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I have written previously about Sir Elton John's recent attempts at country music. Since then I have been listening to his much older work in the same spirit. His second album, Tumbleweed Connection, is heavily country-influenced, but as it didn't produce any hit singles it has been neglected since, though it was certified gold and probably would have been platinum if platinum certification had existed in 1970. None of the tracks has even been on any of the many “greatest hits” albums, though two or three have been successful covers for other singers and groups (the one I'd heard before was ‘Burn Down the Mission’, covered by Toto in their 2002 cover album Through the Looking Glass).

The album includes one genuine celebration of small-town-living, ‘Country Comfort’, but, especially in the light of his later work like ‘American Triangle’, which expresses disgust at Southern America's intolerance, I always have trouble deciding whether (or to what extent) Bernie Taupin's lyrics are tongue-in-cheek. Here's one stanza of ‘Country Comfort’:

Down at the well, they've got a new machine,
Foreman says it cuts man-power by fifteen,
But that ain't natural, well so old Clay would say,
You see he's a horse-drawn man until his dying day.

So, is this a sneer towards new-fangled technology, or is it a jibe at the backward-looking Luddites stuck in their inefficient ways? Perhaps it is both at once.

Most of the album is in a rock-imbued country style, a mile away from the mainstream pop image of the other music he was making around that time, though there are a few exceptions. There are two in a slightly more psychedelic style, though perhaps that word is a little too strong: ‘Come Down in Time’ and ‘Where to now St. Peter?’ are much less grounded in a beat than the rest of the album, with lots of strings and less straightforward lyrics. But throughout, there is a lot of Sir John's characteristic piano playing, with the recognisable chord progressions and off-beat rhythms that he still uses today.

There are two particularly noteworthy tracks. ‘My Father's Gun’ is set in the American Civil War, from the point of view of a family man off to fight for the South. The very first line is, “From this day on, I own my father's gun,” immediately making clear that the fight has already claimed one victim from this family; the rest of the song's plot is revealed in a similarly laconic way. The song opens with a lonely piano and guitar, evoking the openness of the “Northern plain” the narrator rides around with his horse and his gun. But for the refrain they are joined by backing singers, a brass bass line, and a strong drum part; as the narrator joins with his fellow fighters to meet the Yankees. A following verse returns to the guitar and piano accompaniment as the narrator looks forward to what life will be like once the war is won. The refrain is repeated several times, each time with the accompaniment getting more chaotic, the brass chords louder, the drum fills longer and more elaborate. From its soulful opening it becomes the kind of song you can't help beating along to on your desk. (Perhaps I'm not the best judge, as almost all songs are like that for me.) It's under-produced by modern standards, without synths or added echo effects, but that fits nicely with the overall character of the album.

The other candidate for best track on the album is ‘Talking Old Soldiers’, which goes the opposite way. It's just Sir John singing and playing piano chords, and even “singing” overstates the point: it's more like a monologue set to music. The song is sung from the point of view of an old soldier in a bar, looking to the past sorrowfully and railing against his situation to a friendly passer-by. The only way I can think of to describe the forcefulness of the song is to compare it to a standard like ‘My Way’, but with thumping (yet always precise) piano chords in place of the cheesy orchestration. At its peak, there is a cadenza for a whole line sung on the same note without accompaniment, a technical challenge for any singer.

When you look at the back cover of Norman Spinrad's ‘The Void Captain's Tale’ and see, in big letters, “Welcome aboard the sex-driven void ship…” and read that it is about a spaceship powered by “cosmic orgasms,” you might be forgiven for thinking that it follows, shall we say, a certain format, but it is for a good reason that your mother always told you not to judge a book by its cover. Indeed, the tale therein is set in a future society where everyone is familiar with the tantric arts, and it is true that this practice is observed more than once during the course of the book. Further, even when our captain and narrator is not enjoying the intimate company of his leading ladies but is carrying out his mundane duties, even these passages are charged with a certain spirit of language, a choice of words that perhaps could be said to have secondary meanings, meanings made more explicit as the book goes on.

Yet, in a very real sense, ‘The Void Captain's Tale’ contains no sex whatsoever. It achieves this paradox by approaching the issue with a contrast of its own: on one hand, intercourse considered in that word's other sense, as an everyday social interaction no different in kind to tactful and passionless flirting with colleagues or other acquaintances; on the other, an act of reciprocal stimulation and fulfilment that, while it has the same physical conclusion, lacks the very co-occurrence and mutuality that define the relationship as we understand it.

