Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!

Turing had never been in this office before, but it wasn’t as if any of the offices in Bletchley were radically different from each other anyway. While the main hall was pretty enough, in an ostentatious sort of way, the surrounding buildings were functional rather than beautiful.

The same could be said for the rather angular-looking man with the beaky nose in front of him, looking at him through eyes which seemed permanently half-closed. Nobody would ever call him beautiful, but at the same time there was an air of confidence from him, as if he knew exactly what his purpose in life was, and so could go through his existence with no further worry. He looked a little older than Turing, and a little taller, but those few years and inches seemed to have given him the confidence that Turing had always lacked. He was clearly in his element, and Turing envied him immensely.

“Mr. Turing?”

“Doctor Turing, actually.”

“I do beg your pardon, Doctor Turing. My name’s Ian Fleming.”

“We’ve met.”

“Have we? Oh, that’s right! I’ve seen you around Bletchley before. Do take a seat. Drink?”

“Not at this time of day, thank you. I like to keep a clear head for my work.”

“Suit yourself. Personally, I find having a clear head a dreadful handicap. You don’t mind if I do, though?”

“No, go ahead.”

Fleming got up and walked over to a small cabinet, from which he removed a bottle of whisky and a glass. He poured himself a small measure, tipped the bottle half-way back to vertical, then stopped, gazed thoughtfully at the bottle, and seemed to make a decision. He poured again, giving himself a large double, before replacing the bottle, closing the cabinet, and sitting back down. He took a sip, and paused for a second to savour the taste.

He seemed to compose his thoughts, and then asked almost casually, “Has the news about Hess permeated to the general public yet?”

“What news about Hess?”

“Ah, that’s what I thought. It’ll be all over the news in a few hours, I’m sure. Do you know who Rudolf Hess is?”

“Of course. Hitler’s second in command.”

“Well, technically. He’s been more or less pushed aside as the war’s gone on, in favour of Goering and Goebbels. Anyway, he’s in Britain right now.”

“You mean he’s defected? Good God!”

“Not defected, exactly. He’s come over in the hope of making peace. Apparently as a rogue agent.”

“Apparently?”

“Well, we know different. It was us who persuaded him to come over.”

Fleming paused to appreciate the look of shock on Turing’s face, and it took Turing a few moments to recover sufficiently to respond.

Eventually, however, he managed to ask the obvious next question. “How in the world did you do that?”

“Have you heard about The Link?”

“What link?”

“It’s a group of rich Nazis. Mostly from the Mitford set, those sort of people.”

“What sort of people are those? I’m sorry, I don’t know who the Mitford set are.”

Fleming gave a slight smirk, and hesitated a fraction of a second before replying.

“I do beg your pardon, Doctor Turing. One forgets sometimes that not everybody has society connections. You’re rather better off not knowing who the Mitfords are, so I shall refrain from explanation. Just think of rich idiots who have a superficial, dilettantish interest in political dogmas – an interest which, while tissue-thin, is still stronger than their commitment to the country.”

Turing nodded. “I think I know the sort.”

“Anyway, some of those people are supporters of the Nazis, and it has suited our interests to have them believe we are unaware of this, while we feed them information. Hess didn’t just decide to come here on a whim. We’ve been working on him for months, through various intermediaries. We’ve got him convinced that Britain wants peace with the Nazis on their terms. He thinks we’re desperate to install a puppet government and become Berlin’s slaves. Because we’ve told him that.”

“Surely – surely! – no-one could really be that gullible. This is the second most important man in Germany. He can’t have been taken in by a basic confidence trick, can he?”

“I think you’re severely underestimating the gullibility of the Nazis. They’re not known for their intelligence and discretion, you know.”

“Even so!”

Fleming smiled. “I know you boffins think the rest of us are a bunch of fools who don’t know anything – no, don’t deny it, I’ve heard enough of your conversations – but there are skills in the world other than mathematics and fiddling with vacuum tubes.”

Fleming walked over to a filing cabinet, unlocked it with a key taken from his inside jacket pocket, and pulled out a handful of papers. He flicked through them to make sure they were what he thought they were, extracted a couple of sheets, which he returned to the cabinet, and then handed the rest to Turing.

“Take a look at these. What do you think?”

The papers were covered with letters. They were handwritten, rather than typed, and clearly in a Germanic hand, but Turing recognised what he was looking at.

“It’s a ciphertext of some sort, yes?”

“It is. If anything, you see, our plan has worked rather too well. Hess brought these papers over to share with the members of the Link. Now we need to know what they say.”

“And it’s not the standard Enigma code?”

