Book Ramble: Then Will the Great Ocean Wash Deep Above

At this stage it's becoming apparent what we can expect from an Ian Sales Apollo Quartet novella: alternate histories of the Apollo space program, lovely yet minimalist design, meticulously researched, detail-laden hard science and superficially straightforward narratives with subtle twists, sometimes so subtle you can only understand them by reading the extra-textual material.  Which is something else they all have in common, thinking about it: appendices and plenty of them, though Then Will the Great Ocean Wash Deep Above (oh, and long, wacky titles!) is relatively light in that department, with the actual narrative taking up a relatively whopping sixty percent of the page count.

So three books in and it's safe to say that there are clear patterns emerging.  However if the similarities are what justify the Apollo Quartet being an actual thing, as opposed to four books with just an author and a design ethos in common, it's the differences that are starting to become more interesting at this point.

I said in my review of The Eye With Which the Universe Beholds Itself that I found it slightly disappointing after the brilliant and BSFA award-winning Adrift on the Sea of Rains.  It's indicative of how good Then Will the Great Ocean Wash Deep Above is that I now want to go back and reread it to see if I was wrong.  (I suspect I was.)  Like I said, if the similarities are what superficially grab you - and let's face it, there's something intrinsically fascinating about that alternate-history Apollo program concept - it's the fact that within the rules he's set himself Sales is crafting stories with such individually rich identities that's proving most rewarding in the long term.

All of which is to say that, despite feeling very much of a piece with parts one and two of the Quartet, Then Will the Great Ocean Wash Deep Above is not much like them at all.  For a start, at least half and probably a little more of it is set not outside Earth's atmosphere but beneath the ocean, as Lieutenant Commander John McIntyre and his two man crew venture in the tiny Trieste II bathyscaphe to recover what it soon becomes apparent is a downed spy satellite.  It's not particularly a criticism to say that this is the less interesting of TWtGOWDA's two plots, for while there are some genuine faults - it feels a touch padded, there are only so many times you can use the word 'abyssal' before it starts to stand out - its greatest flaw is simply that it's an intriguing story set beside a superb one.

For plot two follows the Mercury 13, America's all female astronaut team, as they play desperate catch-up with the Russians, with the ultimate goal of putting the first woman on the moon.  You remember how that happened, right?  No, of course you don't, because that's not at all the way it went down.  But perhaps it should have been, for there really was a Mercury 13, and their history - covered by Sales in a brief nonfiction epilogue - is every bit as fascinating as the fiction.

Which is to say, a lot.  Because the Mercury 13 subplot is deeply engaging stuff, and for that matter entirely novel-worthy.  The greatest frustration in Then Will the Great Ocean Wash Deep Above, in fact, is that of the two plot lines it ends first - and really, that it ends at all, since I could happily have read another three hundred pages.  At any rate, it's thrilling stuff, and absolutely the best kind of feminist fiction writing, in that it makes little surface effort to convince while steadily constructing an argument of just how brazenly ignorant and absurd it is that these woman should not be given exactly the same opportunities as their male counterparts.  It doesn't proselytize, it merely shows, but it shows really well.

Like I said, the McIntyre plot pales a little by comparison, though it more than pays off by the end, when it finally interlocks with its counterpart narrative.  There are also some odd design decisions; I would really have liked a clearer distinction between the fiction and non-fiction sections, though I wonder if the lack of one wasn't deliberate.  I'll be hearing the word 'abyssal' in my nightmares.  I sort of missed have a glossary, even though one wasn't particularly required, certainly not the way it was with books one and two.  And with that, I have no more nits to pick.

Looking back, I realise I was fence-sitting a little on the Apollo Quartet.  It was hard to guess if it would be a thing of greatness or just a great novella and three unrelated sequels.  Well, I'm not fence-sitting anymore.  With Then Will the Great Ocean Wash Deep Above, I have no doubt that this series is going to be masterpiece, even if Sales's forthcoming All That Outer Space Allows turns out to be seventy pages of astronaut-related fart gags.  I have a feeling it won't be; I suspect it's going to be brilliant.  But even if it isn't, I'm damn sure it's going to interesting.

Eastercon 2013

This year's Eastercon had a lot to live up to.

Last year's was possibly the best of the conventions I've been to, with a comfy, modern venue and something not far off the perfect balance between entertainment, edutainment and providing a suitable venue in which to drink too much with friends and complete strangers.  Not to mention George R R Martin chillin' in the bar, the Iron Throne sitting in the lobby and, oh yeah, the fact that I met my partner Jobeda there.

No idea who these two are.

Meanwhile, Eastercon 2013 (henceforward, EightSquared) was set for a major weekend anyway, what with it coinciding with the deadline for me handing in Prince Thief - and with two novels plus a chapbook behind me, it felt like it might just be my first 'Con as something other than a newbie author.