But I am jumping the gun. Let me start over. From the very first page, Spinrad makes the details of the plot quite clear. The spaceships of the future run on a jumping-through-hyperspace–type technology. The jump is navigated by a woman, a biological component in the mechanism, whose function is to be brought to a momentary and fleeting ecstatic state at the moment of translation. But every once in a million voyages, when the ship jumps, the pilot jumps somewhere else, leaving the ship stranded in the middle of nowhere with no hope of rescue.

Our narrator captains one of these ships. He happens to meet his pilot, and makes the mistake of getting to know her as a human, not just as a component. He starts to reflect on the relationship between captain and pilot. One thing leads to another. Eventually the ship makes a “Blind Jump,” and it is when the ship is marooned that the captain writes his tale.

The situation has one other important point. Void-ships only need a crew of six people, excluding the pilot. The passengers are kept in “electrocoma” for the whole voyage, which takes some time. This might cause some boredom and the attendant performance degradation. In the fifties, the usual sf way of dealing with that issue was to ensure the crew was well-supplied with books, films (invariably on microfilm or some futuristic magnetic tape), and maybe even a chess board or two. But by 1983 (the copyright date; it was not published until the following year), Spinrad could conceive a much more elaborate means of entertainment.

So, in addition to the regular passengers, the ship carries an extra complement of Honoured Passengers: the wealthy and their companions, artists, the great and the good. These spend the voyage in non-suspended animation, feasting, revelling, partying, discussing the great questions of philosophy and art, and making use of the “dream chambers,” usually in pairs. The crew is expected to join in with and be diverted by this floating festival, and to carry on dalliances with one or two of the Honoured Passengers.

This situation allows Spinrad to bring out the traditional image of the lonely hero, surrounded by frolicking, happy people, but brooding on his troubles, troubles he has in part brought onto himself.

The language he uses to describe this is almost as extravagant as the activities of the Honoured Passengers themselves. The language of the future is a kind of patois of English sprinkled with loan-words from every language, with each character having a different blend of linguistic influences depending on their upbringing. You might accuse Spinrad of having had his nose in his thesaurus while writing, but his cross-linguistic extemporisation is its own guarantee, for no thesaurus covers as many languages as he threads together. It sounds on the surface like the talk of poncy pseudo-intellectuals, borrowing from many languages as if to say that their thoughts are far too refined to be expressed by English alone, but the effect is not of exclusion, of being made to feel that one is not educated enough to read this piece; rather of luxury, that the prose envelops and warms you in a quilt of sumptuous excess, almost the same feeling as when reading Bester.

But this work lacks the urgency of Bester, the mad dash from chapter to chapter. Instead, the book ambles along in a civilised, almost stately, straight line from beginning to end. The literary foreshadowings, the parallel repetitions for emphasis, the climax and anticlimax, even those occasions when the narrator steps out of the thread of his tale to speak with hindsight, are not trying to be subtle and clever like the twists of a thriller, but are reassuring. They remind the reader that he is a reader, not a participant. Unlike the close identification, the very personal involvement, that erotica tries to achieve, this book pushes the reader further away, a work of art providing its own white rope.

Like many works of its time, this book felt the influence of Buddhist philosophy. There's use of certain Eastern sexual practices I have already mentioned, and there are also a few loan-words from Sanskrit like karma and maya. In addition, the very plot has a Buddhist flavour. The captain muses quite often on the illusory nature of the observed universe, and part of the plot hinges on some characters trying to ascend to some higher plane of existence, described in a way that is strongly suggestive of the extinction of nirvana, though the method is somewhat different.

In all, this is a pretty odd book. It's entertaining to read, the plot is easy-going but still has a slight sting in the tail, and the prose is warm and engaging, if a little idiosyncratic. It's by no means a great work of literature, but I'd recommend it to anyone; well, I might be embarrassed to recommend it to my mother, but apart from that. But what I want to know is this: how does Spinrad manage to get through the whole book without once referring to the ship's odd propulsion mechanism as the ‘sex drive’?

I'm quite a fan of Dune. I think it's an intricate work of political intrigue in a feudal setting in the far future. Herbert's prohibition of “thinking machines” from his universe enabled this stark contrast of futuristic technology and old-fashioned manpower, allowing his characters to inhabit an interstellar empire while keeping all their worries human worries, focused on human ambition and goals.

Messiah and Children spoil the fine balance slightly by introducing new technologies, but the early stages of the Golden Path, the connections to family dynasties, and the off-stage jihad, broaden Herbert's lens, giving the developing work even more of an epic tone while keeping it grounded in human affairs in the small.

