rom British editor, anthologist and writer Peter Crowther comes the third volume in his Foursight anthology series. Each book in this annual showcase features a novella apiece from four acclaimed British writers. Prior volumes have included work by such diverse talents as Graham Joyce, Paul McCauley and Ian McDonald, and overall quality has been high.
This time out, Crowther brings us novellas from a quartet of writers in the early stages of their careers: Eric Brown, author of the novel New York Nights and winner of the 2001 British Science Fiction Award for the short story "The Children of Winter"; Ken MacLeod, author of the novel The Cassini Division; Alastair Reynolds, whose novel Chasm City won the 2001 Best Novel BSFA; and Adam Roberts, author of the novel On.
In "A Writer's Life," Eric Brown presents a literary mystery that blends comfortable middle-class realism with portentous gothic atmospherics and conventional horror and SF tropes. Daniel Ellis, a British writer whose novels are less successful than the TV novelizations he churns out to pay the rent, becomes obsessed with the work of Vaughan Edwards, an obscure writer who vanished some years before. Although discouraged by his partner, Mina, a realist who resents and fears his imaginative enthusiasms, Ellis plunges into his obsession, sneaking into Edwards' abandoned home. What he finds there puts more than just his relationship with Mina at risk, forcing him into a harrowing choice between exalted artistic ambitions and something less grand yet perhaps more real.
Ken McLeod's "The Human Front" is a mix of utopian politics and gritty adventure set on an alternate Earth in which the United States and its allies—including some who are not of this world—use atomic weapons against the U.S.S.R. after World War II, thus triggering World War III. Our narrator, John Matheson, is a young Scot whose doubts about the Western cause lead him to enlist in an underground resistance movement called the Human Front. Taken prisoner, John discovers the shocking truth behind the Americans' mysterious allies ... a truth that will change everything he believes about the world and his place in it.
"Diamond Dogs," by Alastair Reynolds, harkens back to Algis Budrys' 1960 masterpiece, Rogue Moon, in its evocation of a mysterious artifact that challenges all who enter its labyrinthine interior to a game of Jeopardy in which wrong answers result in the loss of body parts and/or death. Reynolds explores the boundaries of the human and post-human in this gleefully sadistic, blood-drenched, far-future tale of misfit gameplayers who progressively reconfigure their diminishing bodies as they advance through the innards of an alien Vegomatic.
Finally, Adam Roberts' "Park Polar" grafts a murder mystery onto a tale of corporate greed and human need set in an overpopulated, ecologically devastated near future where the arctic has been turned into a preserve for genetically altered animals—such as lions and kangaroos—whose natural habitats have been co-opted or destroyed. Like Reynolds, Roberts throws a group of misfits into a blender and switches it on "high," then steps back and lets the blood and guts fly.
England swings ... and unfortunately misses
Judith Merril's famously influential 1968 anthology, England Swings SF, made a convincing case that British writers constituted the cutting edge of the contemporary speculative-fiction scene. The jacket copy of Infinities makes the same claim, calling the anthology "proof positive that British SF deserves its pre-eminent place in the genre." That's a heavy burden to place on four novellas, and it's one this quartet cannot sustain. With the exception of "Diamond Dogs," these are competently executed but largely uninspired stories. They prove only that even the most talented writers and editors have their off days.
In his introduction, Crowther writes that all four contributors are "'playing' with the genre's—perhaps even ALL genres'—conventions and giving them fresh air and new life." Certainly, the first half of this assertion is true. Each novella is steeped in convention. The resulting fiction, however, is for the most part merely conventional.
"A Writer's Life" is the least successful and most conventional novella of the lot. Brown's earnest mishmash of gothic, horror and SF is clumsy and predictable. Mina and Ellis seem to have wandered out of a bad mainstream relationship novel, the mystery of Edwards' disappearance is resolved with the stalest of genre cliches, and the story's saccharine conclusion rings emotionally false. A little irony would have gone a long way here.
"The Human Front" sets up a series of expectations in its characters and readers alike that are then successively exploded. McLeod fleshes out his alternate world nicely, but the firecracker chain of conceptual breakthroughs at the end comes across as jury-rigged. Endings of this sort should transform our understanding of everything that has gone before. Here, once the fireworks are over, nothing has really changed, and the momentum of the story is exhausted; it limps along for a few final expository paragraphs in anticlimactic conclusion. Yet McLeod's idea is a good one, set up with skill and subtlety; this is one novella that might work better as a novel.
Not just another future song, "Diamond Dogs" is the leader of this pack. Cleverly composed and deftly executed, with entertainingly eccentric characters struggling for survival in an increasingly over-the-top situation, "Diamond Dogs" will have readers on the edge of their seats one minute, laughing out loud the next and squirming with disgust the one after that. The personalities of Reynolds' characters and their interrelationships are believable and integral to the working out of a plot that is almost as convoluted as the interior of the alien artifact known as the Spire. Only near the end, in introducing a diabolus ex machina that all-too-conveniently smooths the way to a predetermined conclusion, does Reynolds misstep, but this slip, though regrettable, is a quibble in what is otherwise a fun, thoughtful and (like its model) surprisingly poignant piece of fiction.
In "Park Polar," the killing machine is nature ... or, rather, nature as engineered by human beings. Roberts is more successful at evoking the harsh arctic landscape, with its genetically crafted carnivores, than the equally harsh and deadly corporate landscape in which his nerdy scientists play out dramas of thwarted and twisted ambition, jealousy and desire that lead to violent bloodshed. Given the echo of Jurassic Park in Roberts' title, perhaps it's not surprising that his characters seem to have stepped onto the page from the screen of a Hollywood blockbuster; they are that flat. As with "A Writer's Life," a conventional genre appropriation that cries out for irony is treated with earnest respect. The result is similarly disappointing.
