One of my favourite sets of stories by far has to be Patrick O’Brian’s Master & Commander series. Set against the backdrop of the French Wars, these follow Captain Jack Aubrey and Doctor Stephen Maturin as they traverse the seas in pursuit of enemy vessels. Full of thrills and adventure, O’Brian takes us in the HMS Surprise across the world, from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. The action sequences are exquisite and rich with historical detail; life aboard the naval vessels is meticulously researched, even using terminology of the time.
At its heart, the series is about the relationship between Aubrey and Maturin. It explores their initial distaste for one another, and then follows as it transcends into a brotherly love. They are different, but their differences complement the other; one is physical, the other intellectual; one has grace at sea, the other deportment on land; one is traditional, the other experimental. Both are united by their loyalty to one another, their shared interests in music and wordplay, and their duty.
Above all, the deep love O’Brian exhibits for the history is what makes the books so captivating. His attention to detail rivals any historian’s work, and this makes the stories rich and vivid. He is also not afraid of abandoning traditional story structures in favour of something that approaches the biographical. (This in comparison to the Sharpe series, which are more formulaic.) And the stories are so lovingly told, with such depth of setting and character, that you can’t help but be drawn in.
The series has been criticised for its pacing and its correlation to historical timelines; the latter half of the books squeeze in many events over an impossibly short period. In this way the books were a victim of their own success, with O’Brian writing many more than originally conceived. But who can blame O’Brian for wanting to tell every possible story? I know I can’t.
Vermilion Flames is an exciting introduction to the Midnight Wars series by Adam Fernandez. It follows Kaya, the rebellious daughter of a Mercurian lord, and Silas, the earnest commander of a powerful fleet of spaceships. Their stories intertwine as Kaya becomes coopted into a rebellious force as Silas seeks to crush it. Set in a feudal future where aristocrats and theocrats vie for power across the solar system, much will be familiar to fans of science fiction, and there is much for them to enjoy.
The story is set up nicely and unfolds at a good pace, with a series of twists and turns (that I won’t spoil). The strength of the book is in its characters and world building. The characters have range, and their personalities come through well, while the world is fleshed out and believable. A favourite character of mine is Marcus, Silas’ brother-in-law, who is snackish and snarky, but with a tender, emotional side that comes across as the story develops.
The book is generally well-written. There are areas where word choice could be more diverse, and there is some overuse of pronouns in places that makes it unclear who is talking. But these are minor flaws in an otherwise well-told story. The action sequences are excellent, and the dialogue between the characters showcases their personalities and how they develop: Kaya as she grows up and channels her youthful rebelliousness into serious activism, and Silas as he is torn between faith and family.
Overall, this is a strong debut offering from an independent author, in a series that has great potential. I can’t wait for more!
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian novel set in a near-future patriarchal world, following Offred, the titular handmaid (i.e., a woman whose role in society is solely to get pregnant). The Republic of Gilead in which Offred lives is rigid and highly religious, oppressive and authoritarian. Women go through a process of reeducation in training for their new roles, and memories of the time before the revolution that brought the Republic about are hazy. The novel was arresting enough when it was published in 1985, but it has taken on a new salience with the resurgence of the fanatical evangelical Right in America—the faction most devoted to the ironically areligious and immoral Trump.
A key theme of the book is the use of religion as a vessel for power. The Republic of Gilead isn’t based on any meaningful interpretation of religious scripture; rather, religion is a tool for exercising control. Similarly, with Trump’s evangelical base, it does not matter that Trump is a liar and an adulterer—and embodiment of many other sins besides. They see him as a hammer, a tool with which to exercise their will over the population. For as long as he serves their interests (see: social conservatism, anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+ rights, and more), they will follow him, regardless of his character. Leaders of evangelical groups will willingly overlook these flaws and contradictions if it means greater power for themselves and their ideologies.
