American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s

Fans of vintage SF will rejoice at this deluxe edition of nine classic novels from SF’s Golden Age. Picking a favourite is impossible: time travel, space opera, dystopic visions, science fantasy, and post-apocalyptic adventures are all on tap, and in some cases they’ve never been handled better. Of course there’s a 1950s flavour to the proceedings — this is the future that was — but at the same time it’s remarkable how lightly these novels wear their age. In large part that’s because their influence has been so great: to a large extent it was the science fiction of the ’50s that defined the genre as it’s still practiced today, and we’re still exploring worlds that these authors first imagined.

Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow

In a near-future England 16-year-old Trent McCauley is busted by the Internet police for illegally downloading and re-mixing film clips. Upset, he runs off to London to join the cyber-underground, and gets a heady taste of first love and idealistic politics leading the fight against against the jackbooted, corporatist police state and its draconian copyright laws — a cause near and dear to the heart of author and activist Cory Doctorow.

Whatever the merits of that cause, and they get a full airing here in several set-piece speeches, Pirate Cinema has to be judged a very irresponsible book. Not only does Doctorow shamelessly flatter his target teen-hacker audience by pandering to their already well-developed feelings of being smarter and more important than everyone else, he also peddles a dangerous fantasy, especially for a YA title: Trent is a kid who runs away from home to the big city, where he is immediately adopted by a lovable street-wise buddy and gets to enjoy a comfortable life of petty crime, playing around on the Internet, casual drug use, and sex with a cute anarchist girl, before becoming an overnight hero and global celebrity by splicing together a bunch of video popcorn (apparently this is the only thing artists are capable of in our age of cannibal culture, where all human life is dependent on the Internet). The fact that Doctorow is a good writer with a large following only makes it more essential that he take a big step back and think a bit more about what kind of message he’s sending.

The Fifty Year Sword by Mark Z. Danielewski

A simple Halloween ghost story about a cheating woman getting her comeuppance is tricked out to the max, Danielewski-style, in The Fifty Year Sword. What this mainly means is visual gimmickry, including colour-coded quotation marks signaling the speech of different characters, a whole book’s worth of blank versos, and a lot of expressionistic stitchwork art. It’s all very clever, but there’s just not a lot here. Originally it was produced as a performance piece, where it probably worked better.

Janus by John Park

A lot of SF novels rise or fall on the strength of their basic concept. In Ottawa-author John Park’s debut novel it’s a winner: people are leaving Earth by way of a sort of wormhole known as the Knot and settling on a new planet called Janus. The twist is that many of the colonists on Janus have trouble remembering their previous lives on Earth, and a rumour begins to circulate that Janus is actually a penal planet populated by criminal psycopaths who have had their memories wiped. Which means that total recall is likely to get messy. Janus is imagined as a place that hosts an intriguing blend of old and new technologies: neuroscience and the talking cure, spaceships and dirigibles. Park’s writing sometimes works too hard, especially in the bedroom, but his premise is both clever and original, and has enough of a paranoid spin to it to maintain suspense throughout.

Alex Good reviews SF and speculative fiction for the Star. Jennifer Hunter’s column returns.