The Camel's Tail by Tom Jolly and me as a younger reader

  One of the favourite stories Doug and I read as part of our science fiction reading project was "The Camel's Tail" by Tom Jolly, which appeared in the March/April 2018 issue of Analog. I think I can safely say it reminded us of some of the first science fiction we read but updated for today. 

The year is 2076, and Garaad Gullet is applying for a job as a spaceship pilot with the family firm that runs the Faraax-Qamaan Launch Site in Southern Sudan. The area around the site is home to both traditional herdsmen, solar arrays and air to water converters. The launch site contains several solar system runabouts, including a Tesla-Space X Explorer and a Ford Chariot. Once in the office, Gullet meets Axmed Qamaan, who will conduct the interview. The business is family-owned; they run the launch site, a livestock operation and own the older Ford Chariot. Gullet learns that Halima, the young woman he mistook for the secretary, is Qamaan's daughter and an astrobiologist. The previous pilot, behaved inappropriately and is no longer with the company. Gullet asks if he was fired, but Qamaan states that he killed him and ground up the body.  Gullet takes this in stride and gets the job.

A few years later, Gullet and Halima are married. They have made several successful flights, and things seem to be going well. Then they learn that a cousin has absconded with the family's funds. Gullet offers to use his savings for one last flight. Their ship the Sabamisa is one of three registered Somalian near-space explorers. The solar system is dominated by ships belonging to governments or large corporations. While alien tech is the holy grail, smaller operations search the debris field resulting from asteroid mining for minerals or recover extremophilic bacteria from the trojan clusters. Then word comes of an unknown object moving towards the sun, and the race is on.

Overall I enjoyed this story. It seems up to date. Gullet and Halima sign a prenuptial agreement before the wedding because the family is worried about his student debt. They use implants, data chips, and an AI to operate in space.  Jolly has also updated the concepts of the economy of commercial space exploration. Discoveries are often data rather than physical objects. The data can be patented, funds transferred, mergers and joint ventures between corporate entities negotiated and announced while the ships are still in space. There appears to be an element of potential criminality within the space exploitation business. Jolly mentions that Somalis are treated with care because some of their ancestors were pirates, and Gullet uses this to his advantage at one point. (I did find this a problematic and wonder if Jolly could have handled this aspect of the story differently.) 

Analog included Jolly's profile, which indicated that his mother worked as an aerospace engineer through the 1950-70s on satellite programs, and his father was a machinist. Tom grew up reading science fiction and also became an aerospace engineer. In the profile, he says, "I had a very science fiction type of life." 

I was weaned on this type of story. From Heinlein's The Rolling Stones, Andre Norton's The Solar Queen stories, Larry Niven's Tales of Known Space and Arthur Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, I ate this type of story up. It would have been hard to write a story that appealed to me more. There are Martian colonists, Belters, and space elevators for goodness sake. It is the kind of the hard science fiction that people wrote when we just knew humankind would soon move out into the solar system and that anything was possible. I also enjoyed (spoiler alert) that the situation is resolved without violence. It did remind me of the first science fiction I read in public school. Even though I was reading those books in the mid-1960's, they tended to have been written ten or even twenty years earlier. The Russians and the Americans were in a red hot space race during this period, but that was not the model I read about. Space flight was the purview of intrepid "boy" geniuses, somewhat absent-minded scientists that never noticed the stowaways, (but had enough oxygen, food and fuel for everyone), families and business tycoons. Then for a long time, space flight was the business of governments; the bigger, the better. Jolly's story made me wonder if that is going to change. 

