In City of Illusions, the Shing have shattered the old League of All Worlds and dominated the Earth—whose people they allow to live quiet pastoral lives subject to only one rarely enforced Law: It Is Wrong To Take Life.

The power of the Shing, the legend says, is that they are able to mindlie—a skill that goes beyond the normal human telepathic capabilities in the Hainish universe. Everything about the Shing is some kind of falsehood or mockery. They have elevated animals with the power of speech: flocks of birds chatter with human words, and wild pigs and chickens squawk the Shing Law to human hunters (“It is wrong to take life!”).

Le Guin’s focus on mockery and falseness as the form of evil reminds me of Tolkien. In The Silmarillion, Melkor’s every prideful effort to emulate God is transformed into a mockery and a counterfeit of the object of his imitation. That something is “untrue” is what makes it evil. It is very clear that the humans of Shing Earth see things in much the same way—the pleading appeal of the pig and the chicken to the Shing’s Law against killing is a nuisance and a symbol of a poisoned world whose right and natural order has been perverted.

The narrative perspective of City of Illusions is that only a race in which killing runs deep could conceive of an absolute Law against all killing; and the Shing do things worse than killing anyway, like erasing people’s memory or letting people kill each other. Thus reassured of the hypocrisy and essential falseness of the Shing, we can get on with the “liberation” of all the Earth’s species from Laws that go against the true natural order, which is (naturally) that animals who cannot speak Man’s languages must serve Man in the the only form intelligible to his insatiable appetite: protein, blood, and fat.

Perhaps it is true that the Shing do protest too much and that their Law testifies to their own vicious nature, but of all known races in our own known universe, there is none so dedicated to killing as Humankind, and our own statutes provide for the lawful killing of humans and non-humans alike at scales that defy belief and all sense of morality—even Human morality. City of Illusions suggests that even if the birds and pigs were given intelligible voice, Man would view their pleas as mockery.

Frank Herbert’s God Emperor of Dune is the most delightfully unhinged novel I have ever read. I cannot deny that I have loved all three of the preceding Dune novels, perhaps even more so than God Emperor. But just as Leto II intentionally reduced the mystique of Paul-Muad’Dib to parody in order to deliver Humankind from a horrifying future, I suppose Herbert’s ruthless approach to our memory of wind-swept Arrakis may have been a requirement to make room for the larger-than-life whimsy of God Emperor.

I have always thought that we should write what we know deeply. The problem with Dune and its copious epigrapha—often straight from the blessed lips of Muad’Dib—is the combination of absolute seriousness and near-total lack of signal in his wordy pronouncements. Was Muad’Dib a bullshitter, or was Herbert the bullshitter? I think Herbert aimed to portray Paul-Muad’Dib as a great (but fatally flawed) thinker of another world and time, but the danger of writing speculatively about things you do not know deeply (philosophy, history, the State, and the Spirit) is that successive generations may find the result less credible than did the Mid-Century Man, whose more limited access to the breadth of human culture tended to generate “profound” insights that are quickly hackneyed.

God Emperor turns all this on its head—Leto II’s wordiness and tendancy to unclear (meaningless?) pronouncement is legendary (and a thorn in the side of his retainers and his enemies alike), but that is one of the privileges accorded to a God. Leto II is the greatest bullshitter to ever live, and he knows it! The Golden Path, that tenuous thread in the tapestry of time by which Mankind may narrowly avoid total extermination by prescient machine minds, demands nothing less than Leto’s unintelligible tyranny. Who are we to question a God, and who can be Shai-Hulud besides the only living sandworm?

Moments before leaving for a meeting in Barbados with my colleagues Anil Madhavapeddy and Mark Elvers, I hastily loaded Arthur C. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise onto my Kindle for airplane reading. I really want to love “hard science fiction” — I spent months with Asimov’s Foundation in 2022 — but I must admit that I am struggling with the limitations of this genre.

In her 2013 interview with The Paris Review, Ursula Le Guin questioned the hard/soft divide in science fiction, pointing out that the distinction seems to be based on authors and readers of sci-fi arbitrarily deciding which of the sciences are “Science” and which aren’t.

The “hard”–science fiction writers dismiss everything except, well, physics, astronomy, and maybe chemistry. Biology, sociology, anthropology—that’s not science to them, that’s soft stuff. They’re not that interested in what human beings do, really. But I am. I draw on the social sciences a great deal. I get a lot of ideas from them, particularly from anthropology. When I create another planet, another world, with a society on it, I try to hint at the complexity of the society I’m creating, instead of just referring to an empire or something like that.

There is a good point here, and Le Guin’s attention to social sciences and anthropology and history was indeed a strength, but Asimov was also preoccupied with the same throughout Foundation. So what is the difference, aside from the fact that Foundation was written by a man? Well, it cannot be unrelated to Asimov being a man, but perhaps we will get to the point sooner by referring to a specific type of man — the Mid-Century Man.

The Mid-Century Man has no time for the usual literary rules governing the development of characters and their arc of growth. He is interested in science and humanity, yes, but through the lens of his own avatar whom he transplants directly from our world of his time into the futuristic world of his story. This hapless transplant finds himself, with no volition, speaking the author’s words through his own lips… He hears his own voice prattle on about “the last refuge of the incompetent” and can do absolutely nothing about it.

