Books and TV

[ewx]

Books:

Singularity Sky and Pushing Ice form an interesting pair. a technological singularity, something presented as having far-reaching destructive consequences (as well as advantages). In the former it's an overriding fact of the story, in the latter it's largely off-stage. Both also feature humans trying to survive in the presence far more powerful cultures.

Pushing Ice (Alastair Reynolds) involves comet miners who quickly end up isolated on a mysterious alien spacecraft (formerly disguised as a moon, which turns out to be about the smallest scale its builders seem willing to act on by quite a long way) rapidly receding into deep space. Shades of Space: 1999, perhaps.

The Fermi paradox asks: there are tremendous numbers of stars in the universe - indeed, merely in the galaxy - but why don't we see any evidence whatsoever for intelligent life among them? The explanation we get here is that star-faring civilizations are rare enough, and short-lived enough (though nonetheless long-lived compared to the few thousands years even human urban civilization has yet managed) that they never get to meet one another.

The question is, when you're a star-faring civilization that's figured this out, what do you do about it? We see a couple of possible answers presented to this. One seems eminently sensible to me, though I'm not sure it's intended as an answer to this question; the other is frankly a bit mad. In this and other ways the book somewhat falls into the trap as treating aliens as necessarily incomprehensible because they're, well, alien; a shame as in other ways it does a much better job with alien species.

A further weakness of the book is that they then necessarily spend a very long time getting to their destination; in the past Reynolds has simply not bothered writing such details (with various levels of excuse) but here we are treated to increasing levels of internal politicing and societal development, the latter of which in particular seems decreasingly plausible as it progresses. The story does however pick up again towards the end, resolving some questions but leaving others and opening up enough new ones that there's surely room for sequels (I don't know if any are planned though).

All that said I greatly enjoyed reading it. Thankyou naath l-)

Singularity Sky (Charles Stross) pits the cultural and technological reactionaries of the New Republic against the “Festival” - something one might chose to regard as the post-scarcity equivalent of a nomadic pastoralist society. (The reactionaries are somewhat stereotyped, but that's very much in keeping with what they're trying to achieve.)

It doesn't seem like a remotely even contest but Stross keeps the story interesting by embedding a couple of characters from outside the New Republic into the fleet sent to confront the Festival; as well as hoping to survive the fleet's eventual defeat they have their own agendas related to The Eschaton, a post-singularity power which comprehensively re-ordered the world some time prior to the book's opening pages; and of course they must cope with each day while on board a military vessel operated by their cultural enemies.

(In this he's avoided a problem found in The Algebraist, which also had bad guys attacking people with far higher technology than them and duly getting their asses handed to them, this being far too predictable for there to be much tension along the way.)

It was nice to see an appreciation of limits: when Mansour finally makes her move, her augmentations can help, but they don't confer invulnerability. While she may have a conceptual connection to someone like Diziet Sma, she doesn't have a robot ally hanging around to chop her enemies into little bits before you can say “knife missile”.

The book is packed with little references - some to other books, some to things you might not know unless you happened to be reading the right bit of Usenet at the right time. Quite fun though I can imagine readers who aren't in the know being puzzled by one or two bits.

The ending seemed a bit surprising at first, but after a while I decided that actually, yes, it makes sense.

TV:

Life On Mars packs 21st century detective Sam Tyler back to 1973 after an accident puts him into a coma, creating plenty of opportunity for contrasting thirty years of changes to society and to TV cops. Most are predictable enough - Tyler's disdain for the simplistic and sometimes thuggish methods of his 70s-era colleague is clear enough, for instance.

Philip Glenister plays DCI Hunt - the guvnor - well enough. John Simms' Sam Tyler spends a little too long standing around looking anguished but comes across much better when he actually does something. Liz White's WPC Cartright, Tyler's principle ally, obviously feels the same.

Good stuff.

Hyperdrive. I was expecting a quick comedy cash-in on Dr Who having caused the BBC to notice that televisual SF gets lots of viewers, and it might indeed have been that; I don't know. The start didn't seem entirely promising, but once it got going I was regularly laughing out loud at it. Best exchange:

Henderson: That thing is eating all my crew!

York: Only the slow ones!

(When the gribbly finally made it onto screen it resembled a muppet. But never mind that.)

Kevin Eldon probably has the easiest job, playing the coolly deranged first officer, declining an easy kill on the gribbly because it would be less fun, giving it the opportunity to munch on his colleagues for the rest of the episode. Nick Frost plays Commander Henderson like something out of The Office; he and Diplomatic Officer Teal (Miranda Hart) play off each other well.

Pity the gribbly looked like a muppet, but it's not like BBC SF has ever been big-budget. Hyperdrive certainly isn't the next Red Dwarf but I'll keep watching it for now.