Reviews and Comments

Philosophy is bunk. I've gleaned that philosophers in the course of history have felt the need to concoct a cosmology. Over the centuries the great discoveries of science have rendered those earlier confections meaningless, yet they linger. If all the great thinkers of classical antiquity had access to the insights of Newton, Darwin and EInstein, they would have saved a lot of time and not bothered with their speculations about the will of the gods in creating life and matter and all the rest.

Here we have Olaf Stapledon who does indeed have access to the insights of Newton, Darwin and Einstein, come up with a load of tedious waffle trying to describe god. Stapledon thinly disguises his theological nonsense as a journey through space and time. It gets worse and worse as the book goes on as he loses interest in the disguise . Stapledon shouldn't have bothered to write it, and I don't think you should bother to read it.

For me, a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy, continuing to push the themes of race, gender, nuclear armageddon, sex and biology. The alien-human hybrid Jodahs is the narrator. It - for that is its pronoun - is another Christ figure, like Akin in the previous novel. But this time the name suggests Judas, and there is frequently a suggestion that a putative mediator could turn out to be a betrayer.

One thing I like about Butler is how she goes to extremes. In this case the most sexually desirable creatures left on planet earth are a community of nuclear mutants afflicted with debilitating degenerative conditions and horrible skin diseases. Bow-chicka-wow-wow!

In her other novels (e.g. the Patternist series) she portrays the worst traits of human debauchery and murder, just to make it hard to pick a side - hegemonising aliens or violent human psycho-killers. Here I found I had sympathy for her protagonist Jodahs, but at the same time the ooloi are an alien species with a special gland that excretes the ultimate date-rape drug. One whiff and you can't help falling in love with that tentacled freak from space. Consent and free will, it seems, are more complicated in the post-nuclear alien contact phase of humanity.

But then, Jodahs doesn't have any choice in the matter either, it has to find human mates or descend into a suicidal metamorphosis where it devolves into a mindless slug and finally dissolves itself in the post-nuclear swamp.

Much as this is a compelling story with some appealing concepts, Butler's futures are not aspirational.

In typical Butler style, the second book in this series moves on to the next generation. Lilith, the human collaborator with the alien saviour-colonisers, fades into the background, making way for her half alien son Akin. He's not portrayed as a mythical Christ-figure, his motivations are too deeply biological and personal for that. But he is a potential saviour for the human holdouts who would rather die out than interbreed with the hegemonising Oankali.

There's a perfect balance here. The Oankali have rescued the tiny remnant of humanity which survived the nuclear holocaust, and they treat their new friends with love that goes all the way into the sexual realm and way beyond what we thought was possible with our limited capacity for fleshy pleasures. On the other hand they dictate that humanity can only survive as an interbred hybrid with themselves. Fuck with us and have half-alien babies, or remain sterile and go extinct. Benevolence and dictatorship never co-existed with such intensity.

The rebellious humans would appear to be completely within their rights to resist, but the Oankali have determined with absolute certainty that they will only end up destroying themselves all over again, so there's no future for them. The humans are already murderous arseholes, kind of proving the point.

Akin knows that too, but he can't help himself. He wants to save humanity even if it's doomed to failure.

As usual with Butler, the moral and social dilemmas of her fiction are laced with passion and horror, and the result is a super intense portrayal of love, life, sex and death. There are no easy answers, no happy-ever-after, but the messy, ambiguous reality gives very satisfying HARD answers, and little bits of happiness along the way.

Another essential novel from a master of the genre.

You start with the origins of a post-human tele-kinetic society, jumping forwards through its history in the second book, interrupted in the third by the arrival of a super-evolved inerstellar contagion which turns those it infects into a new and virulent species intent on infecting and converting all life it encounters. The last book is set in the far future as the two groups - alien hybrids and post-humans - struggle for supremacy.

