Christopher East

Ian McDonald has been working his way up my list of favorite SF writers over the past few years, and The Dervish House (2010) just brought him that much closer to the top.  Both in the impressive Brasyl and the spectacular River of Gods, McDonald has proven himself to be one of the field’s most accomplished visionaries:  an inventive, thought-provoking, and entertaining novelist.  What I love best about his work, though, is how thoroughly he immerses the reader in his vivid futures, which are already vibrant and detailed, but all the more fascinating for their unique settings.  With these recent books, McDonald has been taking SF to corners of the globe most white, westernized SF fears to tread, and it serves as an enjoyably disorienting double-jolt to the system, not just showing us how diverse and complex the future will be, but how diverse and complex the world already is.  McDonald may not be the only author reminding us that the future isn’t just happening to Los Angeles and London – that change is a truly global thing – but  he’s certainly among the best.

The setting of The Dervish House is Istanbul, and it’s a thematically significant one – a bustling crossroads bridging the divide of the Middle East and Europe, old ways of thinking and new, the past and the future.  A simplistic plot summary won’t suffice.  Let’s just say there’s a fearless nine-year-old boy with a unique heart condition and the coolest “action figure” ever…a crusty Greek economist with a dark political past and an eye for redemption…an ambitious art dealer who sets out to uncover an ancient artifact…her husband, a cut-throat wheeler-dealer looking to set himself up for years to come…a young woman who takes a job pitching a revolutionary new nanotechnology to venture capitalists…and more memorable characters, their stories told over the course of an eventful week during a relentless heat wave.  Various interests – business, political, cultural, technological, religious – are on a collision course, and as the novel progresses, these characters are witnessing it all, and exerting their effects upon history.  The individual stories are ingeniously interconnected, and together they tell the story of a city, and of a future.  It’s breathtaking stuff, and it’s the essence of “futurismic” – it should be required reading for anyone submitting fiction to Futurismic, that’s for sure.

McDonald’s work can be challenging, at times – bringing SF reading protocols to an unfamiliar culture, even as you’re learning that culture, can be hard work – but it’s well worth the effort.  I do recommend setting a big block of time aside to truly sink your teeth into this one, though; I feel I would have enjoyed it even more if I hadn’t had to divvy it up into bite-sized chunks, due to an unfriendly reading schedule.   It’s great science fiction, and deserves all the attention you can give it.

I woke up in the middle of the night with a Cairo-scratch on one arm and my mind roiling with a weird kind of negative writing energy — cool ideas gestating, but also a nagging dread about my ability to realize them.  When my mind starts churning like that, there’s no sense trying to go back to bed, so here I am composing a Saturday morning linkdump:

• I like this article by Christopher Cokinos about Mundane SF, although — like the very concept of Mundane SF — it’s likely to polarize and piss people off.  After all these years, it’s curious that this “movement” still has no members; it’s like a clandestine service of the subgenre, burbling along under the surface, surreptitiously wielding its indirect influence.  Stealth genre; no wonder it connected with me.   The genre everybody is too cool to join.  Or maybe it’s just a concept with a severe branding problem.  (I mean, Futurismic is pretty much 90% a Mundane market, but I’d be surprised if half our submitters knew that.)  Anyway, it’s an entertaining article and it points out some good near-future SF that’s been published lately.
• I haven’t had a chance to read much of Lightspeed Magazine yet, but boy do I envy the look and feel of the site.  (And their submission interface is pretty slick, too.)
• China Mieville puts his finger on something here in his comments about J.J. Abrams, particularly when drawing the comparison with Joss Whedon.  I have enjoyed some of Abrams’ shows, but he only seems to have one foot in the genre camp, and I get a sense of him being a cagey, hitmaking opportunist.  I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say he’s contemptuous of genre, but…I get the sense there’s something to the insight.
• I don’t expect everyone to share my love of the new spy series Rubicon, but this is the post where I beg you to give it a try, if only to keep it on the air for my benefit.     I don’t generally get hooked on shows this quickly, which of course makes me think its demise is imminent…

I was certain I had more to post about when I started this…maybe I shouldn’t write blogs before 7AM on a Saturday.  Oh, well — have a great weekend, folks!

