SCIENCE FICTION ALEX GOOD
In the year 2099 prisoners are sent off planet, their memories wiped and their understanding of language reduced to a vocabulary of 850 words known as New English. In order to preserve something of the glories of English poetry, one individual translates an anthology of classic short poems. Years later, a pair of New English scholars have prepared an edition of the prisoner’s manuscript. That’s the clever conceit of “Limited Verse,” by Calgary poet David Martin. As the notes explain, there’s a history of radical experiments in how stripped down language can be and still function, from the Basic English of C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, to Orwell’s dystopic Newspeak and the avant-garde Oulipo movement.
An SF novel about a resort where extinct prehistoric creatures like woolly mammoths have been brought back will no doubt have you thinking of “Jurassic Park.” It’s certainly the first thing visitors to Colorado’s Erebus Resort think of, though they’re quick to say that Erebus is “Jurassic Park for real.” Things get more real quickly when a couple of campersare found brutally murdered. Then, when a pair of investigators start looking around, a whole lot more is found beneath the surface of Erebus. The bad guys are quite bad, the plot has lots of nasty turns and the whole thing is well worth checking out.
Best known for her award-winning Imperial Radch trilogy of novels, Leckie’s stories are gathered together for the first time in “Lake of Souls.” We begin with the title story, previously unpublished, which showcases Leckie’s blend of SF and fantasy tropes when an astronaut finds himself marooned on a swampy planet inhabited by an advanced race of “lobster dogs.” It’s a perfect introduction to Leckie’s world, as it presents the difference between science and fantasy as being as much a matter of perspective as of genre labels. The collection is divided along similar lines, having three parts: miscellaneous stories, SF stories set in the Imperial Radch universe and fantasy stories connected to the mythos of her novel “The Raven Tower.”
An oneironaut is a dream traveller, an explorer of inner space, which in Wilson’s futuristic poem is like being a unicorn ever since the totalitarian overlords of the DoD (Department of Dreams) took over. The sleep police are the next step in the evolution of the surveillance state, keeping the population in line mainly through a pill that prevents anyone from dreaming. But when a scientist named Rain stops taking her meds she becomes “awake for the first time,” enters a cosmic egg and makes contact with a mythic underground movement. “The Oneironaut” is the first part of a trilogy in verse and it rolls along with the fragmented, manic energy of a light show-cum-spoken word performance.