Neal Asher: Orbus

If this was the future, and there existed a desolate, lawless area of space which was a contested no-man’s-land between two implacably opposed galactic cultures and which was known colloquially as “the Graveyard”, would you ever want to go there? Would you, in fact, want to venture within a hundred light years of the place? I certainly wouldn’t, and neither would you if you’re as pathetically cautious as I am. Luckily for readers of Orbus, however, the characters in Neal Asher’s latest book are not averse to a little trouble now and then. And trouble – in spades – is exactly what they find in the Graveyard.

Ever since reading Neal Asher’s The Skinner back in 2003, I have thought that the Prador (a race of enjoyably nasty and warlike crustacean-analogues from deep space) are among some of the best SF baddies to emerge since Terry Nation invented the Daleks. Furthermore I have believed it was high time that they had a whole novel to themselves, more or less, without any danger of the planet Spatterjay’s entertainingly horrible and ruthless oceanic fauna stealing the show. Asher’s 2006 novel Prador Moon came close to accomplishing this, the one caveat being that it was all too short, but at 438 pages, Orbus hits the bull’s-eye.

So, what’s to like? Plenty! As per usual in a Neal Asher book, there is no shortage of futuristic mayhem, as Prador engage in battle with one another, and with monstrosities even scarier than themselves, in a flurry of explosions, crashes, laser blasts, rail-gun duels and hand-to-hand (claw-to-claw) fisticuffs. Joining the fray is the eponymous Orbus (a Spatterjay native with superhuman strength and an attitude problem), his rather dim sidekick Drooble, the nautiloid-shaped war drone Sniper (who easily has to be my favourite Neal Asher character) and his own sidekick, the seahorse-shaped drone Thirteen. They find that even a boosted musculature and/or fiendishly advanced weaponry do not necessarily guarantee survival in an environment like this, where sudden death is usually only a fraction of a second away. It is, of course, all excellent, violent fun.

What impresses me in Orbus, and in Neal Asher novels generally (as it also does in the novels of Iain M Banks) is the ease with which the future technology is described, to the point where it becomes difficult to accept that rail-guns, fusion power plants, augs, chainglass and all the other accoutrements don’t actually exist right now (although I’m sure DARPA is on the case) and this is a testament to the way Asher is able to make his fantastically and nightmarishly improbable scenarios seem absolutely solid and real.

What also delights is that along the way the reader is treated almost imperceptibly to some of the bigger themes and questions in both fiction and real life. Such as, what makes aliens alien? (Take a while to think about that one.) And if you take most of what defines a person away from him (by reanimating his corpse under the control of an uploaded digital snapshot of his own mind, let’s say, or infecting him with a virus that causes him to undergo rapid and irreversible mutation) is what remains the same person? Happily, these thought experiments are not conveyed by long expository passages but occur as by-products of the relentless action-filled story, like a crop of interesting weeds found growing in a bomb crater.

Some reviewers have pointed to the rather lacklustre character of Orbus himself as a weakness in the novel, but my own impression is that, mad as this may sound, he is just about ideal for the role – physically superhuman enough to hold his own in an environment where mere humans wouldn’t last more than a minute at most, and at the same time able to act as a perfect foil to the more exuberant or dramatically interesting characters. In my opinion, it works.

As you have probably realised by now, I had a lot of fun reading this novel; and yes, I’m rather a fan of Neal Asher’s books, generally. Orbus isn’t The Catcher in the Rye, or Anna Karenina, but then it never sets out to be. There are indeed days when I prefer to read something like Anna Karenina. And there are other days, mostly after having done my level best to help prop up this country’s ailing economy for another twenty-four hours, when what I really, really want to read about – and nothing else will do – is aliens trying to murder one another with absurdly powerful military hardware.

Colour Edition

We’re still in the depths of winter here in London, with a preponderance of grey skies, rain, sleet and outdoor temperatures not very far above zero. Actually I find winter extremely pleasant at times, but the cold and rain can grow rather monotonous… Hence I thought I’d just brighten up this blog today by introducing an issue in colour.