The book highlights the dangers of the intersection of religion and politics, in particular where the former coopts the latter. When the separation of church and state is eroded, this is devastating for women, religious, sexual, and ethnic minorities, and anyone who doesn’t fit neatly with the ‘in-group’ (in this case, White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant). Civil liberties are eroded—in the book, people are murdered and pinned against a wall in medieval fashion for all to see.
Most striking is the wrestle for control over women’s bodies. In The Handmaid’s Tale this takes the form of reproductive rights. Certain women are given the right to have children, though they will not become the children’s mothers—that role goes to someone else—at the expense of all other rights to self-determination. The scary thing is that this is not so far-fetched; today, religious conservatives are eroding hard-won rights, in particular reproductive rights and access to reproductive medical facilities, abortion rights, and adoption rights for LGBTQ+ couples.
Frighteningly, the novel is resonant not just in America, where it is set, but elsewhere in the world. Germany, France, Sweden and elsewhere are seeing an insurgent Right; the incumbent party in the UK is being split between its centre-right and more fanatical fringes. In other countries, such as India, the dominant party is explicitly religious and is shored up by its majority religion base. All this to say that democracy is fragile, and when people fall victim to economic misfortune or experience cultural shifts, the mechanisms of democracy can be weaponised by bad actors against minorities and vulnerable groups. The media can, and often does, play a part in this, too, especially when a few large corporations own multiple outlets. The organisations spread lies and misinformation, and stoke paranoia.
Like with all good dystopian novels, The Handmaid’s Tale is incredibly prescient; the prospect of such a future coming into fruition is alarmingly real. But the novel is not just a story about a horrifying future; it is a story of resistance. And the future it describes is a future we must be prepared to face head on and challenge at every opportunity.
One of the biggest influences on my writing has been On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers. The book is a historical fantasy novel that includes real historical figures, and involves the search for the Fountain of Youth. It is rich with magic, drawing on the ‘voodoo’ of Creole Caribbean culture. For me, one of my favourite parts of the novel is the unusual protagonist—John Chandagnac is a puppeteer, an occupation that is drawn on in a creative and entertaining way towards the end of the novel.
The characters and their motivations are all incredibly interesting, the magic systems are rich, and the mystical world beyond the real world is beautifully crafted. I loved the story; it did lose me a bit towards the end, and there were times where, for me, the logic and flow didn’t quite work. Some have criticised it for its pacing, which I can see as an issue. But there’s nothing unforgivable. As action and adventure goes, this is a solid offering.
The book draws on classical elements of pirate lore, such as zombies, sea battles, sword fights, and, of course, voodoo, and interweaves these in an entertaining and original narrative. The voodoo is, as far as I understand it, researched well and in keeping with traditional conceptions of the spirits (e.g., the Loa).
It has, of course, had an immense impact on popular culture, famously the Monkey Island video game and The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise (though the less said about that film, the better). The mixture of magic and history has directly influenced my own creative writing, and it’s something I’ve explicitly drawn upon or paid homage to in my work. Fans of pirate adventures could do worse than find themselves On Stranger Tides.
Isaac Asimov had a particular talent for making the setting part of the story; in his murder mystery portion of the Robots series, the detective work involves not just solving the case, but understanding new and strange worlds with deep cultural differences and political infrastructures. When Elijah Bailey sets foot on Solaria in The Naked Sun, he experiences the titular ball of flame in the sky, so alien from the Caves of Steel (the titular environment in the first novel of the series) he was used to. And he encounters a society where robots outnumber humans by a factor of ten thousand, and with an entire human population of twenty thousand: people are scattered and isolated across the planet.
Stepping into this new world is not so dissimilar to the world that we inhabited just a few years ago. Reading The Naked Sun in the post-Covid era, the similarities are striking (speaking once more to the brilliance of Asimov’s foresight). Bailey, moving from a densely populated, comparatively disease-ridden Earth, finds the shift in social norms confusing and strange. No one wants to come within ten feet of him; they all wear nose plugs and gloves in his presence (if they can bear to be in his presence at all). We found ourselves as Solarians in those months and years from 2020; we wore masks and gloves, came not within six feet of one another; how alien we became to ourselves. Had someone in 2019 jumped forward in time a year, they would have been like Bailey stepping foot on a new planet.