As with all of Butler's work, I was acutely aware of her position as a pioneer, the first black woman to break through in a genre dominated by white men. For me she is a teacher as well as a storyteller. But her stories are confronting. There is murder, there is slavery, there is patriarchy, and these disturbing traits are not defeated in a feelgood happy-ever-after resolution. That is not the reality of a black woman in America in the 60s and 70s. The strength of Butler's work is in how her own reality is revealed in these very far-out science fiction and fantasy stories. They are set on earth, in part contemporaneous with our own history, but the real world is hardly mentioned, as the human society we know becomes a lesser species compared to the entities which replace it. But always I feel the author's presence, her voice telling a story which her white male contemporaries could never come up with.

You could read the "Patternist" books in the order in which Butler wrote them, but in this collection, the four novels are presented in chronological order based on the events described. It is at times uncomfortable reading, but compelling throughout.

Two stories in this book are about humans being dominated by nightmarish aliens. After reading Butler's time travel and slavery novel "Kindred", and knowing what a pioneer she was as a black woman in a field dominated by white men, it's hard to miss the influence her real life had on her fiction.

But there's a tremendous compassion and hope for reconciliation in her stories. Anger and outrage are built into the premise of a Butler story, but the future always contains love and optimism... more than the domineering aliens seem to deserve. Her stories have such clarity and simplicity, and I feel like I know her personally, or I WANT to know her, even as she's creating one her uniquely bizarre science fiction scenarios. Everything I've read by her makes me feel her loss. 58 is too young.

I take half a star off only because I thought the story "Near of Kin" was distasteful. Maybe you need to have a different relationship with the Christian bible to get it, but I think it was a rare failure. It's probably the least significant of the stories in this little collection, and others refloated the book as I read on.

It took me a while to get around to reading this. Perhaps it's the title, indicating that this is one of his non-SF books, inasmuch as any of his books can be described as SF. Vonnegut gently mocks himself, his characters, the entire universe, and that includes readers like me. I should have learned from him by now that it's actually absurd to approach Vonnegut from the direction of science fiction. He is clearly not a genre writer, unless you perceive him as being his own genre.

In my defence, I suggest that "Cat's Cradle", which preceded "God Bless You Mr Rosewater", is the best of Vonnegut's novels when read from the perspective of science fiction. But I digress...

There are several Rosewaters in the book - the main one is Eliot, heir to a fortune who turns his back on his privileged life and lives in a backwater county, devoting himself to giving away his money and being a friend to the poor. His father is the monstrous Senator Rosewater, who is staunchly, moralistically committed to the pure conservative ideas of capitalism and the power of money. He despises his son and is horrified at the idea of treating disadvantaged people with the same dignity as any other human being.

Senator Rosewater's speeches have a new currency in this age of American despotism, where the likes of Trump and DeSantis are rewarded with high office, in return for their vicious contempt for the masses they are intent on crushing. What's different today is the way the new breed of wannabe tyrants are lauded by the very people they trample on, as they slash welfare and health care, and shower the rich with dazzling largess.

While this book looks at the big ideas of America, the later "Breakfast of Champions" focuses on the small town and the personal trauma the USA inflicts on its people. In between, you have Vonnegut's masterwork "Slaughterhouse Five". You can see the germination of that book in "God Bless You Mr Rosewater". Eliot is a world war two veteran, his experiences in that conflict against the forces of tyranny lead him to develop a social conscience that his father so reviles. The war is the central motif in "Slaughterhouse Five".

Oh, and like all Vonnegut's work, "God Bless You Mr Rosewater" is laugh-out-loud funny, despite the dark and heavy themes that predominate.

I feel like re-reads of "Slaughterhouse Five" and "Breakfast of Champions" are in order. Vonnegut was a visionary and I love his work a lot. If I wasn't such a staunch atheist I'd say "god bless you Mr Vonnegut".

This 1952 novel has new currency in the age of surveillance capitalism. Pohl and Kornbluth conjure a dystopian future where the advertising industry has come to dominate human affairs. Politicians no longer represent districts, they are instead controlled by one of several all-powerful advertising conglomerates. Anyone who speaks against sales and marketing is immediately suspect as some sort of traitor or terrorist. When a new industrial project is developed, it is not owned by the traditional industrial leaders, like the factory maven or the shareholders. Instead, the company which advertises the product has control.

