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Tag Archives: Stephen Baxter

Reprint: The End

27 Friday Jan 2017

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction

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Alfred Bester, Brian Aldiss, Carolyn See, Clifford D. Simak, Douglas Adams, Edgar Pangborn, Elizabeth Hand, George R. Stewart, Greg Bear, H.G. Wells, Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov, Jack London, James Morrow, John Wyndham, Keith Roberts, Lucius Shepard, Mary Shelley, Nevil Shute, Octavia Butler, Peter George, Philip Latham, Piers Anthony, Raymond Briggs, Richard Jefferies, Ronald Wright, Russell Hoban, Stephen Baxter, Thomas Bailey Aldrich

I had great plans for my Cognitive Mapping series that ran in Vector between 1995 and 2001. At one point I envisaged producing 100 of the columns, which could then be gathered together as a decent-sized book. But at some point the project ran out of steam. I had maybe another half-dozen columns started but never completed. Apart from a parody piece (written by another hand, not naming names Mr B****r), the column was over. But at the end of 2005 I produced one last hurrah, appropriately enough on how science fiction deals with the end of things. This last column was published in Vector 244, November-December 2005. Continue reading →

Reprint: Whose History

16 Monday Mar 2015

Posted by Paul Kincaid in Uncategorized

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Adam Roberts, Aldous Huxley, Carolyn See, China Mieville, Darko Suvin, David Karp, Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Erskine Childers, George Orwell, George R. Stewart, Gordon R. Dickson, H.G. Wells, Hugo Gernsback, Ignatius Donnelly, Joanna Russ, Johannes Kepler, Jules Verne, Karel Capek, Kenneth Mackay, Margaret Atwood, Mark Bould, Mary E. Bradley Lane, Mary Shelley, Michael Crichton, Philip K. Dick, Pierre Benoit, Robert Heinlein, Sherryl Vint, Stanislaw Lem, Stephen Baxter, Strugatsky Brothers, Thomas M. Disch, Yevgeny Zamiatin

This review of The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction by Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint was first published in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Volume 23, issue 2, 2012: Continue reading →

Reprint: Alternate History

07 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction

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A.J.P. Taylor, Bruce Sterling, G.K. Chesterton, G.M. Trevelyan, Harold Nicolson, Harry Harrison, Harry Turtledove, Hilaire Belloc, Hilary Bailey, J.C. Squire, Keith Roberts, Kingsley Amis, L. Sprague De Camp, Len Deighton, Lisa Tuttle, MacKinlay Kantor, Martin Cruz Smith, Philip K. Dick, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Harris, Stephen Baxter, Terry Bisson, Vladimir Nabokov, Ward Moore, William Gibson, William L. Shirer, Winston Churchill

Someone asked for more of my Cognitive Mapping columns, so here’s another one. In fact, this is the first one I wrote. It appeared in Vector 186 (December 1995). To be honest, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the term ‘alternate history’, one cannot help feeling that grammatically it ought to be ‘alternative’, but usage means we are stuck with it. As a sub-genre, however, it is one of my favourites. Continue reading →

Reprint: Life on Mars

10 Tuesday Sep 2013

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, reviews

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Alastair Reynolds, Cory Doctorow, Ian McDonald, John Barnes, Jonathan Strahan, Kage Baker, Kim Stanley Robinson, Nancy Kress, Nnedi Okorafor, Rachel Swirsky, Stephen Baxter

This review of Life on Mars edited by Jonathan Strahan first appeared in Bull Spec 5, Spring 2011.

life on marsIt doesn’t specifically say so on the cover, but this is a YA collection. This is a category that simply did not exist when I was of an age to be the target audience, now it seems to be all pervasive. But what exactly is it? The authors aren’t exactly talking down to their audience, or, at least, I have seen works that are as complex in language, ideas and structure that are ostensively aimed at an adult audience. But the stories do seem to address their audience by the simple expedient of having a protagonist of the same age (the one exception to this rule is ‘Discovering Life’ by Kim Stanley Robinson, which also happens to be the only story that is not original to this anthology. Its presence here tends to suggest that, other than the age of the protagonist, there is no real difference between adult and young adult fiction.) Continue reading →

Reprint: Appleseed

14 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, reviews

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Gene Wolfe, John Clute, Samuel R. Delany, Stephen Baxter

I included an article about John Clute’s Appleseed in my collection What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction, but before that I reviewed the novel for Foundation. It appeared in Foundation 83, Autumn 2001: Continue reading →

Infinity Plus Two

10 Wednesday Aug 2011

Posted by Paul Kincaid in Uncategorized

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Brian Stableford, Charles Stross, Eric Brown, John Clute, Keith Brooke, Lucius Shepard, Michael Moorcock, Nick Gevers, Paul J. McAuley, Paul Park, Stephen Baxter, Terry Bisson, Vonda McIntyre

And we start with Infinity Plus Two edited by Keith Brooke and Nick Gevers with a (somewhat perfunctory) introduction by John Clute (PS Publishing 2003).

