SF rules, UK!

By Jick Hambleton

When I was a child it seemed that British science fiction strode the Earth like one of the giant Martian machines from HG Wells’ War of the Worlds. Probably it was never so, but during those heady days of the seventies, when Arthur C Clarke was still pumping out award-winning novels, Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds was completing a genre redefinition and Doctor Who was thwarting the Daleks at every turn, this young journalist felt British science fiction had an identity that resonated around the world.

Then the eighties came and Clarke went into semi-retirement in Sri Lanka, Moorcock started pumping out fat fantasy novels that smacked of end-of-tax-year payments and the Doctor began a lengthy descent into childish farce.

You see Britain had much to offer the world of science fiction. The genre that was born in American pulp magazines was revolutionised by the UK’s new wave in the sixties, where authors like Brian Aldiss, Kingsley Amis, Keith Roberts, John Brunner, M John Harrison and JG Ballard, led by Moorcock, breathed new life into an increasingly stale market.

But nothing really happened after that. The new wave reached their zenith in the mid-seventies, then drifted away. When the eighties dawned Britain had nothing of note left. The drought continued into the nineties when, thankfully, new names appeared and again began reinventing the old genre.

One thing you may not realise about Britain is that the book-reading public at large consider science fiction to be a literary version of leprosy. Contempt does not begin to cover their feelings for the genre. Which is why it was especially surprising when one of Scotland’s brightest young mainstream authors decided to publish a science fiction novel. Iain M Banks (just Iain Banks to posh readers who prefer to pretend he is not involved in such a mucky business as science fiction) put his early award-wining career on hold in order to reinvent that hoariest of sub-genres, the space opera. And my goodness what a job he did. Consider Phlebas turns the concept on its head. In the novel we are first introduced to a political system that Banks was to return to again and again – the Culture. Banks’ universe is dominated by a human utopia that has spread across the stars (don’t ask how; he doesn't do physics) and now finds itself embroiled in a war of ideals. Banks chooses not to follow old routes. Instead, we are introduced to his vision of the future through the eyes of its enemy. And in so doing, he tells us a good deal more about the Culture than we might have learnt from it directly. He did not stop there, over the next twelve years he released a science fiction novel every other year, some less successful, others quite brilliant but always jam packed with ideas and expressed through superior prose. Quite simply, science fiction has not had an author the caliber of Iain M Banks for a very long time. We should treasure him.

Interested readers should investigate The Player of Games. Here, Banks returns to the Culture but with less of the epic scale of other outings. In this utopian far future, game players thrive on challenges. So when the Culture’s most lauded player is invited to compete in a competition where the prize is the throne of a small alien empire, he finds it hard to resist. The empire, however, turns out to be far from the idyllic paradise it initially purports to be. As a parallel to our own world, it is highly effective. It is also a necessary device to give the Utopian universe a worthy opponent. It is that rare science fiction novel that combines thoughtfulness with action and big ideas.

Currently Iain is taking a rest from science fiction. His last novel was Look to Windward.

Scotland, it turns out, has more than its fair share of emerging talents. Ken Macleod has been building a solid reputation for near future science fiction for almost as long as Banks has been spinning tales around the very distant future. Macleod’s broad grasp of politics and political systems gives him a strong edge in presenting believable stories. Take his first novel, The Star Fraction. Written eight years ago, he brilliantly predicts the complete decentralisation of the UK. And now look at us. Britain is split between four parliaments three of them governing the regions of Wales, Scotland and, depending on the political whim of the day, Northern Ireland. Admittedly, Macleod went further, suggesting a return to individual city states but he had sensed which way the wind was blowing.

Macleod’s most accessible work is The Sky Road, a tale told along two timelines. The first is set in a near future of crumbling nations, where an ex-Soviet bloc country’s chief export is a nuclear deterrent for hire. The other tale is set after the Fall, which we surmise to be an event reached at the conclusion of the first tale. In the second tale, a society controlled by tech priests strives to reach for the stars once more, equally afraid of the past and the potential dangers left lurking in orbit following the apocalypse.

Ken has just published Dark Light, the third installment of a far future trilogy called the Engines of Light.

In Alastair Reynolds we find a newer voice but one leaning away from far future utopias and political future history treatises and towards harder scientific rules. In his own words, he does not expect literal scientific application but rather an author’s consideration as to how the universe and its contents work. This puts him in a very different camp to Banks who is more inclined to back his story and damn the science. Not that this makes Reynolds a journeyman hack. By no means. Since the mid-nineties he has been plying a trade in the short story market that has earned him a strong reputation as a writer who works big ideas into small spaces. Typically, his narrative direction lies through the thriller style but he is not confined to this sub genre. An early short story, Spirey and the Queen, brilliantly posited a tale of future war in which the two combatants are barely aware of one another. One constant in his work is his realisation of future hardware – big starships, bigger alien bases in the hearts of neutron stars, planet-crunching weapons and nanotech plagues. Reynolds found room for all this and more in just his first novel. The man is a veritable font of imaginative technology.

Reynolds’s Revelation Space is an epic novel spanning a short period of time but with its roots in the Dawn War of a billion years ago. A ruthless scientist with a fascination with alien artifacts has been summoned to a dead world to establish how an alien race managed to wipe itself out. On its way to join him there is a giant battleship with a tiny crew of misfits and an agenda of their own. Following a trail of lies and deception, the protagonists end up plunging into a neutron star in search of the answer to the planetary puzzle.

Alastair has just published Redemption Ark and is at work on a new novel called Absolution Gap.

Recommended reading:
Iain M Banks – The Player of Games
Ken Macleod – The Sky Road
Alastair Reynolds – Revelation Space
Peter F Hamilton – Fallen Dragon
Stephen Baxter – Time
Christopher Priest – The Separation
M. John Harrison – Light
www.infinityplus.co.uk – a site where established and emerging writers place fiction for readers to sample. It also runs extensive book reviews and author interviews.

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