Easily the best big budget Hollywood film I’ve seen in years, Inception (2010) is a structurally fascinating blend of science fiction and corporate espionage, an intelligent and deviously complicated spectacle that satisfies on just about every level. (Spoiler note: If you haven’t seen the film yet, you might want to skip the next paragraph, if not the rest of the review. I don’t think it’s that spoiler-y, but I was very happy to have gone into the film with few preconceptions.  So, if you’re stopping here — great movie, go see it!)

The film depicts a world in which science has made it possible to infiltrate an individual’s dreamscape, and Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the best of the best in this field.  As the film opens, he and his team are attempting to steal secrets from the head of a major energy corporation named Saito (Ken Watanabe), but the plan goes off-track, and Saito turns the tables, recruiting Cobb on an entirely different mission:  rather than retrieving ideas, they are to plant one, in the mind of one Robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy), the heir to a rival corporation.  Cobb assembles a new team to accomplish this extremely difficult task, which comes for him with the ultimate reward.  But Cobb isn’t exactly mentally stable, his dreamscape consistently invaded by a projection of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), and his risky strategy of sending Fischer into a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream puts the entire team at a terrible risk.

Writer-director Christopher Nolan returns here to the grand conceptual structuring of his breakout film Memento, and the result is impressive:  a smart, challenging, complex story that is serviced, rather than sidetracked, by its larger-than-life visual spectacle.  There’s proof, here, that film audiences aren’t nearly as stupid as Hollywood generally tends to believe they are; the viewer is credited with the intelligence to put the pieces of this puzzle together, and indeed deconstructing the twisty plot mechanics is a huge part of the appeal.  It’s the ultimate Mission: Impossible, a task of intense con-game persuasion with a mindbending skiffy twist.  For the most part the film is briskly paced, although it does bookend its accelerating middle stages with some extended world-building set-up and a slightly laggy emotional wind-down; all things considered, though, it earns its two and a half hour running time, and its final note is pitch perfect.

DiCaprio shows once again why he’s become Hollywood’s go-to guy for intensely unhinged protagonists, and he’s surrounded with great support, particularly from his fellow team members, which include Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, and Tom Hardy.  I do wish the intrusively dramatic Hans Zimmer soundtrack hadn’t stepped on so much of the dialogue, but that’s my only major complaint about the film.  It’s visually stimulating, intellectually engaging, and emotionally satisfying — highly, highly recommended.

Mary Rosenblum’s second novel, Chimera (1993), focuses on virtual reality.  Jewel Martina is a medical aide who has wrestled herself up from poverty, trying to make a name for herself as an information broker in the VR web.  She works for a “web node” named Harmon Alcourt, a powerful controller of the internet economy who’s sequestered himself in a remote compound in Antarctica.  Jewel’s struggles to swing her own deals online are sidetracked when her fate becomes entangled with a virtual artist named David Chen and his loose-cannon lover Flander, a shifty designer of VR avatars who’s run into trouble with a criminal element.  Jewel’s past and David’s love for Flander thrust them into the middle of a complicated power struggle, in an adventure that leads them from Antarctica to the Pacific Northwest and back again.

I enjoyed aspects of Chimera, but overall I found it a slow read, and not all that enthralling.  For a novel seventeen years old, it holds up pretty well science fictionally, and certainly feels ahead of the game in its approach to VR and AI.  The internet as depicted in Chimera feels conceptually dated compared to modern reality; the way the web commodifies information doesn’t quite ring true, and the fact that the internet isn’t ubiquitous feels a little like a predictive misfire.  But considered in the context of its era, it still feels like a valid, earnest guess at the future, and the ideas Rosenblum plays with here are still being examined in depth today.  So even if its details aren’t quite right, it does strike me as a book that had its finger on the SFnal pulse.

