Situation comedies are tricky things and often the struggle to establish themselves in their first season as writers, audiences and performers come to terms with the format, relationships and voice of the show. Some sitcoms spring perfectly formed from their creators’ brains – Fawlty Towers, The Office, The Thick of It – but others struggle to be born before hitting their full stride – Blackadder, Only Fools and Horses, Men Behaving Badly.

So the fact that the first season of No Heroics stands up pretty well to a second viewing is a considerable success.

The show’s premise is straightforward. Superheroes are real and perhaps not quite as super as the comics would have us believe. In the opening sequence Timebomb uses his power (to see sixty seconds into the future) to get a jump on his fellow commuters while The Hotness uses his powers to heat up his microwave meal while sitting in front of the television.

No Heroics focuses on the lives of four minor heroes.

The Hotness/Alex (played, obviously, by Nicholas Burns) is more than a little hopeless. His limited heat powers are best utilised heating old people’s homes in the winter, but his ego keeps writing cheques his limited abilities can’t cash. Alex’s nemesis is not a villain but Excelsior/Devlin (played with fantastic smugness by Patrick Baladi) who is Britain’s greatest superhero and a playground bully and all-round dickhead who gets his greatest pleasures in highlighting Alex’s shortcomings.

Electroclash/Sarah (Claire Keelan) can control machines but she refuses to be a hero – in one quite shocking moment she stands by and allows a shopkeeper get shot by a robber because he won’t give her free cigarettes – rebelling against her parents (who are superhero royalty). She’s The Hotness’s ex-girlfriend and their bickering/flirting is the foundation for much of the comedy.

She-Force/Jenny (Rebekah Staton) is “the third strongest woman in the world” and was formally in a super team (Lady Trouble, fnarr!) with Electroclash. Sarah is the only one with a real alter-ego as an ordinary office worker. She is also needy and desperate to find “Mr Right” – leading her to leap on any advance from men, no matter how ill-advised.

Timebomb/Don (James Lance) is a creation of genius. His only power is to see 60 seconds into the future but Timebomb is the perfect piss-take of the modern “dark” superhero (post Millar’s Dark Knight). He wears black leather, he’s gay and wildly promiscuous, he’s a drug addict, he’s a mercenary and he specialises in the cruellest of tortures. He also gets most of the best one-liners and despite being very much the fourth character in group, James Lance frequently steals the scenes with a languidly convincing performance.

Most of the action takes place in The Fortress – a superhero pub with a sign proclaiming: “No Masks, No Powers, No Heroics” defended by Thundermonkey (whose inspired power is to be able to summon a troop of battle-hardened monkeys: “They’ll be here in a couple of hours…”)

The plots of the early episodes tick all the expected boxes. Alex has a hopeless night with a cape-chaser, geeky fans get a bashing when Lady Trouble get back together to meet their fanclub, Alex’s attempts to prove he’s dangerous go badly wrong on a night out with Don and he ends up getting a kicking from a group of strippers, Jenny proves too needy even for a locked-up and desperate super-villain.

The first four episodes are good. They all have unexpected dark moments – Electroclash/Sarah and the shopkeeper, Don’s quick blowjob in the pub toilet, Sarah’s ASBO sidekick – and some good jokes. But it’s the last two that are the most interesting.

Episode five introduces Sarah’s parents as she attempts to annoy them as much as possible by pretending to be back with Alex. But the most interesting part of this episode is the insight into Jenny’s alter-ego and her almost pathetic willingness to put up with the jokes and jibes her colleagues make about superheroes. In her new job she falls for a jokey colleague, but almost at once he reveals he’s a member of a “cape-hater” group and begins a stream of anti-cape jokes, which Jenny sits through and even agrees to go on a cape-hater march with him only to be forced to reveal herself when there is an accident at work. This episode also features Don’s predictably hopeless attempts to deal with his violent streak by visiting a therapy group.

Episode six sees the death of Thundermonkey. A row with Sarah saw Thundermonkey attempt to prove himself against a real supervillain – an attempt that ended badly for him and for all his monkeys. There’s a great wake (where Jenny finds a new role for herself), but Don’s the star of this episode as he is dragged out of retirement to interrogate hapless supervillain Doomball so the heroes can extract their revenge on Thundermonkey’s killer. Meanwhile The Hotness has the chance to step up to the big-leagues with an audition for an elite American superhero team – and he’s willing to do just about anything to get it…

Given that the nearest thing to this that British TV has produced in the past is the entirely dire My Hero, No Heroics is almost unbelievably good. There will be those who find the show’s tendency to fairly crude sexual jokes too harsh for their tastes, but the dark thread that runs throughout the series gives the whole thing a pleasant sharpness. There’s lots of neat jokes for the nerds amongst us (the bar serves everything from Green Lamp Ale to Gin City) but the really encouraging thing about No Heroics is that it gets better as the season progresses and we get more familiar with these characters and their world. That suggests that writer Drewe Pearce might be capable of taking this premise to even higher levels.

