That story succeeds because it’s able to get beyond its inspiration and work as a short story in its own right, but not all the stories in this anthology manage to shake off their obvious starting point. Thought experiments share many characteristics with short stories, such as a reliance on a narrative which exploits the possibilities inherent in the set-up, and a reliance on an imagined world. And sometimes these shared characteristics seem to operate as an inhibitor. If a short story is also a thought experiment then can it sufficiently assert its own literary merits? Can a short story be more than a simple population of the underlying thought experiments with words? ‘Lightspeed’ by Adam Marek suffers from a workmanlike approach to its inspiration the Twin Paradox, in which an astronaut experiences the passage of time at a slower rate compared to the people left behind, and because of this he has problems with his marriage. But it’s not wholly believable that this character wouldn’t understand and be able to quantify the effect of time dilation on his domestic life.
In contrast, ‘Red’ by Annie Kirby takes the famous ‘Mary’s Room’ experiment and turns it into something genuinely new. In the original experiment a young girl growing up in a monochrome world has an intellectual knowledge of the colour red, but apparently lacks a full understanding until she experiences it for the first time. This short story has the confidence to invert the main idea and isn’t afraid to depart some distance from it. ‘Monkey Business’ by Ian Watson imagines those infamous monkeys randomly hitting typewriter keys and after some unpredictably long period of time, producing the entire works of Shakespeare. The fact that this thought experiment is so well-known could have acted as a disadvantage, but Watson manages to use his own narrative to extend our understanding of how the experiment might actually work.
‘Keep It Dark’ by Adam Roberts is a terrific imagining of a possible (and quite bonkers) answer to Olbers paradox—that apparently naïve question of why the sky is dark at night which has worried several centuries of astronomers and philosophers. The accompanying essay covers a lot of ground but presents the answer to the paradox a little too simplistically.
The essays vary in their technicality and there is a small amount of repetition across them, but it is fascinating to read about ‘Mary’s Room’ by the man who actually came up with the idea. And it’s also refreshing to see actual equations and diagrams in a book of stories. This makes for a lively mix of styles and subject matter. Comma are to be applauded for encouraging fiction writers to write (and readers to read) about such unusual topics.
Iraq +100: Stories from Another Iraq
Hassan Blasim (editor)
Comma Press, 224 pages
Review: Chris Kelso
A nation’s literature is often shaped by historical and political events, and there aren’t many countries who have recently undergone such immense turmoil and upheaval as Iraq.
It’s funny: science fiction seems such an obvious genre to explore for a population which has suffered decades of oppression, censorship and violence – and yet, not many have. There are, of course, reasons for this – the government’s dogged application of the 1969 penal code for one.
Iraqi+100, edited by controversial author/filmmaker Hassan Blasim, is an anthology which aims to overturn the Western world’s preconceptions of what contemporary Iraqi literature is all about. He encourages his writers to shed the shackles of inflexible religious discourse (which has restricted so much of Iraq’s creative output over the years) and take a renewed pride in the Arab poetic tradition. In essence, this is a book about promoting progressiveness, and it’s long overdue.
Blasim assembles some of the brightest among the young Iraqi diaspora and lets them run in any direction with his mission statement: Imagine your homeland in the year 2103, a century after the US/UK invasion. What we get is ten fascinating and courageous short stories that bend the allegory of the future into something poignant and relevant - one almost feels that Iraqi +100 should be required reading for any super power.
The anthology opener really sets the tone, an introduction full of bitter irony. Anoud’s ‘Kahramana’ starts with a young woman escaping her marriage to Mullah Hashish, leader of a group of anti-tech extremists called Empire (a faction which cleverly mirrors the real Islamic State) - but when she escapes one oppressive environment she finds herself quickly caught up in various others, each populated by tyrannical immigration officials and sensationalist television reporters who twist and distort Kahramana’s story to suit their own agenda. It’s a pertinent tale that resonates events closer to home – look no further than the French government’s recent promise to close the UK border post in Calais post-Brexit.