There are many arcane reasons for the particular selection of stories that appear in a reprint anthology. They might represent some measure of ‘best’, they might represent some specific theme, they might be stories rescued from obscurity, they might simply display the individual taste of the editor(s). What they usually do not do is represent the taste of the contributors. But that is the premise of the Infinity Plus anthologies. A bunch of regular contributors to the infinity plus website have been asked to choose one of their stories for the anthology. The result is decidedly curious. There are stories here that are clearly long-time favourites – Vonda McIntyre’s ‘The Genius Freaks’ was first published 30 years ago, in the glory days of Damon Knight’s Orbit series, while Lucius Shepard’s ‘The Arcevoalo’ is nearly 20 years old and I refuse to believe it hasn’t been collected before now. Other contributors, however, seem to have gone pretty much for their most recent story, or for something from relatively small circulation sources. The variation in quality, therefore, is marked.

Paul Park’s ‘Untitled 4’, for instance (first published in Fence in 2000), is a confused and confusing mishmash of ideas in which a writer imprisoned by a peculiar form of totalitarian state edits a couple of stories by the student who betrayed him, and in them finds an account of the real crime he committed. If this is what he has chosen to represent him, one can only assume he hasn’t been producing much of real rigour lately. Adam Roberts, on the other hand, probably doesn’t have that much in the way of short fiction, but this still feels like a poor representation of his work. In an alternate Victorian England where the lands discovered by Lemuel Gulliver were real and Liliputians are used as slaves, a story that starts off being about slavery and industrial exploitation, turns into a story about guilt and betrayal, and ends up as a straightforward tale of invasion, without satisfactorily tying together or concluding any of these strands. Michael Moorcock probably does think that ‘Cheering for the Rockets’ is a good representation of his work, since it brings back Jerry Cornelius and others from the familiar repertory company, though what they do doesn’t actually make much sense and Moorcock seems to believe that using the name Jerry is all that is required in the way of characterisation.

But if these are the weaker stories, there are others which are much stronger. Stephen Baxter, indulging yet again his recent obsession with the mammoth, is not quite at his best with ‘Behold Now Behemoth’: the story of the possible survival of a mammoth as a family pet in Cornwall really needs a better resolution than it is given, but it deals interestingly with a subject that is actually becoming a little too familiar. Much the same can be said of Brian Stableford’s ‘Emptiness’, which takes him back to the theme of vampirism. This is a small-scale piece about a poor, poorly-educated woman in a run-down inner city who, for a few weeks, adopts a vampire baby. It is beautifully observed, but again feels like the story simply ends rather than being resolved.

Both Charles Stross, in ‘Bear Trap’, and Eric Brown, in ‘Dark Calvary’, offer stories that are bursting with ideas and with life. Perhaps too much so, it is hard to keep track of all the novelties that fizz and sparkle in the Stross story, so that in the end you’re not entirely sure whether everything ties together or not. While Brown’s tale of fevered religiosity in a fevered jungle setting builds to an horrific climax that still feels rather a let-down after all the invention that has gone before.

It also does Brown’s stories no favours to place it immediately before Terry Bisson’s ‘The Old Rugged Cross’, which takes the same idea of crucifiction and makes it both funnier and crueller, and more politically telling; and only two stories after ‘Dark Calvary’ is ‘The Arcevoalo’, written by Lucius Shepard when he was capturing the sweaty, foetid, garish romance of the jungle with almost ridiculous ease. These two stories together bring the collection to a powerful, vibrant conclusion.

Though I have to say that perhaps the best story gathered here is ‘The Rift’ by Paul J. McAuley, which is also set in the Amazon jungle, where a disparate (not to say disfunctional) group of climbers are descending a strange canyon where, in an inversion of Conan Doyle’s Lost World, they meet their ancestors. Here is one story that really does know how to resolve itself, even if it does so, appropriately enough, with a cliffhanger.

First published at Livejournal, 30 July 2003.

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