On his decade long voyage, the Greek hero Odysseus encounters the alluring Sirens, as he and his men journey home. As deadly as they were beautiful, the Sirens were known for their enchanting song, luring sailors and their ships towards the rocks and their inevitable doom. Odysseus’ men fill their ears with beeswax to resist the Siren’s call and sail the waters safely. Not so for Odysseus. He has himself bound to the mast of the ship so that he may hear the song itself, and know its seductive power. The fetters that bind Odysseus and the loyalty of his men, ultimately save him from ruin. Then they are attacked by a six headed monster called Scylla as they steer to avoid the enormous whirlpool Charybdis as one expects in a Greek Epic.

A siren song calls for me this week. And I will bind myself to this keyboard to hear its melody and resist its lure.

This week, a tiny British company known as Hello Games launched a highly anticipated science fiction game No Man’s Sky. The game begins by stranding each player on a planet where they must gather the necessary minerals and isotopes to repair their spaceship. Once they escape the gravity of that first world in their tiny spacecraft, they find themselves on the edge of a galaxy. Before them lie 18,446,744,073,709,551,616, or 18 quintillion unique planets, in a galaxy they share with all other players. It is an ambitious and audacious concept, one with unprecedented scope in gaming. No Man’s Sky is based on the childhood dream of Director Sean Murray, who imagined being the first astronaut to step onto an alien world. It also draws significant inspiration from the science fiction novels, and the aesthetics of their covers, that Murray and his colleagues read in their youth. Works like Frank Herbert’s Dune and the novels and short stories of Issac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlen. These are authors that I too read growing up; these are worlds I too wish to explore. But in light of recent Pokémon related relapses, it is perhaps unwise of me to heed the call of No Man’s Sky. So I will satisfy myself by asking the following:

• What does it take to make 16 quintillion worlds?

• When we talk about science fiction writers, why do we only talk about men? What are women writing about?

In June 2013, a major science fiction and fantasy publisher, Tor UK, released some statistics on writing submissions received that year (Tor, June 2013). Although women submitted more Young Adult and Urban Fantasy/Paranormal Romance novels than men (though only marginally in the latter case), in all other categories the margins are wide. Of the 503 submissions, only 32% were from female writers. In Science Fiction, the chasm is widest, with only 22% of submissions originating from female writers. These days the majority of UK genre publishing houses are run by women, and yet the submissions statistics remain skewed. Perhaps it is because female science fiction writers are never really afforded the same level of interest; never really discussed alongside the Asimovs and Clarkes. That cannot possibly be helpful to young female writers trying to get published in a competitive industry. I have read very little science fiction written by female authors, not for any particular reason other than a lack of awareness. So in trying to correct course, in steering to avoid Charybdis, I read Ann Leckie’s debut novel last year, and I read works by Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood this week. And we are going to talk about them, because they are all exceptionally good and yet they are rarely mentioned.

Ancillary Justice

Anne Leckie

Anne Leckie’s novel Ancillary Justice (2013), won her the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Award and the Locus Award. She basically won all the major awards a science fiction novel can win, and all that with her first novel. Set thousands of years in the future, the galaxy of Ancillary Justice is controlled by the expansionist Radch Empire. The Radchaai exert their dominion through massive artificially intelligent (AI) starships, each of which controls an army of animated ‘corpse’ soldiers who fight alongside normal humans. These AI controlled bodies are known as ancillaries, and the novel centres around the ancillary AI Breq, the sole surviving remnant of the Radch ship Justice of Toren. The novel’s twin plots are set 19 years apart, weaving between the events leading to the destruction of the Justice of Toren, and Breq’s present day quest for revenge.

Ancillary Justice is an intriguingly constructed and relatively propulsive space opera. But it is a poor starting point if you have read little science fiction, because it presupposes a fair understanding of traditional space opera tropes and a willingness to engage with the initially complex world building and terminology. Leckie’s Radch Empire makes no distinctions between genders, using female personal pronouns for all. This concept in combination with typically inscrutable science fiction character names, means that it is often impossible to recognise the gender of most characters. At first this lack of knowledge can be quite disconcerting, particularly if one is given to constructing mental imagery. But reasonably quickly, as I expect Leckie intended, you realise that gender really has no bearing on the characters, and the deliberate ambiguity allows for any interpretations the reader may wish to impose.

Leckie’s novel is written in first person from the perspective of the Justice of Toren AI. In the present day, the former starship AI is reduced to a single being: Breq. But in the past, Justice of Toren spanned a multitude of bodies, splitting between multiple viewpoints, that are part of a whole, yet also developing their own personality traits. While the overall plot is less visionary than the world building, with some pacing issues in the first act, and characterisation that is occasionally fairly scant, Leckie does manage to elevate Ancillary Justice. It is her pluralised and parallelised depiction of consciousness, her interesting representation of gender, her commentary on Empires, colonialism and class division, and her well structured narrative, that make Ancillary Justice worth reading.

The Parable of the Sower

Octavia Butler

Among female science fiction writers, Octavia Butler is one of the most well known and respected, and amongst African American female science fiction writers, she is undoubtedly the most prominent. All of which is to say, that despite having won multiple Hugo and Nebula awards, and a MacArthur Fellowship (Genius Grant), Octavia Butler is not particularly well known. And that is disappointing. Though she passed away in 2006, it is startling how prescient and modern her writing is. Butler’s 1993 novel The Parable of the Sower, the first in her Earthseed series, is eminently readable, standing head-and-shoulders above many of the more recent female-led, Young Adult (YA), dystopian science fiction.