He won’t be doing it in America. ABC made a pilot with Freddy Prinze Jnr and then decided to pass – not surprising, really, since robbed of its jokes about blowjobs No Heroics is likely to be a lot less fun.

Will he get the chance to do it in the UK?

I hope so, but the current state of ITV suggests that finding money for a niche comedy that’s very unlikely ever to find a home in the mainstream is going to be difficult.

If you haven’t seen it, I recommend you pick up the DVD. Even if you watched No Heroics when it was broadcast there are a few nice extras – including an in-depth guide to the hidden nerd-friendly jokes (Stanlees Bank, for example) and “Power Hour” interviews with the heroes – though, in truth the extras aren’t up to much. Still, perhaps big sales will encourage ITV to find the money for a second season, so go on, buy it now.

Anaximander is the student hoping to enter “the Academy” – a mysterious organisation that guides her nation – by demonstrating her knowledge of Adam Forde (2058-2077) who, it appears, is a crucial figure in her people’s history. This is a post-apocalyptic tale. Anaximander lives on Aotearoa (New Zealand’s northern island) which was spared the ravages of the war by the foresight of a man called Plato, who built defences and created an isolationist republic (yes it is modelled on Plato’s Republic) to preserve civilization while the rest of the world crumbles. Adam Forde, we learn through the questioning of Anaximander, emerges as a trouble-maker who is expelled from the philosopher class, becomes a soldier, kills his comrade, allows an outsider to cross the boundaries of the republic (risking the entrance of virulent plagues) and is captured. In a public trial his charisma wins him sympathy with his fellow citizens who are chafing under the demands of the republic and he is saved from death. Instead he ends up living with an experimental AI robot, Art. The latter sections of the book are dominated by the debate that takes place between Adam and Art as their discussions become philosophical as they batter, somewhat crudely, at the question at the difference between robot and human, machine and conscious being.

I disliked pretty much everything about this book – apart from the fact that the UK edition (from Quercus) has lovely cover art and the fact that at 180 pages (of widely spaced) text it didn’t take long to read.

The basic conceit of telling the story through the medium of an examination seems, to me, almost perverse – placing the reader at the furthest possible remove from the action. The Socratic dialogue might have a long tradition in philosophical exploration but it’s not a storytelling method designed to make a reader’s life easy. Beckett seems aware of this problem, so key moments are re-enacted through “holograms” and the action moves to a more traditional, third-party narration.

The final twist – one which Beckett keeps secret only through deliberate obfuscation – is one that most science fiction magazine editors will have seen a hundred thousand times beforeand probably warn their prospective authors not to pull. I found the revelation so annoying I almost threw the book across the room.

But where Genesis fails most seriously is in its pretensions to philosophy.

The core of this book is obviously intended to be the debate between Art and Adam about the nature of intelligence. Adam insists that Art is not capable of true intelligence, that a machine cannot be conscious.

The turning point of the debate comes when Adam invokes John Searle’s Chinese room problem. Put simply a man sits in a room, from an input slot he receives a list of characters in a language he doesn’t understand – say Chinese. He has, in the room (in this version) a complex machine with levers and pulleys and instructions in how to respond to each possible input. By following those instructions an output is created – a Chinese phrase – which to those outside the machine appears to make sense. A conversation, apparently between two intelligent constructs, takes place.

Searle’s point in creating the Chinese room was to demonstrate that Turing type tests are not sufficient to demonstrate “intelligence” or “conscious thought”. Those outside the Chinese room may believe that they are conducting a conversation with an intelligent entity – and thus the Turing Test has been passed – but Searle’s point is that what goes on within the machine is important. There is no intelligence, no understanding, within the Chinese room and that makes a difference – because any machine that works in a rule-driven way like the Chinese room cannot be conscious.

Art responds to Adam first by stating:

“I believe I am a Chinese room”

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And then by posing this what if:

“The first message the Chinese speaker writes is, ‘I’m going to burn your building down.’ Now tell me, what does the machine reply? … [Art posits a range of possible responses]… A thousand things to say, and for each a million ways of expressing them. Your example only works if we can imagine how the machine chooses its response.” (p133)

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This first point is mistaken. We have no need to imagine how the Chinese room chooses its responses – we can know precisely how the response is chosen because we can know what the rules the operator has access to and read blueprints of how the machine works and predict exactly what it will say. This is the definition of a Chinese room – the programming can be read.

Next Art claims that for meaningful conversation the Chinese room:

“must be able to interpret the intentions of the Chinese speaker and it must be able to pursue its own objectives in framing its responses. If it has no intentions, it can make no conversation.”

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Art may be right that for an Artificial Intelligence to pass the Turing test it will need to be able to interpret the intentions of those it is speaking to and have their own objectives, but it is not legitimate to wish these qualities on the Chinese room. If a Chinese room can be said to have objectives at all, then they must come from the creators of the machine and be whatever purpose they have decided. Some commentators have argued that it is legitimate to include the Chinese room’s creators in a “system” response to Searle – arguing that while there may not be understanding within the physical limitations of the room, the whole system which allows the machine to respond (which includes the knowledge of the machine’s creators) can be said to include understanding and therefore be called intelligent.

