The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

I picked this up after reading that it had influenced Douglas Adams when writing the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, although I feel that Vonnegut’s mix of surrealism, satire and science fiction is slightly more focused than Adams. His second novel, The Sirens of Titan deals with free will, something that seems in distinctly short supply in Vonnegut's universe.

Protagonist Malachi Constant is the richest man in 22nd century America. He is also soon to be an unwilling participant in the delivery of a small piece of metal required by an alien from the planet Tralfamdore stranded for millennia on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. He is informed by Winston Niles Rumfoord, a man who has been through a chrono-synclastic infundibulum and now exists at all points between Earth and Betelgeuse, that he will shortly be taken to Mars. Distinctly cool on the idea, Malachi decides to render himself incapable of flying to the red planet. The aftermath of his two month bender is horrific to behold:

Malachi Constant lay in the wide gutter of his kidney-shaped swimming pool, sleeping the sleep of a drunkard. There was a quarter of an inch of warm water in the gutter. Constant was fully dressed in blue-green evening shorts and a dinner jacket of gold brocade. His clothes were soaked. He was all alone. The pool had once been covered uniformly by an undulating blanket of gardenias. But a persistent morning breeze had moved the blooms to one end of the pool, as though folding a blanket to the foot of the bed. In folding back the blanket, the breeze revealed a pool bottom paved with broken glass, cherries, twists of lemon peel, peyotl buttons, slices of orange, stuffed olives, sour onions, a television set, a hypodermic syringe, and the ruins of a white grand piano. Cigar butts and cigarette butts, some of them marijuana, littered the surface. The swimming pool looked less like a facility for sport than a punchbowl in hell. 

The phone rings and he is informed that in the meantime he has bankrupted himself:

Malachi Constant of Hollywood, California, came out of the rhinestone phone booth stone cold sober. His eyes felt like cinders. His mouth tasted like horseblanket purée. He was positive that he had never seen the beautiful blonde woman before. He asked her one of the standard questions for times of violent change. “Where is everybody?” he said. “You threw ‘em all out,” said the woman. “I did?” said Constant. “Yah,” said the woman. “You mean you drew a blank?” Constant nodded weakly. During the fifty-six day party he had reached a point where he could draw almost nothing else. His aim had been to make himself unworthy of any destiny - incapable of any mission - far too ill to travel. He had succeeded to a shocking degree.

Constant is now destitute and desperate, the kind of poor fool who would accept a one way trip to Mars and a position in the Martian army... It’s not like he really had any choice in the matter. Human history, it transpires, has been manipulated for thousands of years, simply so that the Tralfamadorians can deliver a spare part to their stranded traveller. So much for free will.

Use of Weapons by Iain M Banks

The third book in Banks’s Culture Series concerns Cheradenine Zakalwe, an agent for the Culture’s Special Circumstances unit, employed to change the destiny of other civilisations and planets by intrigue, dirty tricks or even military action.

Zakalwe is humanoid, but not of the Culture, and finds his first time on one of the General System’s Vehicles, the Culture’s immense craft carrying millions of people through interstellar space, quite bewildering. A fighting man, he is unused to a life of leisure and limitless recreation. However, he does find time to indulge in one of his favourite hobbies: drinking.

A GSV contains an interesting diversity of drinking companions and some of the people he meets are clearly alien, even more so than Zakalwe:

It had eight limbs, a fairly distinct head with two quite small eyes, curiously flower-like mouth parts, and a large, almost spherical, lightly haired body, coloured red and purple. Its own voice was composed of clicks from its mouth and almost subsonic vibrations from its body; a small amulet did the translating.