God Emperor is quite gripping for people who, like me, enjoy trying to read sense into narrative that is short of it, but the God Emperor's endless monologuing draws it out far past the length it should be, and there are no strong characters. Perhaps Herbert is trying to make the point, crucial to the plot, that you can't have strong characters in a universe that contains a near-omniscient, prescient, almost indestructible being, and that they are all puppets to him; even if this is true, it doesn't make it any easier to read.

Heretics and Chapterhouse return to the old-style political intrigues, but never attain the grace of the original Dune. The balance of power has shifted now, and the plot focuses on the Bene Gesserit far too strongly.

Then, disaster of disasters, Frank Herbert met his Maker. After a gap of some years, his son Brian teamed up with Kevin J. Anderson and wrote a trilogy of prequels, set a generation before the events of the first Dune. They were inexpertly written, but entertaining. Because you know the situation the book has to finish with, it is somewhat like watching a very corny horror film, where you know the female lead is going to try to escape upstairs, and you know she shouldn't try to hide in the bathroom.

The second set of trilogies, set in the far past of Dune, lacked this factor, and all the things I mentioned in the first paragraph, but they kept the same slightly cheap writing. As a fan of the series with a good memory (and having re-read the proper Dune books before starting) it was interesting to see how they arranged everything to set up all the historical background that we already knew from the earlier books.

And now, Herbert junior and Anderson have shot into the future. Hunters, and its sequel Sandworms (which I haven't read), continue the story where Chapterhouse left off. We are awaiting the identity of the mysterious Enemy from outside the known universe, and there is a distinct shortage of spice in the Old Empire.

It will be obvious from the first few pages that the Enemy do not arrive in any real way in the first book, though their identity is made clear. The intent is that it be made clear in a Shocking Revelation in the last few pages, but the authors telegraph it so strongly that anyone should be able to spot it by the time they've read half the book, if they haven't guessed before starting. The authors also introduce a character, the Oracle of Time, who it is said the Guild Navigators have been communing with since the foundation of the Guild; this leaves me wondering why this Oracle has never been mentioned before. The Oracle is the subject of another Shocking Revelation at the end, but the identity and nature of the Oracle is also obvious from early on.

Apart from that, not very much happens. There is quite a common ploy in modern sf books that are trying to be epic, for padding the plot into more pages. You simply have two or three sets of characters. Each set interacts among themselves, but the sets never meet (or only meet at the end). Write a few short paragraphs explaining the situation one set finds itself in. Then write a few paragraphs of one character's thoughts on the situation, or two characters talking over lunch about their situation, or even better, one of the characters having a Mysterious Vision, dream, prophecy, &c. This should come to two or three pages, so call it a chapter. Repeat this for each set of characters. Then write a page (or just insert a note) to show that some time has passed. Now go back to each set of characters. Write the same description of the same situation, inserting the word “still” a few times. Pick a different character from the set and write his thoughts on the situation, or make him have a dream, or better yet, make him discover a mysterious artifact, or receive a garbled transmission, which is the sf equivalent of a minor character saying “I know who did it! The murderer wa—aaggghghgh!” Go round all your sets of characters. By the time you've covered all the characters in all the sets, that is at least two dozen chapters. By then, the reader will have forgotten the first characters you mentioned, so will appreciate a reminder of their thoughts on the situation, perhaps accompanied by them talking about their childhood or by a sex scene.

This is how Hamilton manages to write the Night's Dawn trilogy, which is roughly 3500 pages filled by a two-hundred-page plot. It's how film directors make a three- or four-hour miniseries about a nuclear disaster or train wreck which takes 10 minutes. It's also how Herbert and Anderson manage to write the more than 600 pages of Hunters without anything actually happening. There are one or two battles, but they fizzle out without any real fighting. There are some sex scenes, quite risqué ones I thought, but without the emotional ties that make them meaningful. There are two or three negotiation scenes, but between them they have less subtlety than Prime Minister's Questions.

It pains me to have nothing good to say about a book, but all I can manage this case is that the book isn't that bad of itself. Even for the most hardcore Dune fans, even those who were willing to stick out the mediocre prequels just because they featured the characters and factions we have come to know and love, I can't bring myself to recommend Hunters. It won't give you a new insight into Duncan Idaho's character. It won't make any progress towards a sense of resolution, or fill the hole left by the dangling plot at the end of Chapterhouse. It will just bore you to tears and take up time you could have more profitably spent reading a good book.