New Arrivals, Philip K. Dick and Ian Miller

I am cheating here the only recent arrival is Dick's Galactic Pot-Healer. I got The Art of Ian Miller, Titan Books, a couple of months ago. I have had A Maze of Death for years. But it's a theme. I love Ian Miller's covers. I have to say I would have liked to have seen more of the work he did for the paperback editions of Bradbury and Lovecraft in The Art of Ian Miller, but I understand that was only one aspect of his career. I love Dick and have a weakness for the many cover iterations the various paperback editions of his work have undergone. I also have to confess to enjoying his less-heralded early work Ace Double warts and all. The unsubscriber has lovely photos of some of Miller's wraparound covers, as well as a post on Philip K. Dick's paperbacks that I can recommend. I have been posting more on my HPL blog lately but I will try to pick up the pace here. I hope everyone is doing well. Guy

https://unsubscribedblog.wordpress.com/2014/11/18/wraparound-cover-1/

https://unsubscribedblog.wordpress.com/2014/08/06/off-the-shelf-1-philip-k-dick/

New arrivals, Stanislaw Lem

“Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.” 

from Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

Even though we are home most of the time, I have not posted a great deal. We have been doing some gardening, but I think my lifelong devotion too sloth is probably an even more significant factor. I have had some new arrivals, but most are additions to my weird tale and horror collections. That said, I am pleased to share what must be the most cheerful cover I have in my science fiction collection. I want to look at Stanislaw Lem's work, and I could not resist this edition. I love robots. The cover is by Robert Dale; according to the ISFDB, this is his only science fiction cover. That is unfortunate I would have loved to see what he might have done with Simak's Project Pope or Dick's Clans of the Alphane Moons. 

New Arrivals Soviet SF and a Badger Book

 Some years ago my wife and I visited London. A visit to the Barbican Estate was on our list. We have long been interested it this complex as an example of British brutalist architecture. It is on my list of cool places to live should I ever win (really really big) on the lottery. We had just missed the exhibit Into the Unknown A journey Through Science Fiction, but I bought the catalogue.

The first two illustrations below come from this catalogue.

I have just received Soviet Space Graphics, Cosmic Visions from the USSR  by Alexandra Sankova from a local bookstore and I knew Into The Unknown discussed the topic as well in the chapter, "Space Odysseys, Visions of the Cosmos in Soviet Science Fiction" by Alyona Sokolnikova. So I wanted to look at both essays as well as the illustrations. Soviet Space Graphics is a great book. The introductory essay is only about five pages long but the book is lavishly illustrated, some 267 in total. The reproductions are a bit matte but they allow one to get a real overview of the different styles that were employed over the years. 

One thing that struck me immediately was the similarities between these illustrations and those found in the science fiction pulp magazines of this period. They were also quite reminiscent to the more futuristic covers of general technical magazines like Popular Mechanics. 

https://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.com/2017/08/new-arrivals-sequel-popular-mechanics.html

In discussing the new Soviet era periodicals Sokolnikova notes "A significant number of these publications focused their attention on the exploration of Earth, its subterranean and oceanic depths, as well as the endless mysteries of outer space-each of the frontiers representing the promise of a bright, new Communist future." (8) 

These were not, at least initially, fiction magazines intended for entertainment. Sokolnikova tells us that, "In 1934, the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers was held. At this event, the genre of science fiction was defined exclusively as ' literature for young people' which was required to focus on readers' scientific and technical education in the spirit of social realism. Ideas about human flight were criticized as being too remote from everyday needs, and even utopian. Hence a more pragmatics genre of the science fiction essay, devoid of literary plot, evolved 5." (55) what a buzz kill, it sounds a bit like John Campbell's essays/diatribes in Analog education not fun. Sokolnikova notes that in the late 1960's the work of the Strugatsky's among others spurred the growth of a softer less technical or adventure oriented science fiction from the Soviet Union. 

And for something completely different, or is it? Maybe it's just a different vision of the future? I became interested in Badger books after following the unsubscribedblog's Badger Book on Sunday, posts. Now whenever I see one at an almost reasonable price, especially with the kind of garish covers I love I cannot resist. This cover is by Eddie Jones. Is it just me or is our hero standing in an old style a beer glass surrounded by equipment purloined from a hair salon. Now that is science!

https://unsubscribedblog.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/a-badger-book-on-sunday-with-the-reverend-r-l-fanthorpe-chapter-24/

Murderbot Diaries by Martha Well, plus a couple of new arrivals

Before I discuss Martha Well's Murderbot Diaries I wanted to share the covers of two books I received today. Cheesy as some may find it I love Laumer's A Plague of Demons, I also love this cover by Carlos Ochagavia. Really, does it get better than demon dogs trying to maybe gnaw on human brains encased in robots.

