Heads, Greg Bear

This is a reread of something I must have first (and last) read 30 years ago. It's novella length, but its inventiveness and audacity have kept it memorable when other titles have long since faded away. So it was interesting to see if its legacy holds up.

Entirely Moon-set, it's narrated by Micko, a junior member of a family company (or "Binding Multiple", BM) charged with managing the affairs of his brother-in-law William's low temperature laboratory, the Ice Cave, which is teetering on the brink of an Absolute Zero breakthrough. With excess cooling capacity available, Micko's sister, and William's wife, Rho, brings a pet family history project from Earth: a mixed batch of cryogenically frozen heads from the early 21st century. While effectively dead meat, scientific advances convince Rho the heads can be "read", potentially opening a link to the great-grandparents who founded their BM. But the arrival of the heads triggers unexpected friction with other BMs, including strong pushback from the Moon's president, a member of a religiously-affiliated BM. Micko and the wider BM are caught off-guard by this hostility, until he guesses - correctly - whose head accompanies those of his great-grandparents, triggering revelations but with tragic consequences.

… And it's still excellent. Its length definitely keeps it punchy, but it's really impressive just how much Bear squeezes in. I've not even mentioned the Quantum Logic (QL) thinker - the AI controlling William's experiments - above, but its cool, alien pronouncements are a real joy. And I'm even more impressed on rereading just how vicious it is in its takedown of its thinly-veiled proxies for real-world Scientology. Bear's Logologists are transparently stand-ins for L. Ron Hubbard's cult, and he’s brutal in laying bare the reality of its formation and malevolent perpetuation.

If I had to criticise it at all, the denouement is a little raced-over compared to the preceding. But, otherwise, it stands the test of time, and is easily worth the hour or two needed to read it. It works both as a hard sci-fi yarn on Absolute Zero, and as a devastating strike on a vexatious and malign cult.

Sister Act

Duet, Carol Shields

A return to a favourite writer, sadly no longer with us, with a pair of novellas centred around short interludes in the lives of two Canadian sisters.

One is a tale in the domestic life of an academic biographer, unsettled by her husband's unconventional literary exploration of Milton, her childrens' drift into secretive adolescence, and her own guilt at abortive plagiarism.

The second tale picks up with her sister, a poet just about getting by as a typesetter for a botanical journal. An invite to attend her mother's unexpected wedding sends her on a cross-country rail journey with her new dentist boyfriend, entrusting her son with her employer and his wife. There, she meets up with her sister, and awkwardly bonds with her future step-father, while a serious situation from home bubbles up.

Neither sound promising in outline, but Shields’ writing is just so well-observed, and both are so engagingly written that they're great reads. Her attention to detail in her characters’ inner lives is simply fantastic, one really comes away from both feeling that you really know these people you've spent a few short hours with.

The Iron Tactician

The Iron Tactician, Alastair Reynolds

Despite a novel's price tag, actually a little novella. Without me realising it at first, it's part of an intermittent series I've read by Reynolds on-and-off, about a character named Merlin, navigating the stars on a mission of revenge in a ravaged future galaxy. Usually these tales appear in short story collections, but here it's a separate, super-thin (but full-priced) volume. Leaving aside the pricing policy, this was a pleasing, if brief, read, telling the tale of Merlin's discovery of a damaged hulk, its sole surviving crew member, and how he gets inveigled in, and helps resolve, a nearby solar system's multigenerational war. Easy and enjoyable, though definitely cheekily priced.