The Stars My Destination (S.F. Masterworks)

Alfred Bester
Gollancz 2010, Paperback, 256 pages, £7.99

A few pages in, I realise I’ve been sold another pup. Only stubbornness and blind optimism keep me turning the pages.

I should have stopped reading at the flyleaf with the quote from William Blake on it. If there’s a bigger sign of the hack with literary pretensions than referring to the first four lines of The Tyger I don’t know what it is.

In this case it’s the first message that our protagonist, Gully Foyle, is a bad lot. A tiger, the evil vicious side of creation. He’s trapped in a wrecked spaceship, keeping himself alive by taking short trips into the vacuum for supplies, when another ship, the Vorga, flies past. It sees him, circles, he fires a distress signal, it moves on. He’s doomed.

Anger and the lust for revenge fire his brain into an escape plan, then on into a mobile crime spree, through unbelievable and poorly-conceived environents.

As with most scifi the portrait of civilisation in the future is key to its success, and this one is just silly. A bogus plot device – magic teleportation or ‘jaunting’ – has dissolved geography and a lot of class structure, and society’s dominated by old families with the names of 20th century brands.

Foyle makes his way through this crappy landscape, brings down civilisation, falls in love, expands the jaunting thing for some reason, learns how to be good and the value of democracy, or something. A flaming image of him turns up now and then to remind you of the Blake reference.

This is a terrible book. I’ve wasted my time.

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The Difference Engine (Gollancz S.F.)

William Gibson
Gollancz 1996, Paperback, 384 pages, £7.99

I’ve enjoyed William Gibson’s books in the past but haven’t read anything by Bruce Sterling. I’m very unlikely to now. The Difference Engine has a good enough science fiction premise: rather than procrastinating into his grave, Charles Babbage finished his work on the difference engine, bestowing computing power on Victorian England. Tiny gears and punch cards enter the world of hansom cabs and gas lamps to shift the character of the diminishing imperial power.

Computerised record keeping has become supremely important and each citizen has a number, making the government led by Lord Byron (for some reason that isn’t explained) a fascist state that takes the prison designs of Jeremy Bentham (the Panopticon was a circular building with the cells around the edges with watchful guards in the centre. the inmates could never be sure when they were being observed so would behave as though they always were) and applies them to society as a whole, mirroring the surveillance culture of modern times.

The computer programmers (clackers) provide the substrate that controls all other aspects of the culture. Luddites abound in their dark, secret rooms and Ada Byron, the real daughter of Lord Byron and the first computer programmer, is an icon.

There’s a thinnish plot about a paleontologist who believes in the catastrophist theory of evolution as oppose to the picture of gradual change that makes up conventional wisdom, handily providing a clunking great metaphor for the transition from slow historical movement to the rapid pace of the computerised world. In case you don’t get it to begin with you’re bludgeoned with catastrophist arguments throughout the text. He makes some money on a bet (which is probably the breakdown of the class structure and the hegemony of the landed gentry) and defends the country against an anarchist plot, as he’s a thrusting young democrat.

Lady Byron entrusts him with some punch cards that turn out to be a program for a gambling system, but the nature of the objects themselves doesn’t seem to be all that important, it’s only the significance that comes from their being the property of the Queen of Engines that the reader needs to take notice of.

In fact the addition of computers appeared to make very little difference to the goings on. There are some new words and a new job – the kinotropist, an operator of computer controlled screens – but Victorian society was already led by engineers and industrialists, they could just as easily be talking about iron-hulled ships. Replace Babbage with Brunel and you have a similar story with no alternative technology at all.

As well as beating you about the face with its subtext as you read, it crams your head full of a dreadful cheesy cockney patois to let you know when you’re dealing with a member of the working classes. Gor, miss that one and you’re a cakey dollymop and no mistake. It drove me up the wall.

The Difference Engine might have inspired a generation of steampunk obsessives but it’s a terrible book. Don’t bother.

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The War of the Worlds

Brian Aldiss (Introduction)
Penguin Classics 2005, Paperback, 240 pages, £8.99

It’s been sitting on the bookshelf for almost as long as I can remember too, a leftover from an effort to make an Amazon order up to the free delivery price years ago. Finally I got round to opening it up and I can’t say I’m any less curious having read it.

Like a lot of Victorian and Edwardian books with action in them it’s a yarn. There’s no suspense or action on the part of the protagonists that leads to the resolutions, they’re just bystanders watching the action. The unnamed narrator tours the south of England running away and hiding from the Martians, completely powerless but giving us a picture of the events.

As everyone surely knows, it’s not resistance from the humans that sorts out the invasion but terrestrial diseases that they have no immunity to. As we work towards that we see only two fighting machines being destroyed by earthly weapons (one by a lucky shot and one by a suicidal ramming ship crew) and the total breakdown of English society.

Narrator guy runs around trying to get to his wife who he sent to Leatherhead in the early chapters, meets some people who are equally useless, and eventually sees the final death of the invaders. The death scene itself is rather moving, as the human personal voice seems to step to one side to describe the lingering hoplessness more objectively. As soon as they’re dead, we’re back to hiding in taxi huts and not really knowing what to do.

Contemporary references abound which means you spend a lot of time flicking to the footnotes at the back, which is a bit of a pain for such a lightweight text. It’s like listening to Lenny Bruce.

Life is hopeless, this book seems to say. You don’t really have any control over anything and big schemes come to nothing, no matter how superior your intelligence or technology might be. Run around and look for your wife, there’s no real point to anything.

Is that really the subtext of this incredibly famous book? That there’s no meaning to life and you might as well just hide under a hedge until everything goes away? Curious.

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