The biggest ad agency takes it to a new level when an international plan is hatched to modernise and industrialise India. The ad company ends up effectively running the country, which is now referred to as "Indiastries". Then they move on to the ultimate prize - the colonisation of Venus. The dream/nightmare is of a whole planet where all affairs are completely dominated by advertising from the very first day the colony is established.

In 1952 the authors couldn't conceive of the internet, but the coercive control advertising now has over populations hypnotised by their personalised social media feeds, is redolent of the world Pohl and Kornbluth describe. The Martian fantasies of certain ego-maniacal billionaires in the real world of 2023 also make the scenario in this novel seem prophetic.

I knock off a star because the second half of the book loses some of the compelling storytelling rhythm established in the opening. But for its prescience this is well worth a read.

I'm a big fan of Stroud from the Bartimaeus days. This could be his best series since that ground-breaking epic of a djinn and his human. Stroud's humour and the accessibility of his writing put him in the confectionery aisle of the literary supermarket, but there's a lot of mental and cultural nutrition mixed in with his sweet booky treats.

First up, the characters. Scarlett is a robber and an assassin, a total bad-arse heroine with a dark past. Just one line should dispel any worries from those who felt a bit let down by the self-doubting lovesick Lucy from "Lockwood and Co".

Albert, the Browne of the title, is a kind of autistic superhero, the opposite of Scarlett, but charming and lovable in his youthful innocence and uncontrolled power. There is an impeccable balance in this dynamic duo. They seem to reflect the potential and the challenges faced by young people today, reminding me of Todd and Viola in Patrick Ness' "Chaos Walking".

The post-apocalyptic setting also works beautifully. It is part "Riddley Walker", part "The Chrysalids". From the latter, it also inherits a future world of dangerous and oppressive religious extremism. Stroud conjures a multi-faith theocracy, where Islam, Hinduism, Christianity and the rest join forces in a nasty cabal of murderous oppression, with Scarlett and Browne sharing the podium as its its public enemies number one.

There are obvious references to westerns in the title and the story, but this is English to the max. Calling the post-apocalypse Britain "the seven kingdoms" is also a cheeky swipe at that preposterous yank George RR Martin.

Harari says the problems of famine, war and pestilence have been largely solved. How can he not be bothered by climate change and the threat of nuclear war? He deftly taxonomises reality into three forms - objective, subjective and inter-subjective, then fails to apply his specious system to his own dogma. He declares the ideas of techno-fascist Peter Thiel to be worthwhile simply because Thiel is rich. He equates emotions to algorithms, as if a parent's love for their child could be reproduced as a slider in a character creation page in The Sims video game.

These are the ideas of delusional trans-humanists who think they will be able to use their money to turn science fiction ideas into reality and buy immortality.

I give him one star for two reasons: his ideas on inter-subjective reality are actually quite powerful if applied judiciously. Also, there's a killer sentence: the line about god being dead but believers are having trouble trying to hide the body is an atheistic sick burn. But he then goes on to praise his own religion, Vipassana meditation, which looks suspiciously like an abusive new age cult where I'm from. I might have given him two stars if it weren't for that supreme silliness.

Harari should be wearing the same hair shirt as Francis Fukuyama.

Jherek Carneilan is the protagonist of this book, but in a way I identify more with Lord Jagged of Carnaria. He is the one who has seen the beauty of the world at the End of Time, where the last few living creatures in the universe have solved every problem of life, death and existence. There is a sort of superficiality to their lives, but this is really due to them being effectively immortal and omnipotent. Heaven, as David Byrne mused, is a place where nothing ever happens. But Jherek, The Iron Orchid, the Duke of Queens and the rest of them ensure that the End of Time does not get to be like that, purely through the exercise of will and acts of creativity. If you prefer the value that mortality gives to human life, and impermanence to an environment, you can always get satisfaction from the story of Jherek and Mrs Amelia Underwood. And I do. But I think I'd be staying with Lord Jagged to enjoy an eternal party with energy from the multiverse putting the big freeze on hold forever.

One of my all-time favourite books, and a kind of philosophical fuel for the anarchist temperament.