But the question becomes where do the key elements of intelligence lie? Do thy lie inside the room or are they in the heads of the creators of the room. The answer to me seems to be the latter. All the system’s response to Searle achieves is to reaffirm that human intelligence is distinct from the kind of cleverness embodied in the Chinese room.

Imagine, for a moment, that the Chinese room’s creators had made a mistake. Suppose they had swapped the meaning of two words, so that when the Chinese room saw “burn” it responded as though the word was “wash” and vice versa. Now let us go back to Art’s initial example, the first thing the Chinese speaker writes is “I’m going to burn your building down” but the machine believes that it has been told to prepare for a thorough cleaning. Nothing in the system can respond intelligently to this mistake.

The operator, seeing the flames suddenly leap about him, might rush outside in terror but he has no way of knowing what the conversation he has engaged in meant or how the machine has failed. The system designers are not present and cannot make a contribution. The Chinese room is incapable of learning – the operator has no idea how to change the rules appropriately, the levers and pulleys just do as they are told – only by reprogramming the device from the outside can the machine respond to its mistakes, but then it ceases to be an independent thinking device.

Yet a genuinely intelligent entity could identify its error, respond and learn from the mistake in an instant

Art concedes

“That for a simple conversation, of course, the room does not have to be conscious any more than you have to engage your consciousness to grunt your greetings to the guards who clean out your cell. But at some point, when the room is called upon to access its own memories, respond to changing circumstances, modify its own objectives, all the things you do when you engage in a meaningful conversation, all that changes.  You think the thing you call consciousness is some mysterious gift from the heavens, but in the end consciousness is nothing but the context in which your thinking occurs.” (p134)

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Again Beckett has Art set out precisely those qualities which might be necessary for a machine that could genuinely be credited with possessing understanding and perhaps even consciousness but which are, by definition, absent from Searle’s Chinese room.

If a machine could access its own memories, respond to changing circumstances, modify its own objectives and do all those other things that human’s (and as far as we know only humans) do when they engage in conversation – and could do all this reflexively, i.e. be aware of what it is doing and why without relying on preset instructions or outside interference – then we would be close to a general thinking machine. By insisting that a thinking machine requires these items – that Art himself possesses them – Beckett is not negating the argument of the Chinese room but confirming it. Art is more than mechanism responding to inputs with pre-programmed outputs. Art demonstrates that he is – despite his protestations – far more than a Chinese room.

Unfortunately that’s not the lesson he takes. The argument is “settled” between Art and Adam when Art claims:

“You don’t have to understand the conversation at all, because the person on the other side of the wall isn’t speaking to you. They are speaking to the machine whose levers you are pulling. And the machine understands just fine.” (135)

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But, of course, as Searle has pointed out the machine doesn’t understand. The machine appears, because of the outsider’s limited viewpoint, to understand the conversation but it is merely responding mechanically based on preset rules. Searle created the Chinese room to demonstrate that appearances are deceptive, that Turing Tests and their like are insufficient to judge understanding/intelligence/consciousness because what happens inside – the process by which responses are created – matters.

Art “wins” the argument by ignoring Searle’s central point.

This has crucial importance for Adam’s position – he is left only with metaphysical responses – ideas of soul and the like to distinguish human from mechanical thought, which Art quite properly dismisses these with ease.

All this might seem esoteric, but since Beckett’s novel makes so much of its philosophical discussion (and offers so little in terms of the drama) it seems only fair to demand that the debate is rigorously constructed.

And it isn’t.

Beckett’s creates a machine in Art that possesses faculties that are far beyond those that can be encompassed by a Chinese room. To then offer Art as “proof” that a mechanistic, rules-based machine like the Chinese room can have real understanding – even consciousness – borders on the disingenuous. Art doesn’t disprove the conjectures of the Chinese room. Rather – in being able to react to memories, to respond to changing circumstances, modify his own objectives, and examine his actions and thoughts reflexively – Art demonstrates how much more than a Chinese room a system must have under the surface for it to be considered a real thinking machine.

Beckett undermines his own point.

And this might be the first book review to be longer than the actual book.

Before starting this review I want to congratulate artist Chris Moore and the (uncredited) designer at Penguin responsible for the cover of this book. It was a brave design choice to park the title and author’s name on the little spaceship in the bottom left hand corner of the cover, but the masses of negative space created, and the minimalist feeling it lends the cover, immediately creates the feeling that this book is a classy artefact and delivers an image of smallness and isolation that is wholly apt.  Very nice.

Toby Litt may be best known as an author of literary novels but he’s also self-confessed fan of genre fiction and of sf in particular – for example, he wrote a long piece in The Guardian on his debt to JG Ballard following that author’s death and his Myspace page includes authors like Stanislaw Lem and Neal Stephenson amongst his favourites. So Journey Into Space isn’t just an example of a literary author plucking an idea from the science pages of the broadsheets and stumbling around reinventing the wheels that sf authors have been using to build complex machines for generations.  Litt, in writing a story set onboard a generation spaceship isn’t working in ignorance of what has gone before, he’s making a conscious choice. And that raises the question of why he’s chosen this form.

