Imagine turning over the paper in your Pub Philosophy exam, and seeing the following question:

1. A fundamentalist government may well use severe punishments such as beheading. However, future medical progress may make such punishments less terminal. Discuss.

'Land of the Headless' is Adam Robert's answer. It's also a nice novel following a rather foolish, impetuous man who has his head cut off and then has to deal with becoming part of an underclass in a rather stilted fundamentalist society, but who eventually finds love, escapes, and lives happily ever after. As ever with Mr Roberts, you kind of get the feeling that the plot is almost incidental; but what it lacks in drive, it makes up for in sheer wonder. The characters are typical Roberts creations - stupid, stiff-necked, misunderstood creatures whose paths through life is complicated by their own mistakes, they are all the more human for their so-obvious failings... and that delicious central premise, that beheading is no longer a final judgement but leaves behind a rather embarrassing human residue, is a nice satirical comment on the current rise of fundamentalism in our Age of Technology. I enjoyed it enormously.

All in all, Land of the Headless is not the B-movie gorefest it's title might suggest (sorry Tara), but what they call a 'high-concept' novel - presumably because the plot has been kicked out to leave more room to explore ideas. Another novel which I've been wading through recently also claimed to be 'challenging literary concepts', but Hal Duncan's Vellum is at the other end of the scale. Frankly, I wish I'd paid more attention to that phase about literary concepts when I'd read the blurb on the back, as it might have set some alarm bells ringing. Hal wants his story to transcend time (And maybe space, too); his protagonists are archetypes, replaying the same story in different worlds at different times. Done well - as a series of short stories, perhaps, in a Michael Moorcock style - this could have been an interesting concept. As it is, however, it makes for a choppy read. The scene/story changes happen so quickly it's tiring; flipping between ancient Sumer/twenty first century Bible Belt/the trenches of the Somme/deserted beach hut on the brink of the Apocalypse every paragraph gets dull quickly, and most of the backdrops felt like cliches. That's not to say there aren't some nice set-pieces; but they're not enough. What's worse, the plot doesn't make a great deal of sense - presumably it will be explained in the sequel, but really, I won't be bothering. It was hard enough slogging through the first volume.

I've been thinking about NaNoWriMo again.

I was planning to focus on the story of the first colony on Titan, that I alluded to in Government Joe Must Die - the disastrous settlement which collapsed and resulted in the Howl which haunts the Saturn system in GJMD, and which gave rise to Government Joe itself. But I decided that there probably wasn't enough material there to let me reach the magic 50k word count. So I've been thinking about the other real character from my first NaNo novel: the Bantolith.

The Bantolith in GJMD doesn't talk. He manipulates people like automata, and anyone within the boundaries of his domain can never be sure if their actions are the result of free will or the Bantolith's machinations - so subtle are the AI's directives that it's impossible to tell the two apart. But why does it operate so obliquely? How did it come to be so silent, so unknown?

I'm thinking that the two stories - the birth of Government Joe and the creation of the Bantolith - are maybe not so far apart. Perhaps they were both created by similar events - failing colonies which demanded drastic action. And while Government Joe was created by a terrible act of treachery, the Bantolith's silence might have been some sort of self-sacrifice - a last-ditch attempt to save an ailing colony by assuming near-direct control of the people within it.

So what we have then is an interesting contrast. Two failing colonies, a few decades apart: one damned by the treachery of an out-and-out baddie, the other saved by an unselfish act of deliberate self-mutilation.

Geoff Ryman is an interesting author; his books are often both deeply sentimental and full of hard-science innovation at the same time. The first book of his I read was The Child Garden, and it pulled at my heartstrings so powerfully that I was both exhiliarated and slightly scared when I saw Air on the shelves. It certainly comes highly recommended though - it won the James Tiptree Jr (no, I don't know either), Arthur C Clarke and Sunburst awards, and was shortlisted for the Nebula. That's not bad.

I'm older now, and I'm rather better at seeing the emotional manipulation coming, but Ryman is still a very powerful author. The story of Air is set in a tiny village in the nation of Karzistan, an utterly poverty-stricken backwater that has basically missed out on the entire internet revolution, and now must prepare itself for the next big informational transformation, when information will free itself from wires and computers and become ubiquitous. Most of Chung Mae's fellow villagers assume this will be like a TV in their heads, where they can watch football and soap operas while they go about their daily lives. When they test the system, however, Chung Mae gets a terrifying view into what might actually be in store for all of them, and struggles to educate her fellow villagers, even as her own personal life starts to unravel...