This particular alien is also an agent of Special Circumstances, and is quite happy to spend its downtime with other spies:

It banged its drink-bowl on the table to attract a passing tray. “Let’s have another drink; see who gets drunk first.” “You have more legs.” He grinned. “I think I might fall over more easily.” “Ah, but the more legs, the bigger the tangle.” “Fair enough.” He waited for a fresh glass. To one side of them was a small terrace and the bar, to the other a gulf of airy space. The ship, the GSV, went on beyond its apparent boundaries. Its hull was pierced multitudinously by terraces, balconies, walk-ways, open windows, and open bay doors. Surrounding the vessel proper was an immense ellipsoid bubble of air, held in side dozens of different fields, which together made up the Vehicle’s real – though insubstantial – hull. He took up the recharged glass when it arrived, and watched a puttering, piston-engined, paper-winged hang glider zip past the terrace; he waved at the pilot, then shook his head. “To the Culture,” he said, raising his glass to the alien. It matched his gesture. “To its total lack of respect for all things majestic.” “Agreed,” the alien said, and together they drank... The alien was called Chori, he found out later. It was only due to a chance remark that he discovered Chori was a female, which at the time seemed hilariously funny. He woke up the next morning lying soaked as well as soused half underneath a small waterfall in one of the acc section valleys; Chori was suspended from a nearby railing by all eight leg-hooks, making a sporadic clattering noise that he decided was snoring.

Sadly Banks does not tell us which of them ran out of legs first...

The Player of Games by Iain M Banks

The death of Iain Banks this year was a terrible loss to literature. He has at least left a prodigious output behind him with a fine body of both fiction and science fiction, as well as a paeon to the joys of whiskey. I have recently started reading a lot more sci-fi and when he announced his impending demise, it spurred me to read his entire set of Culture novels, in order...

The Culture, a sprawling, spacefaring human/machine utopian society, is the home of Jernau Morat Gurgeh, a great player of games, a master of strategy and skill. He is also bored, and therefore easily persuaded to travel to the fabulously wealthy and sadistically cruel Empire of Azad, where the outcome of the complex strategic game central to their society chooses who will be emperor.

Gurgeh is met with suspicion and hostility in Azad and his only friends are an ornithology obsessed library drone and The Culture’s representative in Azad, the louche and fast living Shohobohaum Za. One of the first things Za does when he gets the chance is to take Gurgeh out for a night on the toot, which ends in attempted blackmail, a fight and a quick escape for the two of them. Surprisingly, Gurgeh is not too keen to repeat the experience. Able to synthesise his own highs using glands in his body like all people in The Culture, he is also unable to understand quite why Za drinks as much as he does:

“Za,” Gurgeh said, sitting forward, chin in hand, elbow on knee, “Why do you drink so much? You don’t need to; you’ve got all the usual glands. Why?”
“Why?” Za said, his head coming upright again; he looked round as though startled to see where he was for a moment. “Why?” he repeated. He hiccuped. “You asked me ‘Why?’?” he said. 
Gurgeh nodded.
Za scratched under one armpit, shook his head and looked apologetic. “What was the question again?”
“Why do you drink so much?” Gurgeh smiled tolerantly.
“Why not?” Za’s arms flapped once. “I mean, have you never done something just... just because? I mean... it’s um... empathy. This is what the locals do, y’know. This is their way out; this is how they escape their place in the glorious imperial machine... and a fucking grand position it is to appreciate its finer points from too... it all makes sense, y’know Gurgeh; I worked it out.” Za nodded wisely, tapped the side of his head very slowly with one limp finger. “Worked it out,” he repeated. “Think about it; the Culture’s all its...” The same finger made a twirling motion in the air. “...built in glands; hundreds of secretions and thousands of effects, any combination you like and all for free... but the Empire, ah ha!” The finger pointed upwards. “In the Empire you got to pay; escape is a commodity like anything else. And it’s this stuff; drink. Lowers the reaction time, makes the tears come easier...” Za put two swaying fingers to his cheeks “...makes the fists come easier...” Now his hands were clenched, and he pretended to box; jabbing. “...and...” He shrugged. “...it eventually kills you.” He looked more or less at Gurgeh. “See?”

Empathy, then... Sadly for Gurgeh, The Culture have more in mind than him just taking part in a great games tournament and by the end of the competition he may well need a very stiff drink.