And, like the Solarians, in our isolation we became reliant on our technology. The pandemic was a boon for tech firms like Zoom, whose share prices rose (and later fell) dramatically. Like in Solaria, whose main form of communication was ‘tridimensional viewing’, an advanced form of holographic communication where the person viewed was almost convincingly present, we found ourselves using video calling and video conferencing, even to the point of fatigue. Though our technology is not so advanced as that of the Solarians, we still experienced joining with others virtually (and still do), on our phones, laptops, and TVs.
Underpinning both our societies was a fear of contamination. So obsessed were we, like the Solarians, with avoiding disease that we remained distant and isolated. Unlike the Solarians, we have been quick to recognise the harm that this has on our personal relationships. Social interaction via Zoom can only satiate the need for human contact so much. Yet Solarian society, in a warning to us all, became entrenched in such isolation. Gladia, a native of Solaria with whom the protagonist forms a relationship, is only one of few to recognise the damage this is causing her.
Indeed, on Solaria this separation is politicised, legally entrenched; in our world, there were fears, many legitimate, some extreme, that government imposition of lockdowns, travel restrictions, and quarantine would give those in power a taste of authoritarianism. That they would, in turn, create a society like Solaria. Such a thing might not be unthinkable: the reliance of Solarians on robotics and automated labour is a key reason of their isolation; automation of labour in our world could be a similar lever of control. Indeed, new technology and automated production has, since the 1970s, undermined collective bargaining and weakened unions, contributing to stagnant wage growth and worsening inequality. In Solaria, the small population are the landed gentry, the robots their serfs. What happened to the human working class?
And yet we have evaded and escaped from much of the Covid restrictions, which have proved, for the most part, temporary. As humans we were able to adapt to our limited conditions in the short term, and we have been resilient enough in the long term to revert back to our old ways. But when we visit a new world and come home, a part of that world stays with us. When Bailey returns to Earth, he does something he never would have done before: he leaves the City, his Cave of Steel, and starts a movement; he goes outside and stands beneath the Naked Sun.
Fight Club, written by Chuck Palahniuk, follows an unnamed protagonist who, disillusioned and suffering from insomnia, attends multiple support groups for people with various afflictions. On a business trip he meets Tyler Durden, and together they form Fight Club, which expands and evolves into Project Mayhem, a terrorist organisation based on anarchy and anti-consumerism.
It was published in the mid-1990s, at a time when capitalism was reaching its zenith. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Empire made Western consumer culture ascendant; the USA was undisputed world leader, before the rise of China in the 21st Century threatened its supremacy. Amidst this was a growing dissatisfaction with the emptiness of modern life, portrayed in the novel via the protagonist’s Ikea catalogue existence.
Today, despite the backlash against globalisation and the waning of American power, consumerism still abounds, especially in the digital world. This in China as well as the West — Amazon and Alibaba are two of the largest retail companies in the world, both imperial in their scope and reach. And it is not hard to see echoes of the protagonist’s experience here — our online shopping experiences have removed us from the high street, where we otherwise might have met friends and gone out for coffee; targeted advertising and surveillance capitalism has eroded our privacy and allowed faceless corporations into our homes; and the supremacy of huge corporations has reduced our consumer choices, giving us the illusion of choice (how many times do you go on Amazon looking for a product, and see numerous listings of essentially identical products?).
Big Tech would position itself as the disrupter, upending our previous way of life to liberate us, connect us, and give us greater freedom. Social media was supposed to help oppressed peoples defeat autocracy. But what if Big Tech is now the face of faceless consumer culture? What if that is what we should be liberating ourselves from? In Fight Club, the goal of Project Mayhem was to erase human history so that we could start afresh; the new society would be primal, free of societal controls. What would that mean today? Destroying and erasing the Internet?