Unfortunately, Chimera fell a bit short for me in its story-telling.  For much of the novel, Jewel and David seem to be one step removed from the plot’s real machinations, and the proceedings feel murky until its various threads come together quickly in the final chapters.  There is a sound plot running underneath it all, but it doesn’t quite propel the narrative.  I also felt its focus on the theme of illusion versus reality was a bit heavy-handed, and would have liked to see more contrast in its real world; the novel’s vision of its non-virtual world is uniformly bleak and dystopic, perhaps a bit too one-note.

The prose is quite well written, the characters are distinctive, and for the most part it examines its SFnal ideas effectively; it’s not at all a bad novel.  But ultimately this one didn’t thrill me.

The prolific Walter Jon Williams is generally reliable, but Implied Spaces (2009) — although not without its impressive aspects — was a bit of a misfire for me.

In a post-singularity solar system filled with numerous “pocket universes,” Aristide is one of the founders of the new society — a restless immortal, now spending his days exploring the accidental “implied spaces” of the multiverse.  His swashbuckling examination of the fantasy-gamer world of Midgarth, however, leads to information that the multiverse may be in jeopardy.  One of the massive artificial intelligences that administers the multiverse has gone rogue, and someone, somewhere is weaponizing wormholes.  After centuries of peace, a war appears to be brewing, and Aristide becomes an integral part of the effort to counter this threat — first going undercover to suss out intelligence against the enemy, and later participating in a military capacity.  This peaceful, anything-is-possible universe of near-utopia is in dire jeopardy; can Aristide save the day?

As mentioned, the novel has its strengths:  a solid plot structure, generally smooth writing, and simply piles of Big SF Ideas.  But something is missing.  I found the opening chapters in Midgarth frightfully dull, and very nearly didn’t get through them.  The pace picks up a bit in the middle sections, as the universe acquires more definition and the plot comes into focus, but as the conflict escalates, events are depicted more broadly in vast tracts of summary and expositional dialogue.  I didn’t much care for Aristide as a protagonist; he’s just a bit too formidable, too perfect, to worry about, particularly in a universe where personality back-ups and resurrection technology make death merely a temporary inconvenience.  But my main problem involved the villain’s motive for going to war against this near-perfect, peaceful multiverse.  Throughout, I found myself wondering why someone would want to destroy it, and when the reasoning is finally provided (in a massive infodump, incidentally), I wasn’t convinced.

The novel raises interesting questions about the existential dilemmas such a near-perfect future for humanity might create, and fans of galaxy-spanning, big-concept SF will probably find much to like.  But on the narrative level, Implied Spaces didn’t quite click for me as a smooth, enjoyable read, its ambitious plot rather crushed by the weight of its ideas.  I was interested, but never fully engaged.

Why haven’t I heard of Halfway Human until now?  I found myself asking this question frequently while reading Carolyn Ives Gilman’s 1998 debut; it’s so good, surely it made some noise back when it came out, right?  Was I out to lunch?  Was science fiction?  At any rate, this is superb SF, a novel people should know about.

My science fiction interests tend to be closer to home, and to the present, than this far future tale, which depicts — in glorious, convincing detail — not one but two thoroughly imagined cultures descended from our own after an interstellar diaspora.  It’s the story of Tedla, a “bland” from the planet Gammadis, whose suicide attempt brings it by chance into the life of xenologist Valerie Endrada on Capella Two.  In investigating Tedla’s history, and the reason for its despair, Val uncovers the hidden truth about the faraway culture of Gammadis.  There, gender is not determined until children come of age, but not all children become men or women; the unlucky ones become “blands,” who remain in their “natural,” neuter state, and find themselves reluctantly indoctrinated into a working underclass, conditioned to expect nothing of themselves but mindless, obedient servitude.  Tedla is burdened with good looks and considerably more intelligence than blands are “supposed” to possess, which make it stand out in a situation where standing out is not an asset.  Fate takes Tedla through this unjust culture’s darkest passages, but its story is less one of an individual versus society as it is one of someone at war with itself.  Despite cruel treatment and every inclination to be a proper bland, Tedla achieves the utmost importance in universal affairs — not only to the Gammadian establishment, who want to quiet her story and send a message to the bland underclass, but to the greedy, opportunistic information companies of Capella Two, who want to benefit from her unique insight as a bridge between cultures.

