REVIEW | Metatropolis Edited by John Scalzi

Metatropolis is one of only a few anthologies I have ever read where it is hard to pick a favorite story as most were superb.  Five of the brightest voices working in Science Fiction today have come together to create a shared future focusing on cities, which was originally envisioned as a audio only piece for audible.com. Included are stories from Jay Lake, Tobias Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, Karl Schroeder, and John Scalzi who also edited the whole project.

Scalzi has done something I don't think has been done before: created a shared world which all of the contributors helped develop and sometimes working in unison sharing their stories with one another as they were writing so things tied-in together as best as possible. Nearly every story is a winner and stands alone in its own right yet together they build a tapestry world where nations have toppled and communities are organized loosely as city-states with anarchy reigning most other places. Metatropolis is about as Green Punk as it can get with its zero-footprint enclaves and green fanatic cults. It is even more so Green Punk than Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, plus it is a bit more approachable and not so desolate.

Jay Lake starts off the anthology with In the Forest of the Night.  Lake's story is placed in Cascadiopolis, which is a anarchistic closed-collective in the wilds between Seattle and Vancouver. This was the bleakest story of the bunch. Even though this group of people has advanced technology they are still distrusting of outsiders. Two newcomers get into the city and cause havoc. Green leaves you guessing a lot up until the end.  The pacing was very slow and I wanted some more backstory for a few characters, but given the structure I understand why they weren't included.

Tobias Buckell's story Stochastic-City is next placed in a run down Detroit, which gives you a broader view of how the world of Metatropolis came about mixing in some of the events that culminated in the downfall of society. Buckell's story focuses on a future Detroit where a movement to remove cars from the city is taking hold of the populace who are not necessarily for it. Sort of a forced greening of a city. This story easily had my favorite main character who goes to great lengths to get what he thinks he deserves only to find a direction for his life.  This was my first taste of Buckell's writing and it has made me eager to finally crack his novel Crystal Rain, which I hope to get to in the near future.

Elizabeth Bear's contribution is The Red in the Sky is Our Blood, which follows Buckell's setting in Detroit, but takes a very different tact for a similar goal. One running theme in all the stories is people trying to live through each day without thinking about tomorrow and finding a purpose.  I enjoyed Bear's story, but found it difficult to connect with the protagonist Cadie, but that was as designed in many ways.

John Scalzi story is the Latin titled Utere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis , which if I shared the translation would ruin part of the joke to the funniest story in the anthology. Unlike the other stories Scazli focused on a main character who grew up in a closed cities and who doesn't understand what life was like before society changed and does not appreciate what the world outside safe cities has become. Benji ends up taking a very low level job under threat of expulsion from New St. Louis as everyone must contribute to the betterment of the city in some fashion. Benji is a character drawn to be disliked, but in the end he becomes endearing and finds his place in the world even if it smells funny.

Karl Schroeder finish the book strong with the most meta story in the bunch with To Hie From Far Cilenia. It involves steampunk and a cyber world experience similar to that of Snow Crash, but more enmeshed in reality. Yet it oddly reminds me of The City & The City with worlds beyond worlds and a detective like format of an agent in search of something and finding more than he ever thought existed. Really well done.

My biggest disappointment was it was over before I was ready to leave and that we only saw one story outside of North America.  I give Metatropolis 8 out of 10 hats.  This definitely ranks among the best anthologies of the year now.  Longer works could certainly be made from what they have and there are a lot more cities to visit and stories to tell in the world of Metatropolis.  Sub Press's did the limited edition hardcover release which I read with a trade hardcover recently released from Tor.

It was recently announced that there will be a second Metatropolis volume. This time Jay Lake is taking editing duties with all stories being placed in his Cascadia. It will be called Metatropolis: Cascadia and will contain stories by the returning Jay Lake, Tobias S. Buckell; Elizabeth Bear; Karl Schroeder; and newbies to the world Ken Scholes and Mary Robinette Kowal. Now that is quite a lineup. Also, the audio version will be narrated by various Star Trek cast members. I would have preferred to see another book from different cities around the world again instead of one locale, but the lineup more than makes up for it.


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REVIEW | The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade Books)

Paolo Bacigalupi is being heralded as one of Science Fiction's best writers of recent years, having won and being nominated for multiple awards.  His debut novel The Windup Girl caught my eye from the moment I heard the title.  "Is this related to Steampunk," I thought?  "Is it Green Punk?" Which only just before the release received any sort of specific meaning.  It certainly sounded like it could be on both counts.  I was further grabbed by the truly beautiful cover art by Raphael Lacoste.   The final cover actually has a more yellow-tinged look to it to further evoke the smog like conditions of the city.