If that sounds unprepossessing as a story line, then don't worry, there's plenty going on - but this isn't one of those future history books documenting the Great Events of the Future. This is about one woman, one village, living on the brink of change and trying to come to terms with it. It's a great and simple story, with charming characters who became deeply important to me as the tale progressed. Ryman seems to belong to a similar school of thought to authors like Adam Roberts and Charles Stross, who see technology as not necessarily good or evil, but a profoundly powerful agent of change in our attempts to live, to understand the world, and to work out how to be human.

Following on from ogling the pretty pictures of sf architecture, here's an article on how the sequel to the famous anime movie Ghost in the Shell has actual Nissan concept cars in it. Clearly there's a lot of mutual admiration going on here, and as anime becomes more internationally popular maybe ID can tag along for the ride. What an interesting celebrity subculture that would be: I look forward to the day when Hello! magazine has their first animator/industrial designer special issue.

'Bob's loft-style apartment in central Detroit is a testament to the new too-busy-to-even-do-grunge aesthetic. Functional, neo-modernist strip lighting provides a brightly lit interior, and the floors have the interestingly crunchy texture of blue-foam shavings... everywhere the perfume of freshly-cut MDF floats in the air...

Meanwhile, is it me or does this concept car look very much like a stretched Mini?

Back in November, when I was writing Government Joe must Die, one of the parts which caused me most frustration was the little episode on the Bantolith. I wanted the Bantolith to not speak, yet still run his little domain with perfect ease, using nonverbal cues to communicate his orders and wishes to the people on the station. The descriptions I used left me deeply unsatisfied - his communications, by opening doors, shining lifts, discouragingly cold blasts of air, seemed very crude. But I couldn't quite put my finger on why, or how I could do it better. Tonight I was suddenly struck with why this was such a difficult problem. I wanted the Bantolith to manoeuvre people by non-verbal methods, by misdirection and subliminal cues, by appealing to them at a basically subconscious level. That's a difficult thing to write about in a book, especially when you favour dialogue over description. Essentially what you're writing is, almost by definition, of the conscious rather than the subconscious. I wanted the Bantolith to use the sort of tricks that that guy Derren Brown used on TV, the sort of pseudo-magic which we don't even notice, where cues are fed to us in the background, only to impel us at some later point, in what appears to be a free-willed action. That's a tricky thing to write about - how do you talk about the was the Bantolith operates, when the cues happen a long way back from the actions, and they're things you probably - no, not probably, absolutely definitely - did not notice in the first place? They are fundamentally disjointed. That's really gonna screw up your narrative.

I guess the only way to cope is by post-hoc explanation, but I really, really hate doing that.

I'm starting to understand, too, how much potential richness there could be in that little caricature of a universe I dreamt up. Titan in particular could easily have a gothic richness to it - ancient, powerful, immensely wealthy, the fat spider loitering at the edges of the web of Saturnine moons. There's a lot of potential there for digging into some rich seams of history, as well as money and power. And the cold, closed asceticism of the Triumvirates, rich in their own way but always overshadowed by the golden disc of Titan. The Triumvirates could be very interesting, socially. Socio-politically.

The Garden of Martyrs could more accurately be called a cloister, rather than a garden - barely more than a wide, curved walkway, overlooked by the tourists' glassed-in route through the palace, it is one of the emperor's least favourite places. He gives the statues an ill-favoured glance as he strides through.
"You know there weren't even any real martyrs, don't you."
"Majesty." The Chancellor's response is minimal, hoping to cut off the emperor's usual rant before it can start. Above them, the wall of martyrs stands unheeding. Each figure is nine feet tall; their bronze chests are out-thrust, their chiselled features and business suits rendered in bold, planar slabs, in a style which in a previous era would have been more suited to Hollywood cartoons or Soviet propaganda. The arrows sticking out from their chests form a formidable fence, jutting up and out over the two mens' heads.

