I’ve just finished reading Ascent, the newish novel by Jed Mercurio. It’s the story of Yefgenii Yeremin an orphan of Stalingrad and “the great patriotic war against fascism”. Yefgenii is blessed with a talent for mathematics and engineering and supremely acute eyesight. This combination of skills take him into the VVF, the Soviet air force that is fighting a secret war against the Americans in Korea, and thence to legendary status amongst his peers as “Ivan the Terrible”, ace of aces. In the background as Yefgenii rises are his opponents – American pilots like Grissom, Armstrong and Schirra – who would go on to form the backbone of the Mercury and Apollo programmes.

The Americans live in the sunlight of publicity and hero-worship while Yefgenii – partly through his own pride and partly through the machinations of the Soviet system – finds that the end of the war thrusts him deeper into obscurity. He find himself,  literally, out in the cold in the far north flying patrols against an enemy who will never come, not least because the age of the bomber has passed and the age of the missile has arrived. But, even here, Yefgenii’s skills can’t be denied and ultimately he wins back his status. 

From there the only way is up. Yefgenii is enlisted into the cosmonaut corps and, as the Americans open up a lead in the race to the moon, he is strapped aboard an untested craft for a long-shot at glory.

Ascent is a tragedy. Yefgenii’s fate is set from the start – his separation from the world is unbridgeable, the emotional detachment and calculation that make him a great pilot forever distance him from the rest of humanity. Forced to choose between the comforts of family and domesticity and the faintest chance of glory, Yefgenii barely pauses before taking the more dangerous path and his regrets, though real, are vague. 

This was the hardest part of Mecurio’s characterisation for me to accept. Perhaps because I am what one of my friends calls a “soft dad” – one who certainly can’t imagine deliberately making the choice to forever separate myself from my family – I found Yefgenii’s final decision harder to believe. That said there’s no doubt that Mecurio’s writing earns his character the right to make the hard choice. Like all true tragedy, this is the story of a man whose greatest qualities are also those which will eventually bring him down. Even as we will Yefgenii to take the safe path home, we know that his fate does not lie down that road. 

As well as being a solid examination of character, Ascent is an enjoyable read. Were it not for the fundamental bleakness of it all it would be tempting to compare this to the boys’ own action of The Right Stuff or Apollo 13. Its relative brevity and fast pace meant I raced through it, but it is also packed with convincing technical detail.

Mecurio is a qualified pilot and the depth of his research is obvious throughout, but the prose deftly avoids crude info-dumping and the mass of information becomes immersive rather than distracting. If I were critical I would say that the character of Yefgenii’s wife is poorly treated, but then this is consistent with the isolation and drive of the central character. There are a few too many, too similar, dogfights in the Korean section of the story and Mercurio’s technical precision – the unbending focus on which pilot and machine can turn more tightly than the other – while absolutely accurate is perhaps overdone. There are moments of improbability too (Yefgenii’s just a bit too good a pilot. Thirty-three kills is an awful lot. And is it really possible for one MiG to nudge another without fuel to keep it flying?) but Mecurio succeeds in carrying us deftly across these potential pratfalls and in the end there are many more thrills than spills.

More a “hidden history” really, than an “alternate” one, this a “mainstream” novel that deserves to find an audience amongst sf fans. No doubt Mercurio, his publishers or someone else will eventually offend fandom by proclaiming that this isn’t that horrid “sci-fi” stuff and earn a prize place amongst the ranks of “as others see us” – so read the novel now, before something like that sours your pleasure. 

Ascent is a shoo-in for the 2007 Clarke shortlist, surely?

Posted April 19, 2007 Comments(0)

So I finally got round to watching the second half of season three of Battlestar Galactica over the past few days. I approached it with some trepidation as a lot of commentators have accused the show of dipping severely in quality and even, whisper it, of jumping the shark.

And there’s no denying that compared to the electric shock of the opening arc of the third season the second half isn’t in the same class. But then, from the “good guys” using suicide bombers in 3.01 (“Occupation”) to the brutality of the treatment of collaborators in 3.05 (err… “Collaborators”) the new BSG ran a set of episodes that were as powerful as any sf I’ve ever come across. Perhaps it was a bit much to hope that they could sustain that level throughout.