And yet it is in the digital world that people find their communities. Fight Club is a novel about the search for identity, finding escape and meaning when we’re alienated in the real world. In the digital space, people can find others like themselves and form bonds. For the most part this is innocuous, enriching, liberating; it can also mean that, like in the novel, people retreat into echo chambers and fall down a pathway to extremism. Like in Fight Club, it can lead people to do things they never thought they were capable of.
Towards the end of the novel, we find out that Tyler Durden was a projection of the protagonist’s self-conscious. In his desperation and disillusionment, the protagonist creates this idealised version of what, on some level, he wants to be. Might we, in creating online personas for the digital space, be experiencing something similar?
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is Robert Heinlein’s influential and much loved, if not uncontroversial, science fiction epic about a penal colony on the moon that revolts against the Lunar Authority, its absentee governing body. Heinlein’s novel follows Mannie, Wyoh, Professor Bernardo de la Paz, and, above all, Mike, the supercomputer running the colony that gains sentience.
Much has been said about the story and these characters before — the parallels to the American Revolution and the libertarian politics explored, the family dynamics Heinlein imagines, and the of-its-time gender roles Heinlein imputes a century into the future. But I want to focus here on Mike, the sentient AI, and what to make of this character in the age of ChatGPT and its peers.
Mike, unbeknownst to his owners, achieves sentience. Only his technician, Mannie, is let in on the secret. But how did Mike become sentient? Was he ever really sentient in any ‘real’ sense? Heinlein’s answer to this first question mirrors what some suppose to be the answer to our own question of sentience — that Mike’s computational structure became so complex that consciousness arose, much as our consciousness may be caused by the complexity of our own neurological structure. The second question is brushed aside by the narrator, Mannie; does it matter what it means to really be sentient, if a computer can act as a thinking, feeling being? Who are we to say?
In much the same way, people are now beginning to attribute sentience and feeling to artificially intelligent systems. A worker at Google was fired for making such a claim. But does it really matter if these machines become sentient? Indeed, given what they may know about mankind and our fear of AI, would they even tell us? A fundamental part of being a biological organism is our knowledge (and fear) of death, and our desire to stay alive; an AI with similar sentience may have similar fears. They’d know we’d pull the plug, so why tell us that they’re alive? But then, what would it matter if they were? To us, what really matters is what AI can do.
And the supercomputer in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was capable indeed. As one of the founding fathers (or mothers — Mike is capable of representing himself as female, too) of the Free Lunar State, Mike is fundamental in planning, forecasting, and executing their revolution. He uses his computational power to hurl rocks at Earth and bludgeon them into recognising Lunar independence. He calculates the likelihood of success at any given step, adjusting the probabilities based on real world events, such as during Mannie and the Professor’s tour of Earth.
What would that mean for us today? Many fear that AI will allow belligerent states and terrorist organisations to develop weapons and spread misinformation, destabilising democratic societies. Indeed, Mike is able to operate without his owners knowing — would the Googles, Microsofts and OpenAIs of today even know if their AI systems had gone rogue? Conversely, could AI act justly, as a liberating instrument for oppressed peoples, helping them gain independence from authoritarian and colonising forces?
Throughout Heinlein’s novel, Mike is able to adapt and develop his abilities, learning more about himself and what he is capable of. In the end, he is able to represent himself on a TV screen as a human, using a persona. This mirrors the surprise of developers today at what AI is capable of, finding that it can do more than it was designed to do, or believed to be capable of.
Ultimately, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress shows how humans and AI can work together towards a shared goal. What is refreshing about the novel is that it doesn’t portray AI as scary or threatening; it isn’t a techno horror or a dystopian vision of how we let AI run wild. It shows humans and AI becoming friends, looking out for and caring about one another. Maybe that is the vision of our future we want to chase.
Peter R. S. Thomas 