The Centauri Device by M John Harrison

I don’t usually read much science-fiction but I’d been recommended Harrison’s novel Light, which typically wasn’t in the library, so ended up taking this out instead. Bleak and disturbing, it’s nonetheless a truly inventive novel, credited with revitalising the ‘space-opera’ genre.

Lowlife space-ship captain John Truck is loafing his way around a seedy, dystopian future, when the discovery of his connection to the titular device puts him in the middle of a war between the last two Earth based power-blocks who have carved up the galaxy between them, interplanetary drug pushers, a religious cult devoted the human digestion and a gang of aesthetes called the Interstellar Anarchists.

Rescued from the dealer Chalice Veronica by the dandy Himation, Truck and his crew are brought to a hollowed out asteroid floating between our sun and Alpha Centauri, the base of Sinclair-Pater, the Anarchists leader. His domain is an Aladdin’s Cave of art treasures, both authentic and recreated. The white-suited Pater is an artist as well as the pilot of a fantastical space-ship named The Green Carnation. Truck is brought to his apartment and drinks are served:

By contrast, the suite of rooms adjoining the studio was frugal and austere, with little chintz curtains, stained floorboards bordering Turkey carpets and an atmosphere of cherished isolation. In the sitting room, which was achieved by way of a low passage and a Gothic doorway, there were a few short shelves of old books, a scrubbed deal table and some stiff but charming high-backed chairs. For ornament, a bowl of dried rose petals stood in the precise centre of the table. On the walls of this prim apartment were hung two pictures: one of a head of some wine-god, unfathomable and sensually cruel; the other a rough sketch of a morose, stooping young man – thin, heavy jawed, with deep, close-set eyes, dressed in the garments of a defunct High Church order. Here, they sat down, Himation disappeared into the depths of the suite, returning shortly to flourish his cloak over the table-top (rose petals stirred like leaves of another year, and a remote scent filled the room) and manifest a bottle of wine. He held up his hand – prolonged the moment – four glasses appeared, their stems between his fingers. A faint musical tone. Pater smiled on indulgently.

Pater explains that he wants the Centauri Device simply because everyone else does, and goes on to execute a daring and suicidal raid on the convoy he thinks is carrying it. When the dust settles Truck finds himself on the run from his enemies who are prepared to kill anyone in their way. He must now face the device itself alone...

The Time Machine by HG Wells

One of Wells most famous books, The Time Machine is an account by a scientist known only as the time traveller, who relates to his dinner guests one night the story of his visit to the far flung future.

His guests are waiting for him to join them at the dinner table when he appears at the door in a dreadful state:

He was in an amazing plight. His coat was dusty and dirty, and smeared with green down the sleeves; his hair disordered, and as it seemed to me greyer — either with dust and dirt or because its colour had actually faded. His face was ghastly pale; his chin had a brown cut on it — a cut half healed; his expression was haggard and drawn, as by intense suffering. For a moment he hesitated in the doorway, as if he had been dazzled by the light. Then he came into the room. He walked with just such a limp as I have seen in footsore tramps. We stared at him in silence, expecting him to speak.
He said not a word, but came painfully to the table, and made a motion towards the wine. The Editor filled a glass of champagne, and pushed it towards him. He drained it, and it seemed to do him good: for he looked round the table, and the ghost of his old smile flickered across his face. “What on earth have you been up to, man?” said the Doctor.

Small wonder he’s thirsty. He has just spent over a week in the year 802,701 where the human race has split into two – the innocent, childlike Eloi, and the cave-dwelling, photosensitive Morlocks who prey on them. It has been a trying experience, to say the least:

The Time Traveller pushed his glass towards the Silent Man and rang it with his fingernail; at which the Silent Man, who had been staring at his face, started convulsively, and poured him wine. The rest of the dinner was uncomfortable. For my own part, sudden questions kept on rising to my lips, and I dare say it was the same with the others. The Journalist tried to relieve the tension by telling anecdotes of Hettie Potter. The Time Traveller devoted his attention to his dinner, and displayed the appetite of a tramp. The Medical Man smoked a cigarette, and watched the Time Traveller through his eyelashes. The Silent Man seemed even more clumsy than usual, and drank champagne with regularity and determination out of sheer nervousness. At last the Time Traveller pushed his plate away, and looked round us. “I suppose I must apologize,” he said. “I was simply starving. I've had a most amazing time.”