Litt’s story begins as the last surviving member of the first generation of the crew of the UNSS Armenia is approaching death. Already the fate of the generations that will be born aboard this ship – who will travel without ever experiencing a departure or an arrival – is weighing heavily on the collective conscience. The Armenia is already outmoded – it has been overtaken by faster ships from home, parts of the ship are falling into disuse – and the young crew members are living in an environment that has been pillaged by their forefathers. The girls, for example, must wear hand-me-down bras because the women of the older generation refused to be limited to their allocation in stores.  The links with home are becoming ever more attenuated. The motivations and the ideals that drove the mission in the first place are fading amongst generations of crew who know nothing of Earth and have no hope of seeing the new world.

Journey Into Space follows the fates of members of five generations of Armenia’s crew whose choices are intimately tied to the fate of the mission. We begin with the beautiful cousins Celeste and August, who dream compulsively of Earth and become lovers and then follow their inbred son Orphan who becomes Armenia’s captain after they receive the news that humanity on Earth has destroyed itself and turns the ship around. Orphan’s daughter, Three, devotes her life to the ostensibly simple task of making paper and ink so that she can write a brief – never revealed – letter to the universe. Jehangir, Three’s nephew, becomes The Nephew creates a religion around the life of his aunt and control’s the ship as he directs it towards its final fate. Finally we meet Herakles and Ultima, who will be the last of the Armenia.

These are a damaged crew.  August and Celeste’s illicit relationship starts a chain of events (magnified by the news that mankind has destroyed itself on Earth) that leads to a kind of madness as the crew abandon rationality and science and slip into ever wilder idiocies and manias.

Ursula Le Guin didn’t like Litt’s take on the story. In her review in The Guardian (28 February, 2009) she wrote:

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“The theme of the ship of fools is old and tried, and has provided matter for many a good story; but this is a ship of blockheads. Perhaps it’s a good thing to remind us of the dangerous stupidity of our species, but if there’s no end and no contrast to the stupidity, the story itself sinks into the inane.”

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Le Guin is absolutely right – this is a ship of blockheads. It seems to me that Litt’s point is precisely that in a world where resources are reduced, where past generations have strip-mined the environment and where the ideals of the past no longer seem relevant, irrationality can, perhaps must, triumph. Litt’s crew are the logical extension of Coupland’s slacker generation, robbed of hope, denied grand aspirations and their future already mortgaged by those who come before. Unlike Coupland, however, Litt here finds no humour or hope in their circumstance. With nothing to believe in, they come to believe everything. These abandoned generations respond not with sly humour and cool detachment but with righteous fury and with a determination to extract vengeance upon those who have gone before.

There are faults with Journey Into Space. The ten page detour where August and Celeste’s imaginary world is destroyed as an extended metaphor for their relationship turning sexual and begetting Orphan might just rank as the worst sex scene ever written. And, even given the unusual circumstances, it seems to me hard to accept that even very charismatic characters could exert such total sway over their crews. SF fans will also find some of the detail of the ship’s journey shaky – the nerd in me couldn’t help tut at the fact that when Orphan decides to turn the ship around he manages it almost effortlessly (with the aid of a handy nearby planet around which the Armenia - moving at a good proportion of light speed – neatly slingshots).

In the end Journey Into Space does end on a sort of hopeful note, Earth and the Armenia meet their fate but we discover that the story has been reported by those who have come afterwards and have excavated this knowledge from the artefacts that remain. But it’s not much consolation.

Journey Into Space is hard, harsh and that makes it difficult to truly like, but unlike the shambling nonsense that results when some literary authors detour through sf, this is at least an honest attempt at speculative fiction that takes seriously the works on which it has been build. It’s not a great book, but it is an interesting one.

Rather like Chris Carter’s X-Files, producer JJ Abrams previous sf television show, Alias, eventually drowned under the weight of the background conspiracy plotting. As these show went on (and on) the accumulated mass of episodes eventually made the “arc” plot so unwieldy and complex that individual episodes were unable to escape from the pressure and the shows imploded under their own mass. Even after one season Fringe feels as though it is teetering under the threat of succumbing to the same fate even while, so far, succeeding in delivering a string of strong standalone episodes throughout season one. And the latter seasons of Lost, another Abrams production, have demonstrated that a series can continue to please audiences and deliver satisfying drama even when burdened with complex back stories.

The lead characters are likeable enough, if a touch bland. Anna Torv, the Australian born actress who plays Agent Olivia Dunham has a nice, if over-worked, line in portraying a tortured soul. Joshua Jackson as Peter Bishop  -  an unlikely genius with attitude – has a nice smile, a strong line in self-deprecating humour and he does a creditable job of interpreting the pseudo-scientific gobbledegook that sometimes dominates the show. Together their onscreen relationship has none of the tension or zip of Scully and Mulder but they work well enough to carry the plot along.