The Windup Girl is a extremely vivid dystopian future Thailand in a world besieged by food plagues and mistrust. Paolo's superb prose doesn't waste one word in describing the setting.  The world has contracted and segregated itself.  Everything bad that environmentalists now fear has come to pass.  We have run out of fossil fuels, most animal life has died off, and there are massive food famines caused by various food born plagues some of which have terrible effects on humans outside of killing all the crops.  

Governments and Nations have toppled.  The oceans are rising and former places of power are now under water. Religious zealousness rules many parts of the world while the majority is controlled by extremely powerful Calorie companies who grow/design the mass of the food supply. Power is generated by Giant elephants called Megodonts and human labor that is wound into springs to power most anything including Airships and other vehicles.

The narrative is broken into 5 view points, which works well to speed things up somewhat through the slow middle.  However, it was difficult to like and connect with many of the characters as they are designed to survive in this terrible future and make some very tough choices sometimes too easily.  Even the Windup Girl character is hard to to sympathize with, which is surprising given the despicable things done to her.  You can't feel at all for the Calorie Man and Jaidee who is supposed to come off as a hero of sorts is more of a disappointment even to the end.

The Steampunk aspect is more like Clockpunk with the spring tech, but I wish it was described a bit more in depth. Especially in regards to the functioning of the New People or Windups as they are more commonly known. Even with this element I'd say this is as close to Green Punk as anything I've read so far.  The Green Punk mentions are apt in regards to the way people now have to make use of every scrap they have since production of goods is now much more difficult and costly.  And this definitely does not have steampunk's romanticized view of things and focuses on believable technology.  In fact this is a future that is all too real for my liking and very depressive in nature.

Bacigalupi  is a voice that must be heard.  Paolo's work is sure to influence the next generation of writers, but I fear he will become a writers' writer. Meaning that he'll garner high praise and good reviews, but not the large sales he truly deserves for the almost too realistic views and ideas of a future I hope never happens.  In the end The Windup Girl is a bit too depressing for my taste but it has an amazing setting with a great opening and almost as good ending yet suffers in the middle with a less than great storyline and mostly unlikeable characters.  I give The Windup Girl 7 out of 10 Hats.  Paolo's style may be a bit too post modern for some tastes, but his work is light years ahead of what most authors are willing to try.  Readers of Ian McDonald's River of Gods and China Mieville would absolutely love The Windup Girl. Bacigalupi has left the door open for at least more short stories in this world, which I would check out. 

Free Speculative Fiction Online kindly working with Night Shade have three of Paolo's short stories here, if you want to get a good taste for his writing.  This sample includes The Yellow Card Man and The Calorie Man both of which are related to the world of The Windup Girl and Hugo nominees.

 

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AUTHOR INTERVIEW | Paul McAuley author of The Quiet War

McAuley has been turning out well regarded Science Fiction since the late eighties with books such as Cowboy Angels, White Devils, and most recently The Quiet War.  Paul McAuley totally had me lost in The Quiet War (review here) universe and has had no small part in getting me back to reading more Science Fiction as of late, since I was going through a bit of a downturn earlier in the year.  He is also known to release as much as a 1/3 of his books through his blog, so there is plenty of material out there to get a taste.  There are also many short stories which Paul said are early iterations of The Quiet War universe loosely grouped as the Outer System stories, although he has said things changed a bit as the novel progressed.

MH: Hello Mr. McAuley, welcome to Mad Hatter’s Bookshelf. Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to catch-up with us. Firstly, can you tell us a little about yourself?

McAULEY: I was born in England back in the steam age, went to school during the space age, worked in various universities during the rise of the digital age. I used to be a scientist (biology: interactions in plant-animal symbioses); then I was a scientist/SF writer; then I was a university lecturer/scientist/SF writer, and reached a point where I either had to give up my academic job or become a full-time writer. Chose the latter, haven’t regretted it.

MH: What was the inspiration behind The Quiet War?

McAULEY: We have to go back more than a dozen years, when I started writing novellas and novelettes set on various moons of the gas giants and ice giants of the outer reaches of the Solar System. As I deepened and widened my research into the landscapes and histories of those moons, I was overwhelmed by their amazing variety and exoticism. For decades, SF has been imagining all kinds of strange and bizarre worlds that might be orbiting other stars, and all the time they were right here in our backyard. A variety richer and stranger than we could imagine. So that was one big influence: the images sent back by the two Voyagers and Galileo and Cassini, and trying to turn them into landscapes which human beings could inhabit. The kind of thing that Arthur C Clarke and Kim Stanley Robinson (and JRR Tolkien, come to that) were and are so good at. There’s also a reaction against the default californication of space habitats in 1970s and 1980s - every illustration looking like an architectural rendering of a mall, that most deadening and soulless iteration of large enclosed spaces. I wanted to imagination a much wider variety of biomes and closed ecosystems, and inspiration for that came from studying all kinds of gardens around the world, as well as years of curiosity about how biological systems fit together.