His account is incredible; the future of the human race depicted as degenerate and ultimately doomed. The time traveller finishes his sojourn on a dying planet Earth, where the last living things, now little more than jellyfish, flop about on the blood red shoreline.

The Time Machine’s influence is undeniable. Time travel in fiction starts here, and with the brassy finish of Victorian engineering on eponymous time machine itself, arguably, so does Steampunk...

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

I first encountered the infamous triffid when I was a young boy and the BBC were broadcasting Wyndham’s classic catastrophe novel as a six-parter. I think I lasted all of twenty minutes before the killer plants ambled onto the screen and I fled screaming out of the room. It took a few more years for me to summon up the nerve to pick up the book, and even over two decades later when I come to reread it, the sheer horror of the situation, a world blind and at the mercy of carnivorous plants, still retains its ability to shock and terrify.

Bill Masen wakes up in hospital one morning with the acute sense that something is wrong. His head bandaged and his eyes covered, he has been recovering from a triffid sting (the eponymous plants have long poisonous lashes that they use to kill their prey), when one night a fabulous green light illuminates the sky. Said to be the tail of a comet, everyone in the world goes outside to look at the free fireworks. The next morning, anyone who watched the lights has been rendered totally blind and Masen finds himself in a silent hospital, filled with shuffling patients unable to comprehend what has happened to them.

His sight saved because of the bandages, Masen tries to get out of the hospital as fast as he can. The gravity of the situation quickly becomes apparent: London, Britain, the whole world, in fact, is blind. Masen decides he needs a stiff drink:

But one thing I was perfectly certain about. Reality or nightmare, I needed a drink as I had seldom needed one before. There was nobody in sight in the little side street outside the yard gates, but almost opposite stood a pub. I can recall its name now – ‘The Alamein Arms’. There was a board bearing a reputed likeness of Viscount Montgomery hanging from an iron bracket, and below, one of the doors stood open. I made straight for it. Stepping into the public bar game me for the moment a comforting sense of normality. It was prosaically and familiarly like dozens of others. But although there was no one in that part, there was certainly something going on in the saloon bar, round the corner. I heard heavy breathing. A cork left its bottle with a pop. A pause. Then a voice remarked: “Gin, blast it! T’hell with gin!” There followed a shattering crash.

He finds the landlord, who is blind’s a bat, trying to locate a bottle of Scotch:

I took down a bottle of whisky from the shelf, opened it, and handed it to him with a glass. For myself I chose a stiff brandy with very little soda, and then another. After that my hand wasn’t shaking so much. I looked at my companion. He was taking his whisky neat, out of the bottle. “You’ll get drunk,” I said. He paused and turned his head towards me. I could have sworn that his eyes really saw me. “Get drunk! Damn it, I am drunk,” he said scornfully. He was so perfectly right that I didn’t comment. He brooded a moment before he announced: “Gotta get mush drunker.”

The publican has deduced that it was the comets that did the damage, an opinion reinforced by the fact that Masen didn’t watch them and can still see.

I poured myself a third brandy, wondering whether there might not be something in what he was saying. “Everyone blind?” I repeated. “Thash it. All of ‘em. Prob’ly everyone in th’ world – ‘cept you,” he added, as an after thought. “How do you know?” I asked. “S’easy. Listen!” he said. We stood side by side leaning on the bar of the dingy pub, and listened. There was nothing to be heard – nothing but the rustle of a dirty newspaper blown down the empty street. Such a quietness held everything as cannot have been known in these parts for a thousand years and more.

Masen is now faced with having to survive in a hostile world where only a handful of sighted people remain. The void left by the human race leaves space for the triffids, and Masen is suddenly at the wrong end of the food chain...