Halfway Human is compelling science fiction on just about every level.  It succeeds spectacularly in its world-building, first of all.  Gammadis is a rich, fascinating, thoroughly developed world, with much more depth and degree than my villainous “evil society” thumbnail gives it credit for.  The tri-gendered society is confidently rendered, and I can’t think of a more convincing depiction of life under a tyrannical, unjust system…that isn’t a historical novel, that is.  Even as Gammadis is center stage, Capella Two — the more Earthlike world — is given real character for its highly regulated information economy.  And it’s through Capella Two that the novel succeeds — again, spectacularly — as metaphor.  The concept of “blandness” in the book extends beyond gender difference to a broader examination of a the human condition, in any society where power is commodified and concentrated.  The book is full of interesting gender politics, but to me, thematically, it’s class politics that are even more strongly realized.

Finally, the novel succeeds wonderfully on the storytelling level.  For all the thought-provoking material — political, sexual, social, science fictional — it’s the storytelling that may be the most impressive to me.  Gilman juggles multiple tracks and timelines with sure-handed authority, and while the history-mining backstory of Tedla’s life journey clearly dominates, the urgent present crisis of Val trying to help Tedla is just as compelling.  Often science fiction makes narrative sacrifices for the sake of its ideas — clunky infodumps, sloggy exposition as reading protocols are established — but this book, while no less rich for it, benefits from smooth, engaging prose that tells the story well.

Be warned, this is dark, dark stuff on many levels, and perhaps not for the faint of heart.  But I found it inspiring, and full of wisdom, and the payoff in its final moments is well worth it.  This is the best SF novel I’ve read in a very long time.

I went into The Prisoner (1967-1968) with the understanding that it’s  one of those TV shows anyone interested in the medium and its history should know about.  It certainly lived up to that expectation, but not at all in the way I expected.  It’s much, much weirder!

The show stars Patrick McGoohan as “Number Six,” and it’s considered an unofficial sequel to his conventional spy series Danger Man. Number Six resigns from the intelligence world, only to be abducted and imprisoned in The Village, an odd seaside town filled with political prisoners, each represented only by a number.  It quickly becomes clear that escape is impossible, and The Village’s leadership — represented by Number Two, who changes each episode — is determined to wring every last ounce of useful information out of its citizens.  Compliance and conformity are rewarded, and resistance is punished.  Nobody resists quite like Number Six, who engages in battles of wits with his captors on a weekly basis, sometimes losing, sometimes emerging victorious.

The series lasted just seventeen episodes, and it’s easy to see why it wasn’t extended further:  the premise is somewhat limiting, at least on the surface level.  Episodes tend to follow two tracks:  Six attempting to escape, or The Village attempting a new interrogation method on him.   The escape episodes quickly grow repetitive, in rather a Gilligan’s Island manner, while the interrogation episodes — generally more interesting — are just as destined to return the story to its comfortable, episodic starting point.  So the overall shape of each episode is generally predictable, but even so, The Prisoner manages to be wildly inventive within its format, combining spy tropes with outrageous science fiction concepts, political metaphor, and disturbingly weird humor.  It quickly becomes clear that the journey is the destination, here, and looking at the show as a broad, experimental allegory is the way to go — with the major theme being its examination of the individual’s struggle to maintain identity in a cruelly homogenizing state.  This lends the show a kind of creepy power, even in weaker episodes that lack satisfying plot structure.  Intriguing turns of phrase and thought-provoking exchanges of dialogue are common throughout the run.