Composed as the written journal of Lauren Oya Olamina, The Parable of the Sower is set in a future where the American government and society as a whole, is on the brink of collapse. Amidst ecological and economic crises, Lauren lives, by necessity, in a gated cul-de-sac community in a Los Angeles neighbourhood, protected from the violent and the destitute. The novel charts three years in Lauren’s life, at first as part of her half-Black, half-Hispanic Baptist family in Los Angeles, and then on her journey north. Increasingly desperate governments try to deal with unemployment and hyperinflation using aggressive privatisation and laxer employment laws. What results is the reinstitution of company towns and forms of debt slavery and hereditary debt transference. It is poignant that the Black and Hispanic characters are skeptical of these towns being ‘white enclaves’ while the White characters remain somewhat oblivious to the nature of indentured slavery. For a novel written in the 90’s, it is remarkable that Butler’s commentaries on class, colour and socioeconomic conditions, remain pertinent today.

The book does not shy away from violence, including violence perpetrated against women and children. Horrendous moments punctuate the narrative, and yet, in the voice and writings of the teenage Lauren, these acts are stripped of the sensationalisation that many writers use to elicit emotional reactions. Butler manages to craft Lauren such that her writing serves as a means of processing events; a reflection of her state of mind, rather than an overwrought description of what she witnesses. It is a testament to Butler’s understanding of voice and narrative, that in her hands, a single, short sentence can be more gut wrenching than entire pages of prose.

Despite the unremitting terror and tragedy in Butler’s novel, there is also a pervasive sense of hope. Lauren, who suffers from a condition known as hyperempathy, causing her to feel any pain she physically views, remains committed to the idea of community. As the novel progresses, Lauren develops a fledgling pseudo-religion/pseudo-philosophy, drawing on the constructs of her Baptist upbringing, to characterise God as Change. Throughout the novel, passages and aphorisms from Lauren’s new religion, Earthseed, are scattered amongst the chapters, and it is here that Butler can feel slightly heavy handed. That said, her protagonist is a teenager, and such criticisms begin to fade as Lauren ages and grows more assured.

The Parable of the Sower does not offer any solutions; it is a vivid reflection on humanity’s problems that is highly readable, even for those with no background or interest in Science Fiction. In characterising Lauren as an active, pragmatic teenager, committed to establishing a dependable community, Butler has created a truly compelling heroine.

Oryx & Crake

Margaret Atwood

The Science Fiction community has a tenuous relationship with Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. An accomplished poet, novelist, essayist and literary critic, Atwood has won the Booker Prize, one of the highest accolades in literature, having been shortlisted a further four times. Among her novels, many of which are works of historical fiction, Atwood has written a trilogy of post apocalyptic novels, beginning in 2003 with Oryx & Crake. Despite bearing many of the hallmarks of Science Fiction, Atwood has stated that she prefers the term Speculative Fiction since her work is set on Earth and extrapolates from existing technologies rather than including fanciful elements such as faster-than-light (FTL) travel aliens. Parts of the wider Science Fiction community reacted poorly. Genres themselves are largely marketing constructs, existing to facilitate further sales. Whether on not the distinction adds literary legitimacy that Science Fiction does not possess, the whole argument is rather meaningless and a real shame. Because Atwood is a fantastic writer, and Oryx & Crake, however you classify it, is a great novel.

If The Parable of the Sower is about a society sliding rapidly towards an apocalypse, then Atwood’s Oryx & Crake is well beyond the apocalypse. The central figure in Oryx & Crake is surprisingly, neither Oryx nor Crake, but rather a man known as Snowman who lives in a tree. The gradually starving Snowman tends to a group of gentle humanoid herbivores he calls ‘Crakers’ and maintains a religion he has accidentally created. Atwood’s novel is structured non-linearly, darting back and forth between the plight of Snowman, and his past life as a boy named Jimmy. While Oryx & Crake begins rather slowly, it accelerates as more is revealed of Jimmy’s youth, his friendship with the ambitious scientist Crake and his love for the tragic Oryx. The narrative becomes tense and absorbing, winding its way towards an inevitable calamity. To reveal more would be to spoil the experience.

Oryx & Crake is a breathtakingly ambitious novel that explores multinational corporate culture, genetic research, exploitation, love, sex and consumer culture. Atwood’s research evident, sometimes too obviously, with much of the central plot extrapolating from real world science and cultural trends. Her prose is capable and immersive, certainly far better than many other Science Fiction authors, but never quite as emotive as the likes of Octavia Butler. While Jimmy is multifaceted and well developed, Oryx and Crake have their stories relayed or observed, creating a strong alluring sense of mystery, but also a distance between reader and character. Though it clings too rigidly to an underlying cautionary tale, Atwood’s Oryx & Crake is a solid ride and a solid read.

Take root amongst the stars

Because of your preternatural powers of focus, you will recall that we began by asking what it would take to make 16 quintillion worlds. The answer is: logic. In order to create the galaxy of No Man’s Sky, Murray and his team built a mathematical architecture capable of procedurally generating planets and systems, seeding the algorithm with random numbers in order to produce variability. The game procedurally generates landscapes, ecosystems and lifeforms and so expansive and diverse are its results, that the developers had to build algorithmic drones, or probes, to explore and test their galaxy for them.

In a similar fashion Science Fiction is wholly dependent on logic. However fanciful or flawed a setting may be, there is usually a clear ruleset and an underlying internal logic. From that foundation in reasoning, the author can take their audiences to the furthest extrapolation or most twisted subversion of the initial concept. They can create new worlds and narratives to immerse us. And if Science Fiction is designed to enthral, to spark dialogue and debate, and to reflect on what it means to be human, then I think it is fairly important that female writers are part of the conversation.