“I’m afraid not. And we can’t just turn this over to the girls in the huts. We need you to take personal responsibility for this. I, on the other hand, am going to take responsibility for Hess himself.”

“Do you have any clues at all as to what kind of code it is?”

“Not at the moment. But I believe I can probably persuade Hess to give us a clue. In the meantime, though, I’d like you to do what you can, and let me know what you think.”

Turing gathered the papers together, stood up, and left the room, forgetting even to nod to Fleming as he left. He was already planning his first line of investigation.

—
This is an excerpt from my novel, Destroyer. If you like this chapter, please buy the book. It can be bought in hardback from Lulu. The Kindle and paperback editions are available from Amazon (UK) and (US). For non-Kindle ebook versions This Books2Read Universal Link will give you links for your preferred ebook retailer. My Patreon backers also get free copies of all my books. If you like this one, please consider reviewing it on Amazon.

I got a “new” (second-hand) laptop (an old HP Probook) last month, and installed Debian on it, and I use it for all of my writing and much of my music-listening, but I’ve encountered a weird issue and I’m wondering if anyone has any advice on this.

If I listen to music with headphones, the centre channel cancels out. To listen to, say, the new mix of Sgt Pepper with headphones, I have to unbalance the left and right channels so they no longer go out of phase.

EXCEPT that with one pair of headphones — annoyingly a really bad set of earbuds which don’t fit my ears very well — this doesn’t happen. So it can’t be a headphone port issue. The headphones which don’t work on my laptop work fine on my portable MP3 player, so it can’t be an issue with the headphone wiring. These are all cheap earbuds without any fancy Beats-style additional software, so I can’t see what could be causing this.

My best guess, given the general flakiness of sound on GNU/Linux, is that it’s an issue with PulseAudio or ALSA somehow — but how that could only be affecting some headphones and not others, I have no idea. Anyone at all have a clue?

As volume three of my Beach Boys series is *finally* coming out this month, for one month only I have reduced the price of the first two books — on the Kindle only (messing with other platforms’ price is an immense pain, and the price of the paper copies is mostly the printing costs) to $1. I’ll be making book three available for pre-order in a couple of days, and it’ll be out before the end of the month, so why not pick up volume one (Amazon US, UK) and two (Amazon US, UK) now in preparation?
(The change may take a few hours to propagate through Amazon’s systems).

My final Patreon request post for May (I got all of them in!) is a request to write about Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven.

Shamefully, I’m not actually very familiar with Le Guin’s work. I read some of her stuff when I was young and devoured anything in the library with a spaceship or wizard on the cover, pretty much uncritically, but by my mid teens I’d conceived something of a prejudice against anyone I lumped in with the new wave SF writers of the late sixties and early seventies, who I saw as pretentious wankers who were ashamed of actually writing stories about things and wanted to write bad literary fiction instead. By the time I actually got over that and started thinking sensibly about science fiction books, I was more interested in reading new books rather than going back to classics, so a whole swathe of great writers like Le Guin or Samuel Delaney are less familiar to me than other, lesser, writers.

But The Lathe of Heaven is so very much my thing I’m surprised no-one had specifically recommended it to me earlier (cue twenty commenters saying “I recommended it to you in 2012 and you said you’d get right on to reading it straight away”, no doubt).

More than anything, this reminds me of Philip K. Dick. At first I thought that was just because the copy I have, a Gollancz Masterworks edition, is typeset and designed the same way as my copies of VALIS and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. but in fact this book shares so much with Dick — themes, obsessions, and even storytelling flaws — that had you handed it to me with the cover torn off I would have insisted it was by him.

The plot of the book, such as it is, is simple — George Orr, a placid, “normal”-seeming man, is abusing drugs to stop himself from dreaming, and is forced to see a psychiatrist, Dr Haber. Orr admits that he doesn’t want to dream, because sometimes his dreams can retcon reality — he can go to sleep, dream that someone he knows died, and wake to find they’d been dead for six weeks. Haber uses hypnosis to control Orr’s dreams, and to remake the world, but every attempt at making the world better makes it worse — overpopulation is solved because a plague decades earlier killed six billion people, humanity no longer wars against itself because they’re in the middle of an alien invasion, racism has never existed because everyone has always been a uniform grey colour, and so on.

Eventually Haber (who is portrayed as a solipsistic sociopath) gains Orr’s power himself and almost destroys the world. Orr, with the help of his lawyer/love-interest, manages to stop Haber and return the world to a state of normalcy.