There’s even a nice supporting cast that includes the excellent Jasika Nicole as Astrid, a role for Leonard Nimoy as Walter Bell, Lance Reddick from The Wire and, of course, a cow.

But what makes Fringe really watchable is the performance of John Noble as Walter Bishop. It’s a role that mixes clownish antics with real emotional depth. Bishop Snr has spent years in a mental asylum and is utterly institutionalised. Walter’s naivety is often used to comic effect and Noble (another Australian) proves himself to be a capable comic actor. But there’s always been an edge of fragility and darkness to the character and, as the season has progressed and we’ve come to learn more and more about Walter’s past, the character has become altogether more complex.

Noble finds himself playing a character whose history includes conducting terrible experiments on young children and guilty of pretty terrible crimes and yet he still manages to preserve Walter’s essential innocence and likeability. Noble’s Walter may well be the most entertaining character on television, if nothing else it’s great to see the mad scientist back on our screen and played with such unrestrained joy.

Season one of Fringe has been fun and it ended with a cracking finale that mixed minor resolutions with huge new questions. The only aspect of the show that drives me nuts is the way they introduce each new location with those giant words in the landscape. Why?

And stories about drugs are almost invariably tedious. When their not moralising at the reader in one way or another (”Drugs are bad! Stay away!” “Drugs are great! Free your mind!”) they’re descending into the self-indulgent ramblings of writers who’ve taken drugs and mistaken the chemical induced ramblings for genuine insights.

So Lucius Shephard’s novella – “Dog Eared Paperback of My Life” – which is the longest story in Other Earths, the short story collection edited by Nick Gevers and Jay Lake had two strikes against it before I even started reading it.

Had the story not been by Shephard, a writer I’ve long admired, I don’t think I’d have bothered to read it. And that would have been a shame, because this is a proper cracker.

The theme of Other Earths is alternative realities and the standard of stories is quite high (though I don’t believe including fairies in the “real world” counts as a proper alternative reality story – which meant that I wasn’t at all taken by Theodora Goss’s “Csilla’s Story” or (sadly) Liz Willams’s “Winterborn”). There are two or three other really excellent stories – I was particularly keen on Jeff Vandermeer’s angry “The Goat Variations” and Alistair Reynolds emotionally powerful “The Receivers” – not at all what I expected from Alistair but excellent nonetheless.

But it was Shephard’s story that stood out as the best in the collection.

Shephard’s protagonist is Thomas Cradle – a genuinely unlikeable, self-obsessed, weasel of a character. The only characteristic that allows the reader to empathise with Cradle is his own copious self-loathing.

A fantasy author, Cradle is surprised to discover a book that he has never heard of, The Tea Forest, but which he appears to have written. The Tea Forest tells of Cradle’s journey along the Mekong River through Cambodia and Vietnam to a part of the Mekong delta where something is calling to him. He sends the publisher his “new” book but before it is printed he determines to retrace the other Cradle’s steps.

This leads our Thomas Cradle into sexual hi-jinx, a bad trip, danger in a club in Phnom Penh, a miserable journey on the river through Vietnam and then finally an encounter with numerous instances of himself and the true heart of darkness in the Mekong delta.

Shephard’s writing here is fantastic. He brilliantly transports the reader along the Mekong, from the winding river to the madness of the cities, the writing here is a masterclass in how to absorb even an initially reluctant reader like me into this strange world. And yet there’s no sense of the travelogue – nothing of the I went on my holiday’s and this is what I saw and by the way here’s a load of research I did about these places tacked on to a flimsy plot – that is the bane of stories set in “exotic” countries. Ever detail feels important, urgent even, as the country becomes an important

The story finds room for one fantastic rant. In an aside Cradle bemoans his fate as a writer to be trapped, wasting his talents as a fantasy writer and caught up with fandom and all the:

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“mad, portly men with their bald heads and beards and their eyeballs in their trouser pockets, whose wives caught cancer with living with them; all the dull hustlers who blogged ceaselessly and MacGyvered a career out of two ounces of talent, a jackknife and a predilection for wearing funny hats and who humped the legs of their idols, who blogged endlessly and wore the latest fashions in the emperor’s new clothes and who spoke about Art as though he were a personal friend they had met through networking, networking, networking , building a fanbase one reader at a time; all the lesser fantasists with their fantasies of becoming a famous corpse like Andre Breton and whose latest publication came to us courtesy of Squalling Hammertoe Woo Hoo Press and who squeezed of pretentious drivel from the jerk-off rags wadded into their skulls that one or two Internet critics had declared works of genius [...] all the ultrasuccessful commercial novelists (I counted myself amongst them) who cast shadows more substantial than anything they had ever written and could afford, literally, to treat everyone like dirt; all the great men and women of the field (certain of them, anyway, the lifetime achievers who, in effect, pursed their lips as if about to say “Percy” or “piquant” when in public, fostering the impression that they squeezed their ass cheeks together extra hard to produce work of such unsurpassed grandiloquence…”

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I bet it felt good to get that off his chest…

As Cradle proceeds down the river it becomes clear that he’s not the worst of his alternate world alter-egos – and we even begin to unpeal a character with whom we can have some sympathy. The result is that by the time he’s met up with hugely-fat Cradle and gone deep into the forest, we actually want him to complete his journey, make his discovery and get out.