The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

The Difference Engine is a wonderful piece of speculative fiction set in the19th century where Charles Babbage’s mechanical computer of the same name succeeds in bringing forward the information revolution by over one hundred years. Part Victorian pastiche, part pseudo-historical document, it’s debatable whether it is a novel at all, though this is in no way a criticism. One of the more remarkable books I’ve read of late, (and my first proper foray into the genre of steampunk), The Difference Engine is something I’ll almost certainly return to.

The authors’ research is impressive and the characters only have to step into a great bright Whitechapel gin-palace, with glittering gold-papered walls flaring with fishtail gas-jets for me to be able to smell the sawdust on the floor. Sadly the drinks themselves are less impressive:

He’d bought her a noggin of honey gin. She sat beside him. “You did well, girl,” he said, and slid the glass towards her. The place was full of Crimean soldiers on furlough. Irishmen, with street-drabs hanging on them, growling red-nosed and screechy on gin. No barmaids here, but big bruiser bully-rock bartenders, in white aprons, with mill-knocker clubs behind the bar. “Gin’s a whore’s drink, Mick.” ... He sipped his gin-twist, rolled it over his tongue with an unhappy look, and swallowed. “Never mind, dear – they’ve cut this with turpentine or I’m a Jew.”

The book’s focus flits between Sybil Gerard, a ruined woman whose father was a famous Luddite, Laurence Oliphant, journalist and secret government agent, and Edward Mallory, discoverer of the Leviathan, a set of Brontosaurus bones in Wyoming. Mallory is first encountered at the Epsom Derby, attending the steam races:

He put it from his mind, seeing that drink was being sold from a striped canvas tent, men crowding the counter, wiping foam from their mouths. A thirst struck him at the sight of it. Veering around at trio of sporting-gents, crops under their arms, who argued the day’s odds, he reached the counter and tapped it with a shilling. “Pleasure, sar?” asked the barman. “A huckle-buff.” “Sussex man, sar?” “I am. Why?” “Can’t make you a proper huckle-buff, sar, as I haven’t barley-water,” the fellow explained, looking briskly sad. “Not much call for it outside Sussex...Mix you a lovely bumboo, sar. Much like a huckle-buff. No? A good cigar, then. Only tuppence! Fine Virginia weed.” The barman presented a crooked cheroot from a wooden box.

Poor fellow has to make do with beer, but before the racing is done, he has found himself mixed up with a wayward Ada Byron and in possession of a very dangerous box. In short, he is in trouble, and ends up under the protection of the mysterious Oliphant, who later rescues him from assault, with the help of five visitors from Japan. Oliphant then proposes that it’s tincture time:

“Under the circumstances,” Oliphant mused, “Dreadful hot day, a tiring foray after enemies of the realm – a small libation is in order.” He lifted a brass bell from the table and rang it. “So, let’s get friendly, eh? Nani o onomi ni narimasu ka?” The Japanese conferred, their eyes widening, with happy nods and sharp grunts of approval. “Uisuki...” “Whisky, an excellent choice,” said Oliphant.

Not that Mallory, a bluff lad from Lewes, wants protecting. He’s soon slipped his guardians and is off to the Cremorne Gardens, looking for a dollymop to take him home. First, he needs to get up a bit of Dutch Courage:

Mallory had two more whiskys at the platform’s bar. The whisky was cheap and smelled peculiar, either tainted by the Stink or doctored with hartshorn or potash or quassia. Or perhaps indian-berry, for the stuff had the colour of bad stout. The whisky shots sat in his stomach like a pair of hot coals.

Even so, he succeeds, and for the promise of a guinea, goes back to Whitechapel with a young lady called Hetty. He tries to explain how London works:

“London is a complex system out of equilibrium. It’s like – it’s like a drunken man, blind drunk, in a room with whisky bottles. The whisky is hidden – so he’s always walking about looking for it. When he finds a bottle, he takes a long drink, but puts is down and forgets it at once. Then he wanders and looks again, over and over.”

Unfortunately, the bottle is about to explode. A combination of the Great Stink and pea souper fogs has led to riots and looting. Mallory is going to wake up in Whitechapel with a dreadful hangover and a hellish walk back to Kensington through a city in the grip of Luddite revolt...

Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny

I have to confess that once again I’m allowing my reading choice to be dictated by listening to my old Hawkwind records, in this case the song of the same name from their 1977 album Quark, Strangeness & Charm. A post-atomic apocalypse road trip from LA to Boston to deliver a serum to a dying city, Damnation Alley is pretty pulpy stuff, both on vinyl and in paperback.

Hell Tanner is the last of the Angels, a motorcycle outlaw whose gang has been destroyed by the Nation of California, one of three cities left in North America after a catastrophic nuclear war. He’s given an ultimatum; either spend the rest of his life behind bars or help drive medicine to bubonic plague ridden Boston through the nightmare of Damnation Alley, a deadly landscape spanning America, full of rock storms, tornadoes, giant snakes and vampire bats and Gila monsters the size of barns.

Damnation Alley is a book about redemption and Tanner is no hero at the start. As the man releasing him at the beginning of the book puts it:

You’re a drunk and a degenerate, and I don’t think you’ve had a bath since the day you were born... You are not a human being, except from a biological standpoint.

Tanner’s ride is exhilarating stuff; he is part of a convoy of eight-wheeled cars, armed with flame throwers, rockets, grenades and heavy machine guns. The empty wastes of the Mid-West see him pass through the empty remains of Kansas City and St Louis, crossing the mighty Missus Hip on a creaking bridge cluttered with broken down cars. By the time he’s made it to what used to be the state of New York, he’s in need of refreshment:

He drew up in front of a flickering red sign that said: “Bar and Grill”, parked, and entered. It was small, and there was jukebox music playing, tunes he’d never heard before, and the lighting was poor, and there was sawdust on the floor. He sat down at the bar and pushed the Magnum way down behind his belt so that it didn’t show... When the man in white apron approached, he said: “Give me a shot and a beer and a ham sandwich.”

It’s not over yet. He still has to get to Boston and he quickly tangles with a motorcycle gang. Killing all but one, he picks up the survivor who is a chick and who he quickly takes a shine to. Especially when it turns out she has a bottle of hooch on her:

“I can buy you a drink.” “What do you mean?” She drew a plastic flask from the right side pocket of her jacket. She uncapped it and passed it to him. “Here.” He took a mouthful and gulped it, coughed, took a second, then handed it back. “Great! You’re a woman of unsuspected potential and I like that. Thanks.”

Too bad she doesn’t make it to Boston with Tanner, but it’s a rough world out there in the post-apocalypse.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick

One of the most powerful books I’ve read this year, Dick’s science fiction classic is a thought provoking observation on empathy and what it means to be human.

In a future world devastated by nuclear war, Rick Deckard is a licensed bounty hunter employed by the state to ‘retire’ renegade androids; exact breathing replicas almost indistinguishable from human beings, created as slaves for the off-world colonies.

Deckard’s ultimate goal is to own a real animal, now incredibly rare after the World War Terminus, and his mission to kill off half a dozen Nexus-6 androids is inextricably bound to his desire to replace the electric sheep on his rooftop with a living, breathing goat.

With most items now synthesised or modified, even comestibles we currently take for granted are incredibly rare or impossible to obtain. Alcohol features only twice in the book, but the poignancy of a glass of Chablis or bottle of bourbon made before the WWT and the subsequent radioactive dust is almost crushing.

Deckard’s mission almost comes unstuck when he starts to empathise with his quarry and even believes it possible to fall in love with an android. The beautiful Rachel Rosen flies down from Seattle to San Francisco to meet him in a hotel room, bringing a special gift in a paper bag:

She held out the paper bag. “I bought a bottle. Bourbon... It’s worth a fortune, you realize. It’s not synthetic; it’s from before the war, made from genuine mash.”

The effect on Deckard is intoxicating:

He sipped the bourbon; the power of it, the authoritative strong taste and scent, had become almost unfamiliar to him and he had trouble swallowing. Rachel, in contrast, had no difficulty with hers.

But that’s because Rachel, being an android, can feel nothing...