The Prisoner also has the odd distinction of managing to be dated and ahead of its time simultaneously.  In many ways an obviously time-stamped product of the sixties, the show is also groundbreaking in its techniques, the scope of its ambition, and in its “anything goes” approach to executing wild ideas.  The insane fashions of The Village give the show an unmistakeable, colorful look, as does the unique architecture of the town (which apparently inspired the series).  And the filmmaking, while sometimes budget-conscious, is often quite visually striking.  (Take, for example, “Many Happy Returns,” a frustrating episode structurally that contains some really impressive visual story-telling, particularly in its first half.)  The music is alternately playful and creepy.  And some of the ideas…I mean,  escaping prisoners are chased down by bouncing, sentient balloons…and in one episode I swear I saw a drumset being played by a statue of a sheep!  Television shows this bizarre simply didn’t exist back then; even today it seems decades ahead of its time in terms of genre content, a mindset that would lead ultimately to shows like The X-Files and Twin Peaks.

The enigmatic McGoohan carries the proceedings with equal parts smug charm and righteous fury, all with an inscrutable expression on his face, and his struggles are fascinating to watch.  And the series grows increasingly more experimental and fearless as it goes along.  The early, conventional spy “false journey” strategy of “The Chimes of Big Ben” leads next to a show where The Village masters leverage dream-controlling technology in their interrogation of Six.  Then there’s “The Schizoid Man,” wherein Six is programmed to think he is actually someone else entirely, whose job it is to break Number Six — one of the highlights of the series for me.  But things really get odd in the later stages.  The bizarre western-themed “Living in Harmony,” a somewhat tedious episode, nearly redeems itself with an odd PKD-like resolution.  The gem of the series is probably “The Girl Who Was Death,” a surprisingly playful interpretation of the series premise, while the final two episodes of the series, “Once Upon a Time” and “Fallout,” provide a mind-blowingly strange wrap-up to the series.

All this said, The Prisoner might not resonate much with modern viewers — certainly it needs to be examined in historical context (both world history and TV history) to be fully appreciated.  I think I may have liked the idea of it more than the reality.  But I’m definitely glad I watched it; I really don’t think there’s anything else quite like it, which is an accomplishment in itself.

My first impression of Cory Doctorow’s novel Makers (2009), as I read its early pages, was that he’d written “Boing-Boing, the novel”:  a near-future science fiction tale filled with passion for weird, interesting, fun stuff.   But for all that its physical world feels like it’s modeled on the internet, it quickly becomes clear that there’s much more to Makers than sheer, geeky inventiveness.

Makers kicks off when two dinosaur corporations – Kodak and Duracell – merge under the leadership of a visionary businessman named Landon Kettlewell.  Rather than continue the slowly dying business of making film and batteries, the rebranded “Kodacell” goes in an excitingly weird new direction:  leveraging its vast corporate resources and infrastructure toward the financing of small teams of intelligent, creative people to produce, well, whatever they want to produce.  Kettlewell entices a sharp tech industry reporter, Suzanne Church, to get in on the ground floor of this high concept gamble, sending her to cover the efforts of Kodacell’s flagship creative team,  Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks, who’ve set up shop in a Hollywood, Florida ghost mall.  It’s an outpost of inventive tinkering in the commercial ruins of old school, decaying capitalism, and exciting things soon start happening:   Suzanne’s exhaustive, persuasive coverage helps sell the charismatic duo’s ingenius inventions – and the Kodacell business model – to the world, leading to a movement called “New Work,” and an unexpected economic surge.

Things don’t stay rosy forever, though, as this found family – which grows and morphs and changes throughout, as relationships evolve under new stresses and strains – navigates the treacherously shifting world of Doctorow’s future.  It’s a future where biotech conquers obesity, creating a bizarre new caste of pleasure-wallowing “fatkins;” where endlessly inventive reality-hackers turn the detritus of American “super-abundance” into fascinating kludges of recycled, useful knick-knackery; where down-and-out homeless drifters spin together magical shantytowns; and where new fabbing technologies look to transform the very nature of how people live.  It is, in other words, highly inventive, totally futurismic fiction, real wheelhouse stuff for me.