This picture is the cover from a book I bought second-hand many years ago. I can’t remember exactly where I got it; perhaps from one of the second-hand book stalls at Norwich market or maybe at a fascinating and completely ramshackle old shop called The Scientific Anglian, which was hidden away in the backstreets of Norwich but is gone now, alas (that bookshop merits a blog post of its very own, I realise.)

It has also been a long time since I read this story – Return to the Lost Planet, by Angus MacVicar, published in 1954 – but my recollection is of an adventure that would have appealed to the sort of children who wanted something more science-oriented than Enid Blyton and thrilled to tales of rocket ships and planets of peril rather than (or maybe in addition to) mysterious castles and islands.

The book is one of a series, about a boy called Jeremy who goes to live with his uncle Lachlan, who lives on a Scottish island and also happens to be an inventor and space explorer. The eponymous lost planet – Hesikos – occupies an orbit between that of Mars and Jupiter and is therefore prone to getting very cold, and this is the case at the beginning of the second book Return to the Lost Planet, which finds Dr Lachlan McKinnon stranded on Hesikos in his damaged craft and trapped by the encroaching ice. Somehow – within four months! – a new spaceship must be constructed and a rescue mission organised.

It’s delightfully escapist. Just imagine having an eccentric relative who lived on an island and could build spaceships in his back yard without requiring some sort of gigantic corporation, an army of minions, endless red tape and a vast slice of the nation’s GDP. It’s surprising just how few people are needed to launch spacecraft in this story – you need a decent engineer of course, a professor or two, someone to do the admin, another person to make a good cup of tea now and then… And imagine being able to hop aboard said spaceship and travel to other planets without being bothered by such mundanities as passports, money, visas, quarantine, border controls or health and safety. Heaven! Wouldn’t it just be fantastic if life was like that.

What I find appealing about these novels is that they hark back to a more optimistic and uncomplicated age, when it was easier to write tales of space travel and discovery without being bogged down too much in the mire of geopolitics. True, these are also children’s stories and so tend to be about unbridled possibilities, without dwelling too much on the real-life limitations, drawbacks and disappointments familiar to our adult selves. Ultimately, perhaps, I’m looking back to my own childhood, when the world seemed to be a truly marvellous place and when anything might have been possible.

Incidentally, Angus MacVicar was a prolific and successful Scottish author who died in 2001 at the age of 93, and I wonder what he made of this rather odd and unheroic post-Apollo era of space exploration (orbiting telescopes and robotic Mars rovers but no starships or Moon bases.)

Who knows, though – he might not have found it so depressing. After all, there are still wonders to be found in the universe. And if they fall short, there always remain to be explored the infinite wealth and vastness of the human imagination.

E-mail to a Prospective Member of Parliament

In about 12 weeks’ time (so I’m told) the UK will have a general election and, even this early, I’d have expected to be receiving a steady trickle of leaflets and flyers from all over the political spectrum through my front door. However, to date I’ve had just one leaflet, from Mary Macleod, the local Conservative candidate. Today I sent her an e-mail, enquiring about her views on some issues I think are rather important and here is what I wrote:

Dear Mary Macleod,

I am a Hounslow resident – and thus potentially one of your constituents, should you win the seat of Brentford and Isleworth in the general election in May this year. In your leaflet, which I received on 1st February, you highlight some of the issues on which you are campaigning; these include rebuilding the economy, job creation, rejecting a new runway at Heathrow and also a number of local matters. However, I would like to know your position on several other issues which to me would also appear to be of great significance and on which I believe all parties will be judged by the electorate during the next few months.

The first issue is climate change. For a long time we have been assured by the current government that man-made climate change is a clear and present danger and that tackling climate change is of the highest priority. Indeed all three main political parties in this country include greenhouse gas reduction and the transition to a low-carbon economy among their official aims.