My discussion of A Plague of Demons appears here;
https://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.com/2015/09/a-plague-of-demons-keith-laumer.html

Joachim Boaz discussed “Testament” a short story by Vincent King here:

https://sciencefictionruminations.com/2017/03/14/book-review-new-writings-in-sf-9-ed-john-carnell-1972-harrison-coney-sellings-king-et-al/

I noticed the bookseller that had A Plague of Demons also had Light a Last Candle by King, with a pretty cool cover by Robert Foster. The discussions on Good Reads sounded intriguing if a bit mixed so the four armed diaper guy joined my collection.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3879759-light-a-last-candle

And now to Murderbot

I  really enjoyed The Murderbot Diaries. Murderbot is a fun character. Murderbot's various adventures take place across a a number of locations within the Corporate Rim. Most of the citizens we meet, we do not meet many, are people working in space in an economy geared to exploiting existing worlds or exploring for new resources at least within the planets and space stations where most of the action takes place. The society in the Rim is dystopian with many citizens indentured or leased to corporations, criminals or the mega-wealthy. The story feeds us enough detail that we can envision the societies and culture overall without becoming so dense that we bog down in back story and infodumps. Instead, the details are inserted into the narrative, emerging as needed without appearing forced or slowing down the action. These are action stories with a very good pace. They are also novella length which as means they are quick reads

Wells understands the human condition and offers a vision of how bleak the society she has extrapolated is for many people, via the experiences of Murderbot a security unit assigned to a mapped expedition on an unexplored planet. SecUnits are a merger of machine and cloned human parts created for tasks too challenging to be handled by even augmented humans or smart machines.  "When constructs were first developed, they were originally supposed to have a pre-sentient level of intelligence, like the dumber variety of bot, but you can't put something as dumb as a hauler bot in charge of security." (Artificial Condition) This would require human supervisors and slow down the unit's reaction time, among other things.  Therefore constructs have some freedom of choice but only within the limitations set by their programming and governor module. 

Wells, through Murderbot can find some humour or at least irony in rather dire situations, something I am increasingly challenged to do. Indeed Murderbot views the interactions of the humans with resignation, cynicism, paranoia and occasionally humour. Murderbot does come across as jaded, disengaged and very world weary. Also interactions with humans on a personal level are unwelcome and quite stressful. Indeed the first paragraph of All Systems Red provides a valuable insight in Murderbot's dilemma.

“I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don't know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.” (All System Red)


One thing that Wells did that works for me in this series is avoiding some of the standard science fiction terms for artificial life or machine intelligence.  The term bot is used extensively for machines that operate independently often prefixed by the function; examples include bot-driven transports, cargo bots, hauler bots etc.

We have augmented humans, but no cyborgs, Miki in Rogue Protocol is usually described as a human-form bot, although the word robot is used a couple of times generally as a derogatory term. ART, the research transport vessel in Artificial Condition, is described as a bot, although it has the characteristics of what would be called an AI in many science novels. I found this freeing; I did not immediately feel I knew the attributes or roles of these characters based on the term. Instead, I learned how they fit into the range of artificial life forms by their actions within the storyline.

I am becoming increasingly interested in depictions of mechanical life, artificial intelligence, robots, drones and all the other manifestations of artificially created sentient beings. So this series was something I quite enjoyed. Indeed I read All Systems Red and hesitated to read the other books for fear I would not enjoy them as much. But when Tor made the series available for download for free, I could not resist. So I will say now I loved the entire series and am awaiting the next addition to Murderbot's story, which I will buy immediately. The setting and action reminded me a bit of C.J. Cherryh's Allliance-Union books, which is never a bad thing.