I can’t say I enjoyed every minute of this novel; after the initial, thrilling rush of the rise of New Work in the early stages, the novel snagged for me later when it shifted focus to Perry and Lester’s near-accidental creation of a network of nostalgic, New Work-related rides in abandoned superstores.   Here, Doctorow’s unabashed enthusiasm for theme parks and Disney seemed to get the better of him…for a while.   But as the battle between Perry and Lester’s network and a villainous Disney executive continued, the novel gradually won me back, and not just with its eyeball kicks and nifty futurismic gadgetry.   Doctorow also ventures into areas most science fiction ignores – the economy, the business world, law, and journalism, to name a few.  He examines these broad topics with the same inventive eye most SF writers reserve mainly for science and tech, and it makes the scenario all the richer.  His enthusiasm for the material can sometimes be exhausting, and I’m not always sure I’m buying what he’s selling – despite well drawn conflict, the odd disaster, and some truly deplorable villains, there’s an underlying optimism to the mindset of this fictional world that I sometimes find hard to swallow.  (Curse my jaded eye!)  But I have to admire the boundless, brainstormy energy of it all.  The next question is always asked, sometimes even before the previous one has been answered, and that feels like life to me – there’s something really authentic there.

Another thing I loved about Makers was its fearlessness regarding change.  For all that they’re supposed to be forward-looking and engaged by the future, science fiction people don’t always seem that interested in or comfortable with change.  Doctorow does not have that problem.  Makers is all about change, the inevitability of it, and the need for people to learn to adapt to it.  The characters here – all of them strongly drawn and distinctive, I might add – confront change constantly, facing tough decisions that often pit them against their own pasts and predispositions.  This is SF that challenges people to think about how systems work…and how to balance the need for progress against the draw of nostalgia…and how to look at old ways, current ways, and new ways, and when to change track.  This stuff is important, and I wish SF did more of it.

On the whole, then, a pretty damn good SF novel.   For me it started out like gangbusters, lost focus and slowed down for a bit, sped back up, changed gears and directions a bunch of times, and ended with a profound and effective final note that brought the whole, grand mess of it together.   Really good stuff.

One of the perils of writing near-future SF is that, by setting your sights so close to the present, you risk trapping your work there.  Bruce Sterling, one of the field’s foremost futurists, has never been afraid to take this risk; in fact, I suspect he embraces it, which is why his science fiction always feels so immediate and relevant.  His stories riff off the real world, something I wish science fiction would do more often.

It comes as no surprise, then, that his collection Globalhead (1992) very much feels like a product of its time — but not at all in a bad way.   Featuring thirteen stories published between 1985 and 1992, the collection features near-future SF, contemporary fantasy, historical fantasy, alternate history, and “non-SF” — stories that feel science fictional without necessarily being science fictional.  Regardless of subgenre, Sterling’s stories here (like his newer work) tend to explore the real world through an SFnal lens.  The world of these stories, though, is colored by its era, so the stories tend to fall under the shadow of the Cold War, the American-Russian geopolitical divide, the tail end of the Reagan regime, and the early, early days of the internet and personal computing explosions.  It’s tempting at times to accuse the work of feeling dated, then, but more often it merely feels ahead of its time; this is the “futurismic fiction” of its day, fearless and forward-thinking, but still in communication with the modern reality from which it was conjured.