The book is, frankly, not strong on character, plot, or description — there are only three characters of any note, and they might as well just be described as “pleasant protagonist”, “mad scientist”, and “the girl one” — but that’s not really the point. Le Guin’s book is an attempt to discuss ideas of the nature of reality and how our perceptions affect it, of medical and psychiatric ethics, of the nature of our responsibility to others, and indeed the concept of responsibility itself.

It’s also a story about the environment — the book is very concerned with climate change (and also, because it was written post-Population Bomb but pre-Green Revolution, with mass starvation due to overpopulation even in the West), and the repeated efforts to reshape the world having unpredictable negative consequences can be seen at least in part as a parallel to the negative consequences of technologically disrupting the environment.

In particular, Dr Haber (presumably named after Fritz Haber, the inventor of chemical warfare) epitomises everything wrong with the technolibertarian viewpoint — he has a “post-racial” view that comes out as imposing uniformity on everyone, he wants children raised on “rational” lines, he’s a eugenicist, and sees the death of six billion people as a net positive from a utilitarian standpoint — and while he pays lip service to utilitarianism and claims to act for the greater good, every change that’s made ends up also increasing his political power and wealth.

Unfortunately, Le Guin’s answer to these problems, inspired by Chinese mysticism, especially Zhuang Zhou (who among other things is famous for the parable of the butterfly which seems to have inspired this book), seems to be that the best thing to do is to accept the world passively, and try to live in harmony with it rather than change it. It’s a cop-out of an answer, and one that’s really identical to the “he meddled with things man was not meant to know” at the end of a fifties monster movie, just dressed up in Daoist clothing.

However, having an unconvincing answer to a set of questions is nowhere near as big a sin for an SF novel, in my view, as not bothering to raise them in the first place. And the questions Le Guin raises here are among the ones that interest me most deeply.

It’s a very early-70s book, and that shows in the way the story is told (lots of people infodumping at each other in dialogue) and in the very nature of the plot (the world ends up being saved by someone listening to a track from Sgt Pepper while high on dope). Its obsessions too — environmental, spiritual, social, and political — are all ones that were up-to-the-nanosecond current in 1971.

But as we’re currently in a world that seems to be performing an early-70s tribute act politically and socially, and in which the environmental crises Le Guin writes about have not yet quite happened but are clearly close, the book seems if anything far more relevant than it would ten or fifteen years ago.

This is a dark book, a paranoid book, and frankly a book I probably shouldn’t have read this week (my mental health is in a bad way, and this… this doesn’t help. It touches on sore mental spots for me). But it’s one of those very rare SF novels that really tries to do what the genre does best, and I would particularly urge anyone else who likes Philip K Dick to read this — in many ways it’s rather better at doing what Dick did than Dick was himself.

This blog post was brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?

This is the penultimate post in my Patreon request series for May — tomorrow will see one on Ursula Le Guin.

This is a review of a book by Simon Bucher-Jones. Simon’s a friend, we’ve written in the same book series a couple of times, and he’s commissioned me as an editor, so you may want to take that into account when reading my review. What I will say though is that I got to know Simon *because* I like his writing, and so I don’t think I’m too biased as a result.

‘You have done well stranger, and we note it. Your kindness will be stored here in our great crystal memory, and when we are ready and we leave this place. We will carry the memory of your good act to our newer world, and tell our children that as well as the slavers and the evil, good men also walked upon Mars, when the worlds were young.’

Charles Dickens’ Martian Notes is a rewrite, by Simon Bucher-Jones, of Dickens’ non-fictional American Notes. The conceit of the book is that it’s a 1913 edition, edited by Bucher-Jones’ great-grandfather Warwick, with the assistance of Sir Charles Dickens himself, who didn’t die in 1870 but had lived well into the twentieth century and had received a knighthood for his work as a spy.

In this world, America is a fictional country created by Dickens for Martin Chuzzlewit, yp satirise the author’s experiences on Mars. Mars is inhabited by several native races, but has been “dome-steaded” by humans, mostly from the Britannic Empire. A rebellion in 1775 meant that the British lost most of the planet, though the Northern region, “Kanata”, has remained under British rule.

Now in 1842 Charles Dickens lands on Mars, ostensibly to write a book about it, but really with a more important mission — one in which he is aided by a robot disguised as his wife (who is later replaced by another agent, Georgina Putnam, who sometimes imitates Dickens’ wife and at other times pretends to be a man called George). He explores a Mars which owes a little to Burroughs, a little to Wells, (and I think a little to some other pulp works I’m less familiar with) and quite a lot to nineteenth-century America.