But there is a problem with this stance. Firstly, as someone who has been following this subject over the last few years, it is clear to me that climate science is extremely contentious and uncertain; the scandalous developments that have taken place in the last couple of months have highlighted this. The “ClimateGate” files and e-mails have shown how a small group of climate scientists have abused (there really isn’t a milder word for it) the peer review process and engaged in very questionable activities, cynically promoting their own point of view and attempting to exclude the work of scientists not sharing their position. In the last few weeks, the most recent report of the IPCC has come under unprecedented scrutiny, revealing a litany of errors and dubious citations. Overall, our knowledge of the basic physics of greenhouse gases remains unchanged; however, it is the way that unproven positive feedbacks have been added to predict global average temperature rises of over 2 degrees this century and to give plausibility to alarming scenarios of extreme weather events, accelerated sea level rises and the creation of climate refugees in their hundreds of millions, that are being questioned by a growing number of people worldwide, including a great many reputable scientists.

There is also a question mark hanging over the calculations used in the drafting of the Climate Change Act of 2008. Peter Lilley MP has highlighted some of the issues associated with the Impact Assessment, showing how the costs to the country and to taxpayers have been greatly downplayed by the current government. Also, even accepting, for argument’s sake, the point of view that CO2 emissions are a problem, spending a large proportion of the UK’s GDP on CO2 reduction does not make much economic sense, given that the UK’s carbon emissions are some 2% (and shrinking) of the global total, and that the political influence of the UK on growing economies (and major greenhouse gas emitters) such as China, India and Brazil is minimal, as I think was demonstrated at the recent Copenhagen summit.

The second issue is energy policy. Based on the perceived need to reduce carbon emissions, all three main parties have thrown in their lot with renewable sources of electrical power and, in my opinion, not quite grasped the fact that we are probably facing an energy shortage in the near future, as the result of over a decade of inaction over building new power stations. There have been several warnings in recent years (e.g., Inenco and also the Business and Enterprise Committee in 2008) which have highlighted this problem; in addition, alternative sources of energy such as wind turbines are unlikely, in my view, to fill this gap over the next ten years. I think this country urgently needs a rational and pragmatic energy policy in order to address the matter.

This leads to my third issue – Europe. Currently the UK is a member of the EU, which is increasingly resembling a very expensive and undemocratic club of nations. The task of strengthening the British economy will I think be hampered by the cost of UK contributions to the EU (now running at over £4 billion a year) and by EU-enforced CO2 emission targets. There is also the matter of the European Large Combustion Plants Directive (LCPD), which sets an artificial deadline for the closure of ageing power stations (mostly coal-fired) in the UK over this coming decade (up to about a seventh of our total capacity), and which thus threatens to increase the possibility of power cuts and energy rationing in the years between now and 2020. There are some plausible arguments, surely, for suspending our membership of the EU and redefining the way we do business with our European neighbours; my view is that the next Prime Minister should at least make a firm re-commitment to a public referendum on EU membership.

I believe that these three issues – climate change, energy and Europe – are interlocked, and will have some bearing on that other very important issue – rebuilding the economy. I believe that the current Conservative policies, based as they are on a) the flawed perception that man-made global warming is an overwhelmingly serious and urgent problem, b) an emphasis on renewable energy and “decarbonisation”, at the expense of traditional and cheap carbon-based energy, and c) continued membership of the EU, may well lead to further economic stagnation, poverty and even social unrest. In my view, a rational look at climate change (as proposed by Lord Lawson, among others), a pragmatic energy strategy and a rethink of EU membership would help to restore a measure of prosperity, sanity and social cohesion to the UK.

I look forward to hearing about your position on these matters.

Yours sincerely,

Alex Cull

Some links:

Peter Lilley on the Climate Change Bill: http://www.peterlilley.co.uk/article.aspx?id=14&ref=1401
Peter Lilley’s letter to Ed Miliband last year: http://www.peterlilley.co.uk/article.aspx?id=10&ref=1421
Wiki page which shows the UK’s share of worldwide CO2 emissions for 2007/08: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol
Business and Enterprise Committee Energy policy report: http://news.parliament.uk/2008/12/energy-policy-report/
News story re the Inenco energy shortfall warning: http://www.electric.co.uk/news/uk-to-face-an-energy-shortfall-1234230.html
The Global Warming Policy Foundation, of which Lord Lawson is Chairman of the Board of Trustees: http://www.thegwpf.org/

UPDATE

I have a reply, which arrived on 5th May 2010:

Dear Alex,

You make some extremely pertinent points in your email on climate change, energy security and the EU. Before I launch into my policies on all these issues I would like to point out my overall view. First, there are reasonable doubts on some of the climate change statistics, but, on the whole, the value of building a more energy efficient economy has both economic and social benefits for the country’s future. New energy efficient industries are developing and I want our country to lead in them. Also I want to live in a country which pollutes less and cares more about the environment people live in. Second, it is vital to plan ahead to develop a broad-based supply of low carbon energy to ensure that we are not over-dependent on any one source or supplier of energy, and to help meet our commitment to reducing emissions. Under a Conservative government, nuclear power will be part of the energy mix if it is economically viable. Third, the cross-border nature of developing policy on climate change and energy security requires us to ensure such policy is not created without a strong UK voice in those institutions, like the G20, UN and the EU, which are key stakeholders. Pulling out of Europe will not preclude us from applying the obligations agreed upon just as pulling out of the UN or NATO would not genuinely make our foreign and defence policy independent.

Climate change:

While we must never lose sight of the environmental imperative for carbon reduction, there is also a compelling economic case for going green. A more balanced economy must include a dynamic industrial change, challenging the dependency of our economy on carbon-based energy. Britain is uniquely well placed to be the world’s first low carbon economy. We already have the natural resources to generate wind and wave power, a skilled workforce trained in the energy industry, a high-tech manufacturing sector and a green financial centre in the City of London.

• By harnessing the power of markets and innovation, we can create the products and services that will transform our economy as well as protecting our planet.
• By using genuinely green taxes to change behaviour the use of fossil fuels can be reduced without increasing the cost of living.
• By diversifying our energy supply we can have cheaper, cleaner and more secure energy.
• By driving energy efficiency, we can reduce emissions and cut people’s bills.
• By renewing our national infrastructure, we will be helping our economy to compete as well as helping to improve the quality of life today and into the future.

By taking a leading role in tackling climate change, we will gain a head start on the green technologies of the future and help Britain to create new jobs in green industries. Whereas the green agenda has been seen as being about banning things, we see the transition to a low carbon economy as an opportunity to become world leaders in new fields, like carbon capture or green finance, so creating jobs and helping our economy.

The economic case for a Third Runway at Heathrow is far from proven, but the extra 222,000 flights a year that would come with a third runway – a 46 per cent increase on current levels – would make it much more difficult to meet the demanding targets our nation has set itself for reducing carbon emissions. However, the environmental concerns are not confined to climate change – the lives of thousands of people would be blighted by increased aircraft noise and pollution and the Environment Agency has warned of the risk of ‘increased morbidity and mortality’ if a third runway goes ahead (Environment Agency, Thames Region Response to DfT Heathrow Consultation, 2008). So we have repeatedly argued that instead of pushing blindly ahead with a third runway, we should focus on making Heathrow better, not bigger.

Energy security:

A Conservative government will make energy security a national security priority. To cover the period of immediate insecurity, a Conservative government will introduce a system of strategic oversight. Our National Security Council will co-ordinate the monitoring of our energy infrastructure – its capacity for fuel supply, fuel storage, power generation, transmission and distribution – with a view to improving its resilience. It would also monitor the foreign policy aspects of energy supply.A Conservative government will ensure that energy security is a Foreign Office priority. Action would include supporting greater co-ordination of European energy policy, discouraging bilateral deals with Russia, and developing better relations with energy supplier nations. We strongly support the efforts of the European Commission to improve competitiveness and to limit the power of the dominant European energy monopolies. At home we have been calling on the Government to make this a key negotiating priority at EU summits for several years. We would also ensure that the Foreign Office worked with the Department of Energy and Climate Change to explore the possibility of expanding and developing a fully integrated European energy grid. We will work with, and through, the EU to deliver a liberalised market, open to new entrants.

Please feel free to contact me with any further questions or concerns that you may have. I hope that I get the chance to meet you sometime soon and I look forward to fighting for the needs of the people who live in this constituency if I am fortunate enough to be elected.

Kind regards

Mary Macleod
Conservative Parliamentary Candidate