Two consecutive episodes – 3.14 (“The Woman King”) and 3.15 (“A Day in the Life”) were probably the weakest and most inconsequential episodes yet aired in the new BSG – revealing that the show really can sink to the level of some of the other scifi on TV. But these episodes were bracketed by shows that demonstrate why BSG remains compulsive viewing.

3.13 (“Taking a break from all your worries”) features Baltar (Callis) being interrogated by Admiral Adama (Olmos) – it’s a fairly straightforward episode, most of BSG’s usual moral ambiguity is swept under the carpet but it is made memorable by Callis’s fantastic performance and by the resonant, terrifying voice of Olmos in the interrogation sessions.

Episode 3.16 (“Dirty Hands”), meanwhile, is memorable because it is one of those episodes that tackles an issue that only BSG would tackle in terms of an sf drama and a topic that almost no ongoing dramas would ever address – industrial unrest. It takes us aboard one of the fleet’s “invisible ships” the “tylium refinery” Hetei Kan – where workers are toiling day and night in horrible conditions to deliver the fuel the fleet needs to survive. When the workers begin to organise for a better deal and fairer treatment the first reactions of Adama and Roslin are dictatorial and repressive. Actions which give Baltar’s subversive agenda of splitting the “proletariat” from the “elite” sudden force. Tyrol’s (Douglas) role as honest broker and trustworthy blue-collar guy is excellently handled.

The resolution of this unrest is too quick and too neat - though there are a couple of stirring moments along the way - but “Dirty Hands” is astonishing because of the way it brings unfiltered class politics right into focus in an ongoing sf drama. It reflects again the way BSG is able to deal explicitly with things that, in the past, sf dramas danced around using allegory and metaphor and why I still love this show, despite its faults.

I can’t discuss the season finale without giving away spoilers, which would be unfair on the majority who may not have seen it – but I will say that I loved the wily, roguish lawyer Romo Lampkin. SF really doesn’t have enough charming, sarcastic, brilliant Irishmen in it – but if anyone needs another, I do weddings, bar mitzvahs and children’s parties.

So, in some ways the second half of season three hasn’t lived up to the promise of the season opening - but in no way has BSG jumped the shark. Heroes is giving the show serious competition as the best sf on television, but there still isn’t a series on tv - whether genre or not - that can match BSG when it is on form and there is no better or more nuanced political drama on television.

Posted April 19, 2007 Comments(2)

One of the very strangest things about the representation of Sparta in 300 is the treatment of the Ephors. If you’ve seen the film then you’ll know that they are portrayed as twisted and mis-shapen mystics, a kind of ancient race living high on a mountaintop above the Spartan city who spend their time molesting drugged-up, lithe, young women and betraying the Spartans to the Persians.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this (not the lithe young girls, cheeky!) and the more I think about it, the more it concerns me.

One of the things that people think they know about Sparta, but which is wrong, is that Sparta was a wicked military dictatorship ruled by kings. It’s an image that contrasts nicely with the “noble” Athenians who live in their proto-democracy, writing plays and founding Western civilization.

But it’s cobblers.

It’s true Sparta was unusual amongst the Greek states in that it did have kings but they did not conform to the image that word creates in the modern mind. They were not imbued with the divine rights claimed by the rulers of Europe between the dark ages and the democratic period.

Sparta had two kings who ruled simultaneously from two distinct royal lineages. Now this on its own might be an interesting experiment in the separation of powers, but the bits of what we know about the Spartan constitution also suggest a more significant division between the power of the kings (who, at least in theory, only ruled directly when the nation was at war and they lead the army in the field) and the Spartan people.

The fragment we have of the Spartan constitution is called the “great rhetra” and it sets out two distinct branches of government. On one side is what we might today think of as the executive, with the kings and a council of elders. On the other side are the institutions of “democracy” (I’m using that word very cautiously) with the Ephors - five magistrates elected each year (no man could stand twice) from a regularly meeting assembly, a body of all Spartan citizens. There are many, many theories about exactly how power balanced out in this system, but we do know that in the era of 300 the assembly and the Ephors were no mere sops - they had the power to punish kings and they weren’t afraid to use it.

