SF corner

I've just finished reading Paul McAuley's Gardens of the Sun. It's science fiction. No! Come back! It's a mix of hard SF (i.e. heavily oriented towards science), space opera and politics, which suits me perfectly. Good science fiction does one thing well: it explores the connotations and consequences of our current conditions through extension and supposition. It is always about us, now, though often disguised as space adventures, the future, or whatever.


Gardens of the Sun is part of the wave which explores the political possibilities of astronomy, environmentalism and climate change, genetic modification, of human modification (including extreme longevity), and of the very shallow commitment to democracy currently present in most of the world. It's a bit like Ken MacLeod's work: committedly left-libertarian (not me, I'm left-authoritarian, as you'll discover when I'm in charge and you're out in the fields picking my organic lettuces).

Now I'm on to Tom Holland's Millennium, an exploration of the rather interesting tenth century in Europe. The opening chapters are bold and provocative, though I'm deeply unimpressed by Holland's maps. He can't resist stamping 'England' across Wales, despite Wales being a patchwork of independent states at this point, united (and divided) by blood ties and a shared language. Ignoramus.

Today in history

Pepys (1633) and Handel born today. Keats (1821) shuffled off his mortal coil (that's a Hamlet reference, kids). 

I read Paul McAuley's The Quiet War yesterday. It's good, solid space opera, in that it debates all the problems facing us (environmental destruction, the ossification of democracies into oligopolies, genetic engineering) by sticking them into a near-ish future and playing with the possibilities. McAuley is part of the hard-sf genre, also known as 'mundane SF' - scientific realism and a pretty downbeat assessment of our chances.

If you look down on SF, you're missing a genre which deliberately tackles all our social, scientific, philosophical and moral problems head on. Perhaps you're lumping fantasy in with it - and that's bad.