Art versus science. One of the age-old conflicts, they say. I believe it's true that some scientists don't think the arts are much use, and quite a few artists hold scientists in low regard, and it's certainly the case that the sciences and the arts compete for the resources of public funding and willing novices; however, I don't quite see the art/science divide reaching the degree of ferocity hinted at by Charles L Harness's classic work, ‘The Rose’, published in magazine form in 1953.

The fifties were at the head of the atomic age. People remembered how nuclear power had been used to end the Second World War, and was beginning to be used for peaceful purposes as well. Military funding of science was beginning to reach proportions that the ‘back-room boys’ of previous weapon development could not have imagined, and brought new opportunities and new dilemmas for civilian scientists. Against a background of rising McCarthyism, it worried many. Blish's ‘They Shall Have Stars’, written in 1956 and later to become the first book of ‘Cities in Flight’, is a supreme example of what people thought a militarised, scientific society would entail. Elsewhere, sf writers and authors of mainstream thrillers were flocking to produce stories of mad scientists with terrible weapons. In the arts, too, it was a time of upheaval. Modernism had run its course, and its practitioners were splitting into schools of thought almost as fast as the atomic nuclei of the scientists were splitting into lighter elements. In such a time, with such outrageousness in fiction, Harness's small story of a death struggle between science and art seems modest.

Harness makes the conflict larger than life by projecting it onto a smaller, domestic stage. Martha Jacques is one of the government's top scientists. She is working on the Jacques Rosette — a formula for Sciomnia, which takes the form of a red rose and can be used as a new power source, or an all-powerful weapon. With all the hatred that the feminine mind can summon, she loathes her estranged husband, Ruy Jacques. He is an artist in the abstract: he dabbles in painting, sculpture, and music. He sees the coming of a renaissance, led by artists, or at least by the Bohemian types who like to think of themselves as artists. He lives in the Via Rosa, the local cultural centre. As an intermediary, we have Anna van Tuyl, a leading psychiatrist who falls in love with Ruy Jacques while investigating his unique disorder. van Tuyl also seeks the red rose: she is desperately trying to finish her ballet of Oscar Wilde's short story, ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ (1891), but cannot compose the ending.

Harness's characters are often poets of dialogue, investing such meaning into tone of voice or exact choice of words that it takes a paragraph of explanation to reveal their full content to the reader. This parallels Harness's own writing style. His prose is deftly written in a way that few writers can manage: it is lavish without the overblown flamboyance of Bester's, and gives intricate details without being as dry as Clarke's. Like many writers, he flavours his text with a sprinkling of detail from contemporary science and philosophy: he doesn't just describe events in the plot, but gives an account of why they must be as he describes.

These baroque features of his writing and narrative structure are present in this book too. It aesthetically draws the reader from page to page, following his presentation as a river follows its course. They make the work a pleasure to read, not a long haul like many of the harder sf tomes. Its length, at a mere 90 pages, contributes to this lightness, by stopping the book being either drawn-out or rushed.

And so, as reading the book gives such joy, it is a disappointment to know its shortcomings. The two Jacques argue intermittently over the primacy of art or of science, but the arguments they present are so facile and so trivially falsifiable that one begins to think the main characters are fools not to notice. Ruy Jacques is obviously playing the long game throughout, and Martha Jacques is blinded by her irrational hatred, so they do have excuses, but Harness doesn't, for fobbing us off with half-formed debating points. As with his presentation of Toynbee in ‘The Paradox Men’, the gaps in the written debate highlight the gaps in his philosophical reasoning and his knowledge of the issues he tries to describe. Because of this, I would not say that this is a book that should be read by everybody; rather, it is a very dangerous book, that may lead unwary readers into believing untruths.

Harness exercises himself mostly with the idea that the arts inform the sciences: in the way that painters gained insight into how vision works before cognitive science was even considered, or in the way that architects discovered the utility of the arch before physicists thought to examine the nature of forces. But to go further and to say that science consistently lags art, as Ruy Jacques does with impunity, is to ignore the distinction between observing the flight of a projectile and calculating the thrust needed to put a satellite into orbit.