With all that baggage, it shouldn't be taken as too much of a criticism to say that EightSquared was good rather than great.  In fact, given that it was organized in half the time of last year's, it's actually a fairly large compliment.  The only things that really let it down were the venue, (nice enough, but sorely in need of a larger bar space and some food that hadn't been brought in from the local school canteen) and a lack in the sort of ambition that's needed to shake up the UK Con template and drag in bigger, wider crowds.

Which isn't to say there was no ambition on display; only that, where it was most noticeable, it seemed to have gone into getting the nuts and bolts stuff right.  The Eightsquared committee made no bones about their commitment to gender parity and from what I saw they pulled it off, thereby setting the example that everyone else will be expected to follow.  I was also pleased to see a serious attempt to cut down on the staggering paper wastage that tends to go on at these things, (and hey, I say this as someone whose book would have been a freebie if they hadn't wisely steered away from that whole big bag o' books thing.)

"TWO AND TWO MAKES FIVE"

As far as content went, most of what I made it to ranged from solid to excellent, and the events that I was in on all seemed to be well received.  Of my two panels, the one of superhero movies got a bit bogged down in fandom nitpicking (as such subjects will) while the one on older female characters in Fantasy and why there are so few of them, which I'd worried might be under-attended due to an early slot on the day the clocks sprang forward, turned out to a real success; I felt that by the end we'd made some good, important points.  For sheer fun, though, my favourite commitment of the weekend was the Graphic Novels Selection I did on the Friday night with Stephen Aryan, C E Murphy and Alys Sterling, wherein we basically rattled on about some of our favourite comics to a small but obviously enthusiastic audience.  I was definitely heading towards sloshedness by that point, and there are few more enjoyable things that prattling on tipsily about things you love to a group of people who seem genuinely interested.

Who would be fool enough to give Ian Sales a raygun?

As usual, though, the choicest pleasures of the weekend were to be found in the bar.  It was great to catch up with some old friends, to get to know people I've only met in passing before, and to meet a whole load of people who will hopefully become friends down the line.  One thing that Eastercon gets right more than any other Con - and I have no clue how they do this, something in the water maybe? - is that everyone is amazingly friendly, cheerful and eager to get into an in-depth conversation at even the slightest opportunity.

Oh, and speaking of friends, let's close with a huge well done to Ian Sales, whose novella Adrift on the Sea of Rains - which I heaped praise upon a few weeks ago - picked up the BSFA award for Best Short Fiction.  The full results can be found here.

A Review: Adrift on the Sea of Rains

A few months ago, I misguidedly promised Ian Sales that I'd read his (rather beautifully, it must be said) self-published novella Adrift on the Sea of Rains and that if I enjoyed it I'd say something nice about it in public.  I figured I could get away with reading a page or two, dismissing it and then quietly forgetting about the whole thing, having at least been nice enough to splash out on a copy.

Now, maybe I should have guessed from the fact that so many big name authors have expressed their admiration for Adrift - see, for example, Lavie Tidhar's gushing praise here - that my scheme was flawed.  Probably I'd just assumed Ian had preyed upon the basic weakness of every writer and plied them with free booze.  Needless to say, I wasn't banking on Adrift on the Sea of Rains turning out to be one of my favourite reads of the year.

But it was, and a month on from reading it, with nothing else pressing to talk about, it still is ... so I guess it's time I said something nice.

I won't spoil too much of the story, since Adrift unfolds in such a delicate and careful fashion, in such neatly unfolding layers, that you're better coming to it with minimal foreknowledge.  Our cast are a crew of astronauts - or lunanauts? - trapped in an impossible situation by a cruel yet very plausible twist of geopolitical fate, and then offered a tiny sliver of hope and an ever-diminishing window in which to take advantage of it.  How they go about doing so, along with a parallel back-story that steadily fills in the gaps of why things went so wrong in the first place, is the meat of Ian's tale.  Try and imagine something akin to Clarke's A Fall of Moondust had it been written with some of Gene Wolfe's elusiveness and you'll have a fair idea of what to expect.

I know Ian's proud of the hard science aspects of Adrift, and justifiably so; he's brought a physicality and a richness of detail to his tale that's terrifically hard to get right without falling into nitpicking, and without sacrificing the all-important sense of awe that a story like this needs.  But what makes it that bit more fun (and for something so determined to be scientifically rigorous, Adrift is a whole hell of a lot of fun) is how all that rich scientific realism is coupled to such a basically preposterous plot; that Ian takes his believable characters and their believable setting and hurls them at a concept that include Nazi mad science, inter-dimensional travel and cold war paranoia at its most extreme.

It's preposterous, it has no right to work, and yet it does, with remarkable elegance.  It achieves everything a good story needs to and does all of it well, which is greater praise that it might seem on the surface.  And unless you're a certified expert on the US space program, it will probably even teach you stuff - not to mention igniting your interest to know more, so that you can begin to separate out Ian's carefully woven web of fact and fiction.  In short, it's small wonder of modern science-fiction and, if that sounds at like your thing, you really should go buy a copy.