It's not often that I know the exact date when a book will be published in paperback, but with Accelerando, I had a good excuse. I'd bought it already. And had it SNATCHED FROM ME at Geneva AIRPORT, after I'd spent an entertaining hour on a plane, chortling over how good the first three chapters were.

So when I finally got my hands on another copy, it had a lot to live up to. This is Charles Stross' third novel; Singularity Sky was a fantastic debut, with one of the most entertaining and novel descriptions of space warfare ever (as well as all sorts of other weirdness). Iron Sunrise, his second, was spoiled a little for me because it seemed to threaten to become a cheesy series. But this is Accelerando, and it's fantastic, just amazingly brilliant. It pushed pretty much all my buttons - it had bafflingly incomprehensible aliens, barely comprehensible technology, dialogue snappier than the West Wing on speed, and a sarcastic cat. What more could anyone want?

Stross' ambition only becomes clear as the story unfolds - nothing less than a family saga and history of humanity, a bastard lovechild of Catherine Cookson and Brian Aldiss. Part of that little group of exciting Scottish sf writers, whose ranks include Iain Banks and Ken McLeod, Stross' style is sharp and snappy, and I absolutely adore his descriptions of technology going far too fast for people to follow.

I do think his characters would benefit from a bit more depth, though - perhaps some of the inexplicability applied to the aliens and the AI might have been better applied to the people - and to be honest I found the ending something of an anti-climax; it's hard to chronicle such a vast span and still end on something more dramatic, without it becoming a cliffhanger. So I forgive him for ending with a lack of 'bang'. But there's plenty of 'gosh-wow' moments here, and I can heartily recommend it for anyone who likes to lose themselves in a fast-moving, fast-talking vision of a World Gone Mad.

First off, let's be clear - Adam Roberts writes high-concept sf, so most of you can go back to you daily lives now - sorry! In the past, he's written about a universe where it was possible to fly to the moon in a biplane, and a world where gravity operates at ninety degrees... Gradisil is a story of do-it-yourself homesteaders living in tin cans in Low Earth Orbit, struggling to remain free of the bickering nations of the Earth beneath them. His style is meditative, with sparse dialogue (no scriptwriters in these people's lives). His characters are deeply flawed, and very human. His scientific conceits are sometimes pretty far-out and sometimes fascinatingly practical, but I think there's a deeper level where the relationship between his characters and their surroundings rings true. And I love it.

What's sad is that Adam will always be a niche author, because he embodies all the qualities which people assume science fiction doesn't have - fully developed characters, human-centred bittersweet stories, a deliciously innovative literary style - while still building his stories around crazy scientific and technological ideas. The best comparison I can make is with Stanislaw Lem, who died a few weeks back (very sad) - some of you might have come across 'Solaris'. If you haven't... it's the sort of style you might get if Kafka and Solzhenitsyn ganged up on Isaac Asimov, stole his wallet and headed for Vegas. That's my best attempt.

What makes Adam stand apart for me, though, is his characters. They're not the emotionless, super-rational cardboard cutouts that often crop up in the genre. They are always deeply human: they're emotional and passionate, often giving to uttering non-sequiturs, or doing stupid things and not regretting them until much later. They're making their way as best they can, in a world where baffling, unfair, Kafka-esque things happen to them. And the worlds in which they live are both the same as ours, but different - physically, they might be completely different (flying to the moon in a biplane?), but on a human level, they're still populated by people making selfish, stupid, emotional, deeply familiar decisions.

I don't know how Adam approaches his work; I've never read any interviews, or seen anything about him. But one theme I see coming out of his books is the idea of our relationship with technology being difficult, almost abusive - technology mindlessly making things more complicated while we struggle to live our lives in a way we can still understand. It's not about consumerism, or corporate evil. It's not about any sort of conscious will at all. It's just about how we get ourselves into a mess, and then have to live with it. And whereas with most books things can be neatly squared away at the end, Adam's stories never seem to fit into our neat, shrink-wrapped preconceptions. That, for me, is his greatest skill and his great triumph.

I'm still only halfway through reading this. I know the ending will be sad, or at best bittersweet - that's Adam's style. But it'll be great: I am utterly, totally confident that he won't let me down. Two things I am sure of; I'll be ambushed by weirdness a few more times before the end of the book; and I will feel these characters for every moment of it. I can't wait