Bucher-Jones is known among fans of his Doctor Who novels for the particularly strong quality of his technobabble, and that’s present here — “the current position of many scientists is that the Mau-Martians deliberately instigated a false-vacuum collapse (FVC) in local space which ‘toppled’ the ‘Edisonian’ or ‘High’ Mass-Boson which mediated dark-matter gravity (from the 250 – 275 GeV range ‘down’ into the ‘Low’ Mass-Boson 125 – 127 GeV range). This – in common language – ‘inverted the polarity’ of dark-matter, and destroyed the technologies of anti-gravity upon which the commerce of the worlds depended… In the event of the Grand Britannic Hadron Collider being able to create dark matter in the Upper Range upon its completion, we may be able to see again anti-gravitational travel as a possibility in the middle decades of the 20th Century”.

This kind of thing mixes freely with talk of Cavor and Tesla on equal footing, and in lesser hands it would have been all too easy for this to turn into a steampunk Pride and Prejudice and Martians. However, there are a few things that save the book from this fate.

The first is that Bucher-Jones has picked precisely the right materials to work together in his pastiche. I’ve recently been reading quite a lot of very early pulp SF, and essentially all of it is travelogue — the early adventures of John Carter or Buck Rodgers do have a certain amount of Princess-rescuing and escape from evil-doers, but the vast majority of SF, at least prior to the 1930s, is almost plotless — it’s worldbuilding, pure and simple. A traveller from Earth (usually a white man from the Northeastern United States) gets transported by some unusual means to another planet (or another time, or another plane of existence), describes what he sees there, and then comes home. The better-written of them tend to follow the patterns of Gulliver’s Travels, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court or The Time Machine in using their travelogues for satirical social comment, but many others were plain travelogues of imaginary worlds.

So Bucher-Jones’ book mashes together several genres, but manages to make it perfectly coherent in terms of genre and time period. Other than some satirical jabs at things like birtherism, and the use of a handful of technical terms coined after that time period (lampshaded in the footnotes), there’s nothing here that would be out of place among the likes of The Gostak and the Doshes, Off on a Comet, The Man Who Awoke, A Princess of Mars, or Armageddon 2419 AD.

(All of those, incidentally, can be found in the rather superb collection A Sense of Wonder, which I also must review when I finally get through it all — as my ebook copy runs to 10095 pages, that might be a while).

But where he really excels, and what makes this book a very special one, is his emulation of Dickens’ prose style. The book itself is almost twice as long as Dickens’ original, and it’s almost impossible (except, obviously, when the plot becomes more involved — Dickens was unlikely to write lines like “she had a spring-loaded hypodermic up her sleeve with enough mars-squid venom to knock out a man for a week”) to tell where Dickens ends and Bucher-Jones begins. I’ve tried often enough to write in other writers’ voices to know how difficult it is, and it’s doubly so when the words of the writer you’re imitating are there on the same page. Bucher-Jones pulls it off perfectly.

There is one possible major criticism, and one minor one, I can make. The minor one is just that the version of the book I have is not perfectly proof-read — there are a few minor errors of punctuation in there. However, there are not many more than one gets in even the majority of books published by the major publishers these days, and the few that there are can be explained away as archaisms by a generous reader.

A slightly more major criticism — though one I’m not entirely sure is negative — comes from the nature of the work itself. Dickens’ book, of course, deals with slavery, and in translating that book to an alien planet, Bucher-Jones has to translate slavery as well, into a system that gels with his invented Mars of multiple human and alien races. I am genuinely not sure if dealing with such a real horror as American slavery in a science-fictional setting is something that it’s justifiable to do. As far as I’m any judge, it’s done well, and I don’t think the book trivialises real suffering in an unjustifiable way, but I don’t know that I’m confident enough of my own judgment of the issue, as a white British man, to say for certain.

(Says the man who just wrote a novel where an occult conspiracy gets involved with the Nazis during World War II… but that’s probably why I’m extra sensitive to such things right now).

I want to note, though, that that probably says more about my own insecurity in my own judgment of “is this an OK thing to write about?” than in the writing itself — and I certainly think there’s more to take offence at in Dickens’ original, which for all Dickens’ very real moral outrage at slavery still manages to excuse most of the people who perpetrated that disgusting crime. (And middle-class white people making excuses for other middle-class white people’s racism even while condemning it has become… more relevant… in the year or so since this book came out). If anyone’s going to get angry at anything in the book, the words they’re likely to get angry at will be Dickens’ rather than Bucher-Jones’.

If you’re a fan of alternate history, steampunk, Dickens, or early science fiction — or of the sort of clever intertextuality one finds in the Faction Paradox novels — you should definitely read this. It’s available from Lulu in paper form, and from all the usual ebook vendors.

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