MH: One subgenre that is on the rise in at least the public eye, if not in literature, is Green Punk (see Greenpunk.net). Do you think The Quiet War is Green Punk? And what do you think about the movement?

McAULEY: It isn’t *intentionally* Green Punk because I hadn’t heard of the term until this very moment. It is fairly critical of turning environmentalism into a creed in which faith and good intentions are more important than actual observations and understanding of natural systems. Usually signified by a totemic reverence for charismatic species like polar bears or whales, and only a glancing knowledge of the complexity of ecosystems and their ultimate dependency on humble microorganisms. And it does share Green Punk’s credo about use of appropriate technology, something I developed more fully in a previous novel, The Secret of Life, where the more extreme radical greens would tailor themselves to live off the land. The point being, in the end, that nature isn’t something that cares about us; but we are, by our overwhelming numbers of use of dwindling resources, must care about nature.

MH: The Green Saints, while important to the back-story of The Quiet War isn’t explored in-depth. Can you tell us a little more about them and the inspiration?

McAULEY: I was thinking of the influence of Rachel Carson on environmentalism in the 1960s, and speculated in a very vague way about what might happen if the green movement became a religion - or at least, fused with one or more the world’s major religions. The Green Saints are living embodiments of that fusion, hugely influential in their time (after a sudden and catastrophic environmental disaster) but more revered than followed by the time The Quiet War starts. So if they’re sketched in a little vaguely it’s because they’re part of the texture of the back-story.

MH: The idea of humanity repeating history and trying to control one another comes up a bit in The Quiet War. Do you think humanity as a whole can overcome this?

McAULEY: It would require either a vast effort of collective will, or a massive change in human nature. There have been various experiments in harnessing collective will - Soviet Russia is an obvious example. An attempt to create a kind of modernist utopia that very quickly fell apart as its leaders fought amongst themselves. We can always hope that the next attempt will be better, of course, but the chances aren’t great. So any break-out from old patterns will require some kind of change in human nature, perhaps through reengineering ourselves. Which may, of course, lead to all kinds of new and unpredictable problems.

MH: You keep a very active blog and often post large sections of your books to them in addition to copious articles. Do you feel having such a presence has been important to your success?

McAULEY: The books are the main thing. I spend most of my creative time and energy on them. The blog is a spin-off from all that activity, really. A kind of scrapbook. Notes on some of the things I’ve encountered during research, of passing and more permanent enthusiasms, and half-formed (or half-baked) ideas more notion than thesis. And like many authors I put up extracts and other free stuff in the hope that they might interest people passing through the blog to check out the actual work. I have no idea how well that works, but it’s cheap and relatively easy to do, so why not?

MH: Awhile back Stephen Hawking put out a statement saying humanity needed to start spreading out into space and living there or our race will die. What is your feeling? Is humanity destined to die out?

McAULEY: Well, I’m very dubious about the lebensraum argument for space exploration and colonization. As Oliver Morton has pointed out, there’s always New Zealand. As for long-term survival of the human species, well, apart from a few archaebacteria, all species on Earth have either died out or evolved into something else. I don’t think that Homo sapiens will be any different, except in one respect: we’re developing tools that may enable us to rewrite our genetic inheritance. So we might become the first self-determined species, able to improve ourselves at will. Or before we’re able to do that, our burgeoning overpopulation may cause a massive reboot of Earth’s ecosystems. Either way, our decedents won’t be much like us.

MH: Gardens of the Sun, which is the sequel to The Quiet War was just released in the UK. Where does the story go from The Quiet War and do you think GotS will be the last book with these characters? Also, do you know the planned US publication date from PYR?

McAULEY: Publication of Gardens of the Sun in the US is presently scheduled for March 2010. In one sense it’s a direct sequel to The Quiet War, in that it picks up and follows the stories of the characters in the first novel through the aftermath of war and the development of new tensions. But I prefer to think of the two novels as a diptych. The first about the onrushing inevitability of war; the second about attempts to win some kind of conciliation and new direction out of war’s aftermath. The first is the lesson; the second is the lesson learned.

MH: Who are some authors/books you think are under appreciated and deserve a wider audience?

McAULEY: Apart from me? Sticking to SF, I think that authors like Cordwainer Smith, Cyril Kornbluth, Joanna Russ, Thomas Disch, James Blish, M John Harrison, and Pat Cadigan deserve wider attention. For the quality of their writing, for their vigorous inquiry of convention, and because they wrote (and write) at a slant to the genre’s mainstream. That isn’t easy, it’s a big risk with generally little reward, but it opens up all kinds of possibilities that are later exploited by other authors.

MH: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

McAULEY: Thanks for asking me what I’m going to do next. It’s one of two things, and I’m not sure yet which is more urgent (which may mean that I end up doing something I haven’t yet thought of).

MH: Thank you for your time. I’m looking forward to US release of Gardens of the Sun early next year.

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