Perhaps the revelation that Cradle’s adventures bring (that really all he wants is the love of a good woman and a comfortable life) is going to disappoint those who cling to romantic notions about wild journeys upriver to uncover the true nature of “humanity” in the dark, wild places, but actually it comes as a bit of a genuine surprise in this story. Cradle’s salvation comes not from the wilderness or from drug induced visions, but from the decent woman he left behind and a desire to settle down. The alternate versions of him – the wildmen, the adventurers, the dangerous Thomas Cradles – they are annihilated by the strange presence waiting for them in the Tea Forest.

I thoroughly enjoyed Shephard’s “Dog Eared Paperback of My Life” – despite enjoying a number of the other stories, this made Other Earths worth the purchase price on its own.

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Other stories

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“This Peaceable Land” – Robert Charles Wilson

A well-written and touching story set in a alt-history based around the American Civil War. Perhaps the traditional topic for an alt-history made it feel a little old-fashioned amongst the rest of the stories, but the ending put a lump in my throat.

“The Goat Variation” – Jeff Vandermeer

What went through George Bush’s mind in those minutes between being informed of the Sept 11 attacks and his aides getting him out of a room of school children. Vandermeer takes us to other realities while scorching our own.

“The Unblinking Eye” – Stephen Baxter

A highly advanced Incan nation make contact with backward Europeans. There’s lots of really good detail here, but I didn’t buy the idea that the Incans could have advanced so far that they had nuclear weapons but had only now contacted other continents.

“Csilla’s Story” – Theodora Goss

The secret history of fairy-folk amongst us. Couldn’t see how this fits with the anthology’s remit. Not a bad story, but not my kind of thing either.

“Winterborn” – Liz Williams

Despite my boundless admiration for Liz Williams’ work, this story set in a Britain ruled by a fairy queen didn’t seem to fit in this anthology. It is, however, an interesting story, well told.

“The Holy City and Em’s Reptile Farm” – Greg Van Eekhout

I felt I was missing something here. I think the events of the bible have been transferred to America. Em’s father runs a failing reptile farm that has been bypassed by the freeway. She determines to go to Las Vegas hoping to win a piece of the true cross in a Templar raffle (or at least get close enough to make a convincing copy). She get caught up in a heist, ends up with a stolen relic, gets lost in the desert, rescued by Hawiians and saves her dad’s business. I found the whole story fun but utterly unconvincing and insubstantial.

“The Receivers” – Alistair Reynolds

World War One has dragged on into the 20s. New weapons are being developed and new countermeasures. Wally and his partner Ralph Vaughan Williams drive an ambulance to a listening post in Dungeness where they are to pick up George Butterworth (another composer) who has been injured. This is a touching tale of great talent wasted by war and while absolutely not what one might expect from Alistair Reynolds – master of the space opera – it is one of the anthologies most affecting stories and one of Alistair’s best.

“Family History” – Paul Park

Tying the author’s life into the myriad of possible histories that might have emerged from the decisions made by his ancestors and the events through which they lived. I didn’t think this delivered the punchline necessary for it to succeed.

“Nine Alternate Histories” – Benjamin Rosenbaum

One of those pieces of writing that’s working so hard to be clever, it forgets to include anything to give the reader a reason to give a monkey’s about what the author is saying. The weakest thing in the anthology. Bordering on drivel.

As the book is named after the lords who controlled the Marches, the frontier lands between the “lawless” Welsh and the Norman’s newly conquered English territories, it is hardly a surprise that the major themes the novel deals with are boundaries and borders – physical, political and personal. It is at its most interesting when it presses its characters against the lines they have drawn for themselves.

There’s lots of remarkable things about Marcher – Beckett’s has a fine handle on his characters with Charles Bowen, his protagonist, and a supporting cast that includes welfare man, Cyril Burkitt, social worker, Jazamine Bright and the “dreggies” like Carl Bone and Tammy Pendant who make up the inhabitants of Beckett’s Social Inclusion Zones (the perfect name for walled areas where the unemployed and unemployable are kept segregated from the nations “decent” people) are real people with real flaws. Charles is whiny and self-obsessed, Cyril is long past caring enough about his work to actually do anything about how bad things have become and Jazamine analyses everyone else’s motives but doesn’t appear to possess any of her own. And there are some great scenes. Cyril Burkitt’s leaving party and his final fate, the killing of Slug, the fateful moment when Jaz and Charles leap – there are moments in the novel that will sit for a long time in the memory.