Diaa Jubaili, the only writer still based in Iraq, portrays a grisly future in ‘The Worker’. A portrait of a city which has been devastated by the loss of natural resources. The influence of faceless foreign corporations is another ever-present theme.
While most of the usual tropes are circumvented, there is the occasional foray into tried and trusted SF devices - virtual reality even makes an appearance in Jalal Hassan’s ‘The Here and Now Prison’ and an intriguing alien invasion in ‘Kuszib’ by Hassan Abdulrazzak.
The fact of the matter is that the horror and cruelty goes on today, and the future doesn’t look much brighter. Remember, we’re still bombing this country. We played a part in turning Bagdad into this type of dystopian wasteland. It shouldn’t take an anthology of fiction for that penny to drop, but if it does then the more the better.
The writing is superb and the stories are all beautifully executed, but it’s difficult to read some of these stories. There is a collective shame that marinates the people of Britain after our government’s decision to play a part in such an abominable act of senseless brutality. The whole book feels harrowing and necessary – for Westerners and Iraqi’s alike.
Keep in mind that in Iraq, the sinister totalitarian governments of George Orwell or Philip K Dick novels are real, not science fiction. It’s useful to have a reminder.
Invasion
Luke Rhinehart
Titan, 432 pages
Review: Chris Heyman
Earth is invaded by thousands of super-intelligent beach balls that want to play. This is the high concept that Luke Rhinehart uses to satirise modern economic ruts and wider social absurdities, as seen through the perennial trope of a fresh pair of eyes. Except that these balls have no eyes, just a shaggy coating of extra-sensory hair. It is to Rhinehart’s credit that there are no gags about hairy balls until the very last page, a trailer for the next adventure. Indeed, taken at face value, this is the first of a series, and is left without resolution. Nonetheless, it’s unusual for satire to invest in such a long game. The book’s page count dwarfs the Vonnegut science fiction that is the closest comparison, yet doesn’t feel too baggy. There are lots of really good ideas here and Rhinehart is not your stereotypical genre-jumping pensioner.
Rhinehart conquered the world of armchair psychologists in 1971 with The Dice Man, an electrifying debut that blurred the line between fiction and reality by chronicling the misadventures of one Luke Rhinehart. The book owed a debt to Joseph Heller’s louche disconnect, and fittingly, subsequent novels struggled to match up. If this early peak wasn’t enough to make me wary, I happen to be mildly prejudiced against the output of octogenarians. Rhinehart is 84. I’m flattered to say that he saw this coming, and rather than sending me a choice verb and pronoun, he creates a main character showing early signs of old age. This creates a bridge between writer and audience, to deliver an old man’s view on a rapidly changing world. If you are in fact old, then I assume this is less of a conduit and more of a sympathetic character.
The said character is Billy Morton, who comes with a bitching wife and a couple of mischievous sons. He’s a fisherman off Long Island, content with his relaxed lifestyle until a funny fish finds its way to him: Louie, the first of a handful of shape shifting invaders. These are the Ickies, hairy creatures of nigh infinite intelligence from another dimension who have arrived to teach the Earthlings a thing or two about fun. Their idea of ‘fun’ involves rambunctious protests, stage shows, hacking, theft and running for president. Chapters jump between multiple perspectives but it is Billy and his family that anchor the novel, giving it a heart. As the benevolent aliens suffer and die in the face of human evil we see the cost on a nuclear family as the modern media sets them on a pendulum swing between celebrity and terrorist.
As the activities of the invaders amps up, so too does the satire. Rhinehart’s voice breezily unpicks economic fallacies as he tactfully suggests we might all be happier if we thought less about money and politics, and more about having fun and helping people. It doesn’t feel preachy, with warm humour and just a pinch of the ribald. In these interesting times things can date very quickly, but the political angle is vague and astute enough to cover the inclement weather of Washington DC. I’m excited to see Rhinehart finish his sequence and resolve a subtly harrowing cliffhanger.
