegal drive over the Florida sands, only to run-over (almost) a drunken, and disgraced, former astronaut. After taking him home to his strange cousin, they release a collective sigh of relief that nothing more serious happened. Returning later to check on the astronaut, a Colonel Travis Broussard, they become intrigued by his NASA past and take an interest in his return to sobriety. Mannie also becomes intrigued by a strange silver "bubble" that he finds in Broussard's back-lot, something which seems to defy the physics he gobbled up in highschool. It transpires that the "bubble" is something created by Broussard's quasi-autistic cousin, Jubal, and it really does defy physics, at least as it is currently understood. As well as creating force fields beyond the ken of modern physics, Jubal also realises that the American mission to Mars is doomed by its risky adoption of a high-speed drive. With these pieces falling in place, Mannie et al. embark on the unthinkable: an independent mission to Mars using the "bubbles" as an even higher-speed drive, both to beat the Chinese and to rescue Ares Seven along the way. But there are a lot of hurdles in the way of these bright but unqualified teenagers. Just as well they've an ex-NASA astronaut, a scientific prodigy and an excess of enthusiasm to draw on.

The novel follows in the tradition of Robert A. Heinlein's "juvenile" series of novels for teenagers. That's not to say that Red Thunder is an easy read for adolescents, but it does mean that things are kept slightly simpler (no complex, meandering storyline here) and that there's a distinct lack of "sex and violence" (although, the characters being teenagers, the former is certainly alluded to). To an adult, it just seems a little tame at times.

Anyway, while not, in science fiction terms, quite up with his Eight Worlds novels (which certainly contain non-juvenile elements), this is a solid and enjoyable read. Perhaps a little too much of a slow burner (it doesn't reach space until the final quarter), but it does invest a lot of time putting its characters and their lives into place. For instance, Mannie and Dak, while clever and enthused by the space race, come from unprivileged backgrounds and broken homes. Mannie's family runs a small motel on just the right side of solvency, and his poor Hispanic background causes a number of difficulties, not least with Kelly's rich, but racist, family. Varley fleshes all of these details out gradually, not forcing them, and makes the disparate crew of the Red Thunder one that the reader can really get behind.

Varley also does a great job on some of the fringe details that would surround such an ad hoc mission to Mars. How can you get hold of space suits without making the authorities suspicious? What will said authorities do to you when you land back on Earth? And, most amusingly, what about merchandising? He handles all these playfully, and much as with his last novel, Mammoth, he puts in a dose of political commentary that's very appetising to someone with my persuasions.

Overall very enjoyable, though I'm still looking forwards to Varley's return to his Eight Worlds - that said, poking around on the web, I find that Red Thunder's sequels already hint at a connection with this series!

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As a sidenote, having recently been to Florida and seen a launch myself, I appreciated his commentary on the state much more than I otherwise would. I even recognised several of the places he describes, including Everglades City (which really is no city). We even stayed in a Cape Canaveral motel not so dissimilar to the one that Mannie's family toils in.

Quaternary Park

As I bemoaned here last week, Iain Banks doesn't produce novels at a fast enough rate. Another science fiction novelist that this applies to is John Varley. But while Banks cranks out a new science fiction novel every two years or so, Varley's batting average evens out at about four to five years. Similarly to Banks with his Culture, Varley is perhaps best known for his work set within the fictional universe known as the Eight Worlds. While not directly precluded from this series, Mammoth is a standalone work that has no obvious connection to the Eight Worlds.


Mammoth opens with the discovery of the frozen remains of a mammoth in North America. This discovery is part of a research project run by Howard Christian, a super-rich entrepreneur, to clone a mammoth from frozen DNA. However, it is overshadowed by the more significant discovery of two humans with the mammoth, one of whom is wearing a wristwatch. Further investigation finds a strange accompanying machine, presumed to be a time machine. Howard then hires Matt Wright, a brilliant but frazzled theoretical physicist, to study and replicate the machine. Working alongside the mammoth cloning project, Matt meets Susan Morgan, an experienced elephant trainer, hired by Howard to ensure the successful birth of a cloned mammoth from an elephant mother. The disruptive intervention of incompetent anti-cloning activists somehow jars the uncompliant time machine into operation, sending Matt and Susan 10,000 years back in time to encounter Little Fuzzy, a baby mammoth ...

Mammoth is a rather fast-paced science fiction techno-thriller which, at a first glance, resembles works by renowned hack writer Michael Crichton (specifically the reasonably good Jurassic Park, and the apparently risible Timeline). However, this comparison is rather unfair. While it doesn't really reach the heights of Varley's other works, Mammoth is clearly separated from Crichton's novels by more intelligent plotting and credible characters. For Crichton, characters are essentially talking heads that act to advance the action. Varley invests a lot more time building his up, and weaving them into plausible relationships. Given the relatively rollercoaster nature of the plot, we're not talking about characters in the literary fiction sense, but these are on the well-developed side of science fiction.

The time travel plot is rather playfully handled by Varley. This playfulness begins with the machine itself, which is described as a superficially simple device containing a matrix of caged spheres (= marbles). Varley leaves its mode of operation fairly mysterious - in fact, the closest he gets to explaining how it works is when the matrix of spheres reorganises itself and some appear to disappear. This is explained by the suggestion that the spheres are now in another dimension. Varley also throws in some discussion of the paradoxes of time travel, which includes an amusingly dismissive reference to his own earlier novel, Millennium. As for the origin of the time machine, well, Varley creates quite a paradox there too. Although Matt builds a functional time machine based on the remnant discovered with the frozen mammoth, and although the route by which the remnant got to where it was found is outlined, there's nothing to say where, or when, or via whom, the machine came into existence in the first place. All things considered, this is probably the most satisfactory way to tidy up time travel stories - that is, not to tidy them up.

In passing, in what's quite a nice touch, Varley uses a children's storybook describing the adventures of Little Fuzzy to frame the novel. Rather than use a heavy-handed talking head (as Crichton would do), this approach allows Varley to use a completely different voice (so, OK, it may just be a "talking head") to summarise and simplify parts of the story. Since these parts often deal solely with mammoths, this permits their anthropomorphisation, without it being clumsy. It's a children's book after all.

As will come as no surprise to readers of Varley's website, he also slips a large dose of anti-Bush criticism into the novel. Mostly via the interrogation scenes that follow Matt's return to the present day. Perhaps reluctant to come over as an unthinking critic of Bush, Varley qualifies this criticism with a degree of realism. While critical of the current government, he certainly has no truck with those who would put the government on the same footing as terrorists. There's something in that, of course, but it perhaps isn't as effective as Varley intended.

Anyway, overall it's an enjoyable, fairly pulpy romp. Hopefully Varley will be returning to his Eight Worlds before too long, however.