Marcher’s greatest strength is in Beckett’s ability to portray the apparently mundane shuffling whereby decent people within a bureaucratic system can create – almost despite the wishes or desires of anyone person or class in particular – a society which creates a group of people who serve the greater good by being excluded. And how, amongst that excluded group, the daily grind of living makes room for anything that offers escape – entertainment, drugs, violence, superstitions and new religions – is gripped tightly and squeezed for every drop of comfort it can offer. The presentation of bureaucrats at work is both clinically precise and yet, at the same time, not entirely unsympathetic while the impact their work has on the lives of those they “serve” will be excruciatingly familiar to anyone who has spent any time working in health or social services.

This realistic portrayal of social services is hardly going to make Marcher an easy novel to sell to the mass market – it’s not the sort of story that’s going to appeal to those looking for spaceships and big explosions. And finding a marketing niche is not the novel’s only problem.

The large number of typos and moments where the book seems to have lacked a really on-the-ball editor/proof-reader mar the experience of reading the novel. I wouldn’t normally mention a few mistakes and the occasional slip-up (as an editor myself I know how easily these can get by even after careful work) but in the case of Marcher the frequency and the obvious nature of the errors can’t be ignrored and as the book progressed I found myself increasingly annoyed. This is particularly regrettable as the book is good enough to deserve better treatment.

The other problems are more of Beckett’s making. There’s an imbalance at the heart of the book’s plotting – stemming, no doubt, from its roots as a fix-up. While accepting that Beckett is interested in writing something more thoughtful than your basic sci-fi knockabout, I think in setting up the threat of the Dunner gangs – world-roaming, Norse-inspired, raiders – Beckett has a duty to treat them seriously. Sadly the threat they present rather slips in and out of focus – disappearing entirely for long stretches – before reappearing in rather stodgy clumps. The threat ultimately gets “dealt with” in a way that feels too perfunctory, too neat and too quick. The result is that the plot that should be driving the book feels unevenly distributed and, in the gaps, there are dangerous slow patches. Now there is nice writing in these slower places and some good character interactions, but, truthfully, there are moments when the story seems to get lost.

All that being said, for the sf reader looking for something smart, compact and interesting to read, you could do a lot worse than pick up Beckett’s book – while you’re at it, do yourself a favour and order his short story collection The Turing Test from Elastic Press – it really is fantastic.

Simply it’s the story of two petty conmen and adventurers, Zelikman a pale, blonde Frank armed with an incongruously long thin sword (it’s referred to early on as “bodkin” but it sounds like a modern épée) and Amram, an aging, muscular African wielding a rune-laden Viking axe, who become caught up in courtly machinations in the triple-crowned court of Khazaria – north of the Black Sea.

So far, so fairly standard fantasy.

But one of the things that makes Gentlemen of the Road interesting (apart from the almost flawless writing, the clever dialogue, the unusual depth of characterisation, thematic complexity and the gripping adventure story) is that it’s working title (as the Afterword reveals) was “Jews with Swords” – almost every character in this novel from the Ethopian axe-man to the hopeless henchman Hannukah are Jews. Khazaria is a kingdom of Jews. The traders who wander the silk route are Jews.

The book itself is a really entertaining read – fast paced, witty in places, sombre in others, but always beautifully written. Plus the production in the Sceptre hardback version, with an evocative green and gold cover and wonderful pen and ink drawings made the book a stunning object in itself.

But it is some of the points raised by Chabon’s Afterword, that I want to discuss here.

Chabon deals head on with why a writer firmly established in the mainstream as a major proponent of the genre he calls “late-century naturalism” (whose key features he helpfully defines as “disappointment, misfortune, loss, hard enlightenment, bleak grace. Divorce; death; illness; violence, random and domestic; divorce; bad faith; deception and self-deception; love and hate between fathers and sons, men and women, friends and lovers; the transience of beauty and desire; divorce…”) should suddenly wander off into the murky world of genre.

He does not repudiate his past work, he’s proud of it (as he deserves to be) but, he says: “It’s just that here, in Gentlemen of the Road as in some of its recent predecessors, you catch me in the act of trying, as a writer, to do what many of the characters in my earlier stories – Art Bechstein, Grady Tripp, Ira Wiseman – were trying, longing, ready to do: I have gone off in search of a little adventure.”

I have to say I found this passage genuinely touching. Chabon is, in many ways, a supremely fortunate writer. Talent and hard work does not always receive both the critical and commercial recognition Chabon has enjoyed. He can afford to take the risk of travelling these side roads, but it would be a mistake of any reader to imagine that this book (or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or The Yiddish Policemen’s Union) are less “Chabonesque” than his earlier books.

Chabon says that many people laughed when he told them he was working on a book called “Jews with Swords”. For Chabon and his (presumably) American friends, the idea of a Jew with a sword conjures up images of Woody Allen in a loincloth (Cohen the Barbarian?), the very phrase “clangs with anachronism, with humorous incongruity”. Yet as Chabon notes the Jewish peoples have had no shortage of warriors or warlike characters. Chabon reflects on how odd it is that the image of a swashbuckling or dangerous Jew seems so anachronistic – though Jews and adventure, is quite another matter.