In 491BC Demaratus was deposed and driven from Sparta and when Leonidas was doing his thing at the “hot gates” (480) Demaratus was standing beside the Persian king Xerxes. Demaratus’s co-king - Cleomenees I - fared even less well. When his role in tricking the Spartans into the wrongful exile of Demaratus was discovered he was chained in stocks, humiliated and probably murdered (490) - to be succeeded by the famed Leonidas, his half brother. Leotcyhidas, the king who Cleomenes placed on the throne in place of his rival Demaratus, was eventually also exiled (for corruption) and his house burned to the ground.

Things settle down after that for one line of Spartan royalty - Archidamus, Agis II and Agesilaus II in the Eurypontid side all see out their reigns to their respective deaths (though not without considerable controversy in Agesilaus’s case). On the Agaiad line, however, things remained choppy. Pausanias, regent for the boy king Pleistarchus, was imprisoned by the Ephors and then, on trying to escape, was walled up inside a temple and starved to death. Pleistarchus’ successor Pleistonax was exiled for twenty years for corruption and his successor, a different Pausanias, was stoned to death in 395BC by the Spartans for failiure to follow an order to join forces with charismatic Spartan general Lysander.

In 130 years (between the first Persian invasion in 499BC to the collapse of Spartan dominance after the battle of Leuctra in 371) of the thirteen kings who reigned in Sparta, five (and one regent) were exiled or executed by the Ephors..

The common image of the Spartan citizen as an obedient soldiers trained from birth to obey orders, keep their mouth shut and respect their betters is not born out by the evidence of how they treated their kings.

So what is 300’s agenda. Is it just coincidence that the simplification of Sparta’s complex constitution and politics leaves us with a powerful, charismatic leader leading a white army of brave, beautiful, supermen into battle against a craven foreign foe?

If I were prone to promulgating conspiracy theories, I’d wonder whether the absence in 300 of the second king, the turning of the chief democratic officers of the state into monsters and the presentation of the only politician given any screen time as a treacherous bastard - represented some sort of attempt to gloss over or misrepreent the “democratic” element of Spartan society. Certainly Sparta has been wrongly used as a symbol of “strong leadership over a pure and strong people” by everyone from the founders of England’s great public schools to the Nazis.

Both 300 and the forces of conservatism (in the widest sense) entirely misconstrue the importance of Thermopylae and the lessons to be learned from the Greek city states of the fifth century.

If the Spartans are only soldiers, bred and educated only for war and admirable only for their superiority of arms - for possessing the ability to do improbable kung fu with an eight foot spear - then we might as well bow down to one mighty king (as, indeed, the Spartans in 300 do) - and thank our stars that we’re lucky that at least our king is modest, brave, handsome and white.

But the thing that set Sparta and the other Greek states apart from the Persians in the fifth century BC is not that the Greeks had better, braver kings or tougher soldiers. The reason for the continued importance of the many Greek cities experiments with politics is that they are the first documented attempt we have to organise societies under the rule of law. Laws from which no one is exempt - not a king, a rich man or a commoner.

That principle - the rule of law - is what allows individual liberty to coexist with collective endeavour in democratic states across the globe. It is, it seems to me, the non-negotiable pre-requisite for a decent society. It is also, I think, something that the individual Spartan citizen soldiers fighting “in the shade” (individuals locked, shoulder to shoulder, in a phalanx - perhaps the most fundamentally cooperative battle formation in history) would have understood as the thing that set them apart from the slaves and subjects opposite.

It is not as easy to make glamorous in an action sequence, but 300 would have been a better film if it had been able to sensibly articulate the real issues at stake in this great clash of civilisations. As it is, 300 at best perpetuates a misconception and, at worst twists history for a rather sinister puropose.

Posted April 11, 2007 Comments(6)

Watching 300 last week it struck me how, like most things, pretty much everything everyone thinks they know about Sparta is wrong.

Like, for example, everyone knows the Spartans were uniquely cruel in exposing children to the elements if they were considered weak.

In the opening sequence of 300 the Spartan priests hold up a baby, judging whether it was healthy enough to be allowed to survive and the implication of the voice over are that the decision whether to expose the child and allow it to die was based entirely on his fitness for battle.