The inclination of the Mid-Century Man to spill no ink that might distract from his speculations (flavoured with thematic orientalism, as in the case of Fountains) is not limited to hard science fiction — Herbert falls prey to the same tendancy in Dune, which I adore, but he is saved by his mastery of the tragedy-form: indeed, we are already weeping with Paul over Chani’s fate a quarter of the way through Dune Messiah.

In contrast, there is little that is compelling about the characters of The Fountains of Paradise, nor those of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the same holds for Asimov’s Foundation. The mostly one-dimensional characters of these works are foils for the authors’ speculative ideas about technology or “future history”, and a shorter work could have been written that omits the ventriloquy act entirely and just directly makes the point the author so strongly wished to make.

Will Fountains be the last “hard science fiction” book I read? Surely not… There is still much to enjoy and marvel over — and there is a true sense in which Clarke’s elevator to Heaven is compelling enough to outweigh even the worst of his flimsy characterisation.

Two months ago I reviewed Harry Harrison’s delightful West of Eden, a piece of speculative fiction that considers a world in which the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event never occurred, and one species of dinosaur went on to evolve over the subsequent 66 million years into a highly sophisticated society stratified by uneven linguistic abilities. The most intelligent stratum of this species calls itself Yilanè, which is at once an ethnonym and a classification of linguistic ability.

In Harrison’s Eden, reptiles of all kinds dominate Africa (Entoban in Yilanè) whereas mankind (Tanu and Sasku in their languages) and other mammals live in North America (Gendasi in Yilanè), confined at first mainly to its colder northern reaches. The icy winds of climate change blow across Entoban and northern Gendasi alike, which leads mankind to migrate south just as the Yilanè begin to colonise southern Gendasi. The encounter of Tanu and Yilanè is predictably violent—when the Tanu encounter the torpid Yilanè males basking on the birthing beaches of Alpèasak (the new Yilanè colony in our own Florida), they slay them immediately and spark a war of the species that shapes the entire trilogy.

That is the premise of West of Eden, the first book of the Eden Trilogy, which tells the story of a young Tanu man named Kerrick who is kidnapped and raised by Yilanè in Alpèasak. The next two books, Winter in Eden and Return to Eden, concern the continuing struggle of Tanu and their Sasku allies to survive in the South while being pursued by a genocidal Yilanè expedition, and of the minority faction of Yilanè called the Daughters of Life who aim to establish a peaceful city in South America.

Although Winter in Eden and Return to Eden share the charm of the first book, they do not quite live up to its promise. Without revealing anything that might spoil the Trilogy (which I do still recommend), there are several imperfections that give a reader the distinct impression of rushed writing—especially in Return.

• Throughout Return to Eden the toponyms Gendasi and Entoban are frequently mixed up, leading to a great deal of confusion. For example, Vaintè says “But Entoban is large, most of it unknown to us, warm and filled with good meat” but this could only refer to Gendasi in the context of the novel. I am apparently not the only person to notice this oversight, as can be seen by perusing the Amazon reviews.
• Relatedly, there is no explicit toponym for South America, which plays an important role in the story. Indeed, South America appears to be referred to as part of Gendasi, which makes sense considering the land bridge that joins it to North America, but in that case it is surprising that Gendasi is glossed as North America rather than The Americas.
• Several interesting story-lines appear to be dropped on the floor. What of the scientist Ambalasei’s fate, and will the radical city Ambalasokei survive?

Perhaps what was needed most was more time. Despite these imperfections, I don’t regret my time in Eden—and I dream of returning there one day.

I have found that one could do far worse than perusing the r/CoolSciFiCovers subreddit and picking things to read at random. This week I chose West of Eden based on its outstanding cover art, and it turned out to be a very enjoyable read.

The premise is that the impact causing the mass extinction of non-avian dinosaurs never occurred, and neolithic Man unknowingly shares the Earth with a very advanced and highly stratified female-dominated race of intelligent lizards whose males have two penises (don’t ask me why! apparently this is common in nature). When climate change threatens both the human and lizard civilisations, they are forced to migrate and, in doing so, discover each other’s presence and clash violently.

Some aspects of the story are a little old-fashioned—I barely need to discuss the instinctive disgust and “racial hatred” felt by the humans and the lizards for each other, but the narrative ultimately challenges this feeling by revealing each culture to be civilised in its own terms, if not in terms that would lead to a cooperative multi-species stewardship of the Earth.

The initial inability of the intelligent lizards to fathom that the “filthy ustuzou”—the lizard phrase for humans and other mammalian creatures—may be sentient and even conscious entities of moral force is challenged by their experience, and by a religious extremist trend within their society that recognises the intrinsic value of all forms of conscious life. In a time where current science continues to reveal, bit by bit, the overconfident ignorance and moral wickedness of those who have insisted that the “lower forms of life” on our own Earth are without sentience, value, moral force (the octopus, the elephant, etc.), it is hard to read this without thinking about our own “filthy ustuzou” and the future consequences of our vicious behaviour toward them.

Reading How the Steel was Tempered, I am struck by the way the narrative takes a definite position—it is for us, children of the future!—without cloaking itself in the viewpoints of depicted characters or that of an active narrator. How unsophisticated and innocent it must seem to those acquainted with the “neutrality” of bourgeois fiction, which deviates from the viewpoint of the bourgeoisie only to relate the views of a character—who naturally lives in a different world.