“From the moment of the true First Commandment, when God has told Abraham lech lecha: Thou shalt leave home. Thou shalt get lost. Though shalt find slander, oppression, opportunity, escape, and destruction. Thou shalt, by definition find adventure. This long, long tradition of Jewish adventure may look a bit light on the Conans or D’Artagnans; our greatest heroes less obviously suited to exploits of derring-do and arms. But maybe that ill-suitedness only makes Jews all the more ripe to feature in (or to write) this kind of tale.”

I think this passage reveals something interesting. I want to call it a bias, but I think it is fairer to think of it as a blindspot in Chabon’s thinking and in his books.

I, for example, have no problem imagining Jews as the bearers of arms. The image that much of the world has of Jews is of Israel. It is of a nation with its citizenry trained and armed and ready for war and of MOSSAD and of high-tech weaponry. In that context the idea of a Jew with a sword (or a rifle) isn’t incongruous at all. Of course people have different attitudes towards Israel – my own, for what they’re worth, are sympathetic to the fundamental existence of the state wrapped up with varying degrees of anger/dismay at the actual actions of its military/government and some of its people – but it seems to me to be odd that a modern writer could muster a range of images of modern Jewishness and not even reflect, however briefly on the image of Jewish Israel.

Is this a reflection of the famous American parochialism we Europeans hear about? Or is it something specific to Chabon?

It’s clear that Chabon has been using his foray into the fantastic to allow him to explore his own attitudes towards what it is to be a Jew. It started in Kavalier and Clay with the pivotal events of World War 2, through the alternative Jewish state of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and here to the loosely imagined history of Gentlemen of the Road. It’s interesting how he notes that the characters in his early (mainstream) stories were “gentiles or assimilated Jews, many of whom were self-consciously inspired, instructed and laid low by the teachings of rock and roll and Hollywood, but not, for example by the lost writings of the tzaddik of Regensburg, whose commentaries are so important to one of the heroes of Gentlemen of the Road.” Not so the characters of his more fantastic novels, who are anything but assimilated. They live in Jewish worlds – whether forties New York, Sitka or Khazaria – but, at the same time, they are far from being comfortable in their Jewish skin – Jews by birth but not necessarily by practice. Not “good Jews” – just Jews who happen to be good.

But I think it is revealing which of the classic elements of the Jewish stereotype/self-image Chabon retains and appropriates for his characters. His Jews remain bookish – the value of learning and of knowledge is never lost on them no matter how far they have fallen down the social order. They love games of strategy – especially chess. They are, both physically and in their imaginations, wanderers – the Afterword compares the Jewish experience to Odysseus’s adventures – bearing a melancholy for a lost home they may never have known.

These characteristics, of course, add up to a sympathetic package, that might even be described as sentimental. Chabon doesn’t consider himself or those he knows and loves as the sort of people who would commit acts of violence or do wrong. There’s a sense that he doesn’t want to think badly about people with whom he has things in common and a sense of nostalgia for days when the Jewish position was more straightforwardly the victims of a history of very great wrongs.

I admire Chabon’s writing a great deal and I think I understand his liberal diffidence about looking at the “reality” of Israel from his secure, American vantage point.

He’s on record as recognising the Israeli state’s fundamental importance for Jews but he’s also clearly remains troubled by what it means to be Jewish. So far, in his fiction, he has steadfastly refused to engage with the implications of the problems that Israel presents for liberal “Jews who happen to be good”. Perhaps he finds himself caught awkwardly between the extremes – there are those Zionists for whom only the unquestioning support of Israel is sufficient while there are plenty of others who will be happy only when the last Jew is driven into the sea. I have some sympathy with Chabon – whatever he says, or whether he says nothing at all, there will be those reading messages into his words (and silences).

And yet, it doesn’t seem possible that an artist of Chabon’s quality can devote so much time to considering what it is to be Jewish and continue avoid the reality of an existing Jewish state and the complexities that creates – Jews as possessors of power, Jews in positions of strength, Jews as corruptible, even Jews viewed as oppressors. Having finished Gentlemen of the Road there’s a distinct feeling that Chabon has completed a circle around something vast. There’s a sense that these books and the worlds he’s created in them have been designed so that he can focus on positive elements of his cultural inheritance without having to look at the problems of the real world. In this sense, it’s almost tempting to dismiss his dabblings in genre since Kavalier and Clay as works of escapism. Is he avoiding the issues? Or should we be more generous and suggest that he is exploring alternatives.

I’m not arguing that Michael Chabon, as an artist who is Jewish, has to write a book about Israel, or that he must justify Israel or that he has to devote some space in all his books to beating himself and his fellow Jews up for the failings of Israel. Not all modern Jewish art needs to take Israel as its subject. But I do think that it is noteworthy that an artist like Chabon has devoted a number of books explicitly to exploring the idea of Jewishness without reference to Israel.