I have to admit, I don’t always exactly get Sterling, and the stories here — which are very idea-driven, sometimes at the expense of narrative — occasionally flew right over my head.  I found “The Compassionate, the Digital,” a weird Islamic political screed involving AI, and “The Gulf Wars,” a densely written time-bending fantasy (?) about two Middle Eastern soldiers, to be politically interesting but somewhat impenetrable.  They do represent rare examples of SF of this time period wrestling with Middle Eastern concerns; not particularly satisfying stories, but Sterling was definitely ahead of the curve identifying the next important area of focus for the US in the wake of the USSR’s decline.  A more satisfying read in this arena, and perhaps even more prescient, is “We See Things Differently,” a near-future tale of culture shock as an Arab reporter from a powerful Islamic Caliphate visits Florida to interview a politically active rock star in the wake of the US’s decline as a superpower.

The two collaborations on display in this volume are also products of their era, and consistent with the collection’s global themes.  “Storming the Cosmos” (written with Rudy Rucker) is a chaotic, energetic secret history that mines the lore of the Russian space program and a certain famous Siberian mystery, a breezy, entertaining tale that has the feel of a “hot typewriter” collaboration.  And “The Moral Bullet” (with John Kessel) has a post-apocalyptic feel familiar from the time, detailing a future wherein life extension pharmaceuticals have wreaked worldwide havoc; a standoff develops between responsible European missionaries and a greedy bandit kingdom that’s come into power in the fragmented, anarchic new US.  It’s a bit unsubtle politically, perhaps, but an inventive and nicely realized scenario.  Both collaborations are satisfying reads.

The solo SF feels more unmitigated, though.  Take, for example, “Our Neural Chernobyl,” written in the form of a book review that looks back at the spread of an intelligence-enhancing plague.  It’s the near-future treated as a deeper future’s past, containing more ideas in ten quick pages than some SF novels.  In “The Unthinkable,” US and Russian political counterparts contemplate the changing world landscape — an interesting mix of Cold war politics and surprising genre content.  There’s also “The Shores of Bohemia,” a transformed far future where a weird European enclave of retro-humans resists the world’s inevitable change; the intrigue here is in gradually unlocking the secrets of the world outside its walls.

Three stories fall into what I think of as the “non-SF” category.  “Jim and Irene” could in fact be more traditionally classified for its fantasy elements — but the mindset is so SFnal, I’m tempted to call it “futurismic fantasy.”  Whatever it is, it’s one of my favorite stories in the volume, an engaging and heartfelt road fantasy about an unlikely relationship between an off-the-grid thief and a Russian émigré, which reads now like an early 1990’s period piece, looking at its now through a futuristic filter.  Less satisfying as story, but jam-packed with ideas and humor, are the volume’s two Leggy Starlitz tales, “Hollywood Kremlin” and “Are You For 86?”  Starlitz (also the star of Sterling’s 2000 “non-SF” novel Zeitgeist) is kind of a quirky international scam artist with a skill for evading the authorities and rolling with every weird geopolitical punch.  The more interesting of the two is “Hollywood Kremlin,” where Starlitz debuts as a cog in the black market machine of decaying Russian influence in Azerbaijan, but “Are You For 86?” is good edgy fun too, transplanting Starlitz to the U.S., where he and his bisexual girlfriends run afoul of right-to-lifers as part of an abortion-drug smuggling ring.

I’ve saved my favorites for last.  “The Sword of Damacles” is a wickedly funny deconstruction of a famous Greek myth about the perils of political power, subversive postmodern metafiction that most writers would never have gotten away with.  And “Dori Bangs,” like “Jim and Irene,” is a kind-hearted and kinda beautiful alternate history, mashing together the lives of two somewhat obscure underground pop culture figures in an unconventional and touching love story, ending the collection on a perfect note.

Globalhead is a challenging and at times difficult collection, perhaps more for Sterling enthusiasts than casual SF readers, but I found it an interesting and rewarding read.

World War II is a subject tailor-made for alternate history speculation. The conflict was just so vast, so complex, and so chaotic; the possibilities for divergent events and radically different outcomes are just countless.  I have to admit, I find the subject fascinating, but oddly I haven’t read much fiction in this vein, and little of it satisfying.