This idea as a whole, of the experiments performed by artists later being “rediscovered”, or revisited, in mathematical form by scientists is mirrored by the work itself, in a ploy so subtle that I can't decide whether it was deliberate. This science-fictional story explicitly references Wilde's artistic short, ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, mentioned above, which is in its own way a treatise on the same subject: a tragic story of a scientist blinded by emotion, facing a brilliant songbird who alone understands the nature of love. Both nightingales are transfigured during the course of their plots, with sad consequences. Both works are dominated by the fulfilment, and the non-fulfilment, of desires made clear early on; and each is notable for its careful prose, though Wilde's is more self-indulgent, with the aesthetic balance wrangled by the crude repetitions characteristic of mediocre children's authors.

One other parallel not commented on by Wilde but carefully expanded on by Harness is that of music as a form of communication. The plot is, in part, founded on the unfinished ballet, with its message of love and death; at several other points, translation of non-musical messages to musical form proves important. In fact, many of the events in ‘The Rose’ can be seen as being about the search for music, as much as the plot as a whole is about the search for the red rose. All the characters are looking for a piece of music that they already possess but cannot yet access.

Michael Moorcock calls ‘The Rose’ “one of the five best sf novels ever”. If it weren't for the clumsiness of its main argument, I might agree with him; despite this failing, Harness makes a good effort at selling the arts to the scientists and wannabe scientists who constitute the bulk of his audience, and does so in a readable and lively way.

One of the distinguishing features of science-fiction is that ideas are as important as people. Whereas a mundane book might be about a family's struggle for respectability, or a heroic warrior trying to overcome fearsome enemies, or even a couple's search for romance in trying circumstances, an sf book might also be about how to integrate robots and humans in a society without repeating the mistakes of previous racial integrations, or how computer systems might work in the future, or how to terraform a planet. People and their problems still feature, but often only as a foreground to a wider discussion.

Whatever else they might be about, John Brunner's books tend to feature society as a key theme. In ‘The Shockwave Rider’, he explicitly contrasts the social interactions within megacorporate culture against those in a small-town setting. In ‘Born under Mars’, Brunner goes further, forking humanity. Earth's colonists have gone their separate ways, one branch in the vague direction of Ursa Major to become the “Bears”, the other in the direction of Centaurus to become the “Centaurs”. The Bears have become friendly and informal, very rowdy and prone to drinking and gambling. The Centaurs have developed a rigid, formal hierarchy, founded on regulations and hypocrisy. The two branches of humanity are in a cold war, mediated by their forebears who remain on Earth (about whom we don't hear much). Brunner explores the notion that this merely organisational difference between their societies deeply affects all aspects of life. As an example: because monogamy within marriage is rigidly observed by Centaurs, most Centaur families have similar children; but it is common for Bear siblings to share only one parent because they are much more permissive.

But there is a third colonial group: the first colony, Mars, founded before the invention of superluminal travel. Because of its historical status, Mars has never become independent from Earth, but its colonists have their own culture, based on trust and rigid adherence to rules of conduct developed for surviving the hardships of colonising a planet with a thin atmosphere. Because of the Martians' special status, the narrator, Ray Mallin, is one of the few space engineers to have worked in both Bear and Centaur space, which conveniently puts him in a strong position as narrator to explain the differences between the cultures to the reader. The book opens on his return from a voyage he'd like to put behind him, and immediately he is set upon by agents of both sides looking for he knows not what. He tries to track down his old teacher, and on his way takes in some interesting ideas about alien artefacts found on Mars by the first colonists, and an explanation of heraldry in terms of genetics.

On Brunner's Mars, as in the early USA, most people can trace their ancestry to one of the early colonists. The halvings and quarterings of coats of arms provides a way to visualise the genetic minglings of ancestry. For Brunner, genetic endowment is the one “ultimate and absolutely indispensable resource,” the means and end of the human ability to adapt and make progress, and heraldry is a means of tracking this resource.

It is no surprise that the book, written only a year before ‘Stand on Zanzibar’, should contain a small stylistic experiment. Early on, Mallin loses (or has lost for him) his memory, and he spends a chapter retracing his steps, but describing everything in different terms. The reader, though, has not lost his memory, and this way of taking a second look at old territory turns out to be slightly confusing and somewhat boring. Even though it doesn't quite come off, by no means does it spoil the book as a whole. ‘Born under Mars’ is a short book, and it is more discursive than descriptive, but it fits the size of its ideas perfectly, being neither rushed nor drawn-out. Brunner is relatively matter-of-fact in his presentation, without the exuberant style of his later work and few lexical embellishments to distract the reader from his thesis. The book is not really an adventure story nor a thriller about an innocent getting caught up in espionage and intrigue. It is about ideas, about how societies come to be arranged the way they are and our reactions to them, from within and without, and it is an interesting and worthwhile read.