The Cygnus Virus
TJ Zakreski
Dancing Star, 366 pages
Review: Steve Ironside
The search for life on another world is not without its risks. Some worry that we’ll end up advertising our presence to a dangerous civilisation who’ll come to enslave us; some worry the knowledge that we’ve contacted someone else will throw our own societies into disarray, and lead to the end of life as we know it. Or what if an alien intelligence were already among us, and then pops up in plain sight? How would we respond?
Moreover, what if a series of bizarre coincidences were to mean that this alien contact happened as the result of a great cosmic accident? The Cygnus Virus is born from just this notion. On the planet of Terra (spookily reminiscent of our own Earth), a depressed guy named Andron, reeling from personal tragedy, signs up to a SETI-like program on his computer, and manages to download a space-faring intelligence called Cygnus.
Sadly for Andron, this is only the first step on a road that will ultimately lead him on a personal journey he could scarcely have imagined as Cygnus turns him into his henchman, with plans to use cloning and a couple of tricks from his home planet of “Earth” to convince everyone on Terra that he’s the Second Coming. Along the way, Andron will make allies, be forced to make decisions that put his friends in harm’s way, he’ll leave his old life far behind in his quest to get out from under Cygnus’ heel, and save the world from his diabolical plans.
Will Cygnus succeed or can Andron save the day? Well, obviously I won’t give that away—suffice to say that when your opponent is a computer-based personality that can control the Internet you’ll definitely have your work cut out for you.
It’s this quandary that allows the deeper themes of the book to develop, and they are interesting. There’s more than a hint of William Gibson and Iain M Banks here, as the story plays with concepts like trans-humanism, cyber-terrorism, the nature of humanity and immortality, and the lengths to which one will go for survival. Whereas those authors’ worlds can be quite sterile, dystopian, disconnected places, Zakreski manages to keep the mood reasonably light, despite the darkness of a couple of the turns in the plot. While it’s not a ha-ha-funny comedy, there’s a streak of humour to be found.
Cygnus is at the heart of a cult of personality built on lies, manipulation and greed. His rise to power, linked to the Church of the Holy Cloth feels very much like the rise of populist movements today. If this review had been written nine months ago, it’d be chalked up as a cautionary tale – now, it can be viewed as a perfectly-timed work of clever observational satire.
The book’s rhythm is great—the story flows along so well that I was half way through the book before it occurred to me that it was written in the present tense. I’m not a big fan of this technique, generally finding it cumbersome and that it gets in the way of the story, but I’m happy to have found an exception that proves my rule. It feels right—almost like a series of diaries, or a documentary show.
I enjoyed the characterisation in this tale as well—from Andron’s beaten down yet still defiant outlook, to Cygnus’ Rockstar delusions of godhood, the main characters in the story feel complete, and have great and distinctive voices. The folks that Cygnus manipulates to advance his plans have flaws that make them stereotypes that seem all too real in our new world of post-truth politics.
The only criticism I have is that there are storytelling tools that do not survive the trip through this tale either. The opening chapters, with that documentary style, treat the events that set the story in motion as a kind of study in chaos theory. Once everything has been established, though, this whole external view is dropped. Given that this book is intended to be the first part of a trilogy, I wonder if this is something that will be picked up in later books. For now it just seems a strange way to approach the opening in comparison, but it’s not ultimately damaging to the rest of the story, so it’s more of a niggle than a complaint.
There are some clues as to how the planned trilogy may unfold, but given the generally completed story that this book delivers I’m intrigued by the possibilities. I’ll certainly pick up part two to see how the story develops. The Cygnus Virus is a book that I would suggest picking up if the idea sounds in any way intriguing to you; given the times we live in, a book which plants its flag squarely in ‘stick it to the man’ territory with a side order of existential debate might be just the tonic that you need.