My only previous encounter with Harry Turtledove’s alternate history work at novel length is Days of Infamy (2004), which speculated on a different Pearl Harbor; what if the Japanese had followed up their airstrike with a land invasion?  I didn’t much care for the book, which felt sloppily written and overlong, and didn’t stretch itself much beyond its narrow theater of focus, little investigating the consequences of its changed scenario.  And irritatingly, without advertising itself as such, it was the first book of a two-book series, so it didn’t even resolve.  I was more than happy to leave that timeline firmly in the past.

But I’ve been in a “second chance” frame of mind lately, and allowed Turtledove’s latest to find its way onto my shelf.  Hitler’s War (2009) has a considerably more interesting and ambitious premise:  what if the British and French had drawn their line in the sand earlier than they did in our reality?  In this timeline, Chamberlain and Daladier refuse to cede Czechoslavkia’s Sudetenland to Hitler at Munich, thus kicking off the hot war in Europe one year earlier.  Through the eyes of a massive cast of soldiers and civilians from most of the major combatant nations — Germany, England, France, Russia, Czechoslavkia, and more — the book spins out an alternate sequence of events.  This is no small feat, for it isn’t simply a matter of subjecting the Czechs to the intial blitzkrieg rather than the Poles.  It forces into consideration a plethora of altered circumstances:  the Spanish Civil War is still raging, here with a more committed Fascist ally, General Sanjurjo, in command; the shocking nonaggression pact between Russia and Germany hasn’t come to pass; and Japan’s military ambitions are still directed toward the Asian continent rather than south into the Pacific, among other things.  In light of all this, will a stingy Czech foe, defending tougher, better-fortified territory than the hapless, sandwiched Poles did in our timeline, significantly change the course of history?

The answer, as I read it, is an unsatisfying “yes and no.”  The situations above are all major factors in the novel’s timeline, and when addressed, they make for interesting historical thought experiments.  Turtledove also does a good job detailing how one year less of military-industrial build-up and technological advancement, on both sides of the conflict, might have affected the course of events.

Unfortunately, the novel spends less time on its genre conceits and its broader geopolitical situations than it does on painstakingly, and quite repetitively, reconstructing – with a certain amount of realism, perhaps – the day-to-day lives of the people subjected to this war’s perils.  Largely, this means it focuses on the  precarious lives of the soldiers on the ground, in the air, and at sea.  There is also some small focus on the plight of a Jewish family in Germany, and a stranded American tourist who winds up in Berlin.  But ultimately it focuses so closely on these day-to-day details – the horrors of war, the paranoia of living in a Fascist police state or Stalin’s Russia, the helplessness of being a Jew under the Nazis, the banalities of soldierly life – that it’s hard to see the speculative wood for the historical trees.  Most of these sentence-level details differ only minutely from a depiction of the real conflict that might occur in a non-genre historical novel.  Which isn’t to say Turtledove doesn’t know his stuff.  But since I know his stuff, too – a lot of it, anyway — I felt like I wasn’t being shown anything.

This wouldn’t have bothered me so much if all these individual stories had been interesting and engaging, but unfortunately that isn’t the case.  The characters are thinly developed, basically conduits through which to view the period, at the mercy of their orders, their police, or their bad luck.  They all have the same motivation – get through the war.  And while there are some minor traits differentiating them, they’re all cut from generally the same cloth, and ultimately pretty forgettable.  Their world is interesting, but sadly, they just aren’t.

Also, be forewarned, since again the packaging fails to do so:  this is the beginning of a series.  I was rather expecting it this time, and in light of the vastness of the undertaking it didn’t surprise me.  I’m not saying the future volumes might not realize some of the intriguing possibilities of the scenario – the broader historical story of the book, once parsed from the tedious narrative, is still pretty interesting – but I doubt I will be discovering that firsthand.  For me,  Hitler’s War succeeds only as a thought experiment, but it’s not a very entertaining novel.