Except the Spartan tradition of exposure wasn’t unique in ancient Greece, indeed exposure seems to have been a shared phenomenon across the Greek city states of the classical era - although how commonly it was practised in any state is subject to question. It’s worth noting that less than a century after the time covered in the 300 Sparta would be led by Agesilaos, a small, physically unimpressive man who was lame from birth. Perhaps the Spartans weren’t quite as ruthless in their pursuit of physical purity as the legent would have it.

The Athenians also certainly exposed unwanted children. The difference was that, in the Athenian tradition, families chose to expose their children for personal reasons rather than the decision being taken for the good of the community as a whole. The result was that, in Athens it was almost always daughters, whatever their state of health, who were exposed (put in clay pots and left by the road in the Athenian way) because the cost of a dowry and marriage rituals could involve in the splitting up of family estates.

Now neither of these methods are ones that I’d want to advocate as a way of treating babies - but it does cast an interesting light on the Spartan tradition. If, living in a land with limited resources - as ancient Greece certainly was - a people have to make the choice about which of their children should live, how should they choose? Should the choice be made based on the needs of individual families - driven by a desire to preserve their private wealth and maintain their status? Or should a society set some rule by which it makes that decision for the good of the community as a whole?

Both options are horrible, neither are a perfect or desirable solution, but at least in this light the Spartan choice is understandable not as the inhuman thinning of a population on the basis of some pseudo-eugenics, pre-genetics breeding programme but the common response of a society to a common threat. Here, at least amongst the Spartiate class, is a fundamental equality of opportunity (the right live beyond birth) that is not based on the wealth of your individual family or their immediate economic need but on the needs of the society as a whole.

Coming next, 300 and the Ephors - the misrepresentation of Spartan democracy.

Posted April 3, 2007 Comments(0)

I’ve just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (lauded as a masterpiece pretty much everywhere, except here). I think Asher is far too harsh on The Road - at the very least it is a beautiful exercise in sparse writing that creates a genuinely uncomfortable sense of dread in many passages. His complaint about crimes against the English language borders on the perverse - and I think he’s wrong too to say that the book portrays a bleak view of human nature. Actually the boy and his father are beacons of decency in an unbearably harsh world and, not to spoil the ending, the conclusion is hopeful.

But I also think that other reviewers have over-rated the book - perhaps they’ve been dazzled by McCarthy’s style and standing as one of America’s greatest living authors and heir to William Faulkner’s position as king of southern gothic, and ignored the fundamental weaknesses of The Road as a novel.

The story doesn’t actually move forward. Despite all their plodding, the journey doesn’t take the boy or his father anywhere or appear to enlighten them in any way and the thing that presses them on from the comfort they find in various locations is never convincingly explained.

And the religious subtext borders on the cliched (there were moments that had me thinking of Waterworld, and that’s not a good thing) and serves no purpose within the story other than to give English Literature undergraduates the chance to mutter about subtext and rub their chins… (g!).

I ended up on the fence about The Road. It has moments of genuine power, but as a whole it wasn’t satisfying. I enjoyed the process of reading it but at the end wasn’t sure what, if anything, I’d been left with - as if the story crumbled to ash in my hands like the scorched trees and leaves McCarthy spends so much time writing about.

The absence of The Road from the Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist for the best science fiction novel has caused a bit of a stir with no less a soul that John Clute, the godfather of SF criticism, expressing his displeasure at the judges for a deriliction of duty. Apparently the publishers refused/didn’t submit copies of their novels (the new Pynchon’s also missing) to the awards committe for consideration and the judges had the temerity not to go out and buy them!

Despite my criticisms above, The Road is easily superior to three of the five ACCA shortlisted books I’ve read so far (only Hav and Nova Swing are in a similar class - I’ve still to read Brian Stableford’s Streaking) and it’s a shame that publishing politics have kept it off the shortlist.

That’s not a reason to boycott the ACCAs as Alan Balm at AICN somewhat hysterically suggests - but it does reflect poorly on the awards and perhaps the sf genre’s standing outside its sometimes closed circles. In an era when some “literary awards” charge publishers a huge sum just to have books considered, it is very disappointing that the publishers in question here couldn’t stretch themselves to supply an established genre award with copies of their manuscripts even though, I’d concede, in marketing terms a listing on the ACCAs (or even a win) is unlikely to add significantly to the sales of a Pynchon or McCarthy.

Posted April 3, 2007 Comments(0)