Edited by Paul Leonard and Jim Mortimore
Bless the Decalogs. They were Short Trips before there were Short Trips, and despite some youthful awkwardness with the format (how do we string together ten stories? Do we need a linking narrative? Will a theme do?) we got many excellent stories out of them. They have necessarily moved away from Doctor Who now, with the fourth book focusing on the lineage of Roz Forrester and book five (Wonders) completely unmoored from continuity. This is, as far as I can tell, ten stories of honest to god sci-fi. We know going in that this was the last Decalog, so it’s fair to say that one way or another there was no progression from here. Was it a step too far? With these stories, will I be tempted above whether it’s good or bad simply to wonder, is this anything? I’m a fan of the editors so I’m cautiously optimistic.
*
The Place of All Places
By ???
Based on an idea by Nakula Somana
It’s sort of ironic, in a book totally divorced from Doctor Who, that this feels like the sort of moody no-idea-what-that-was-about prologue you’d get in a Who book. It’s very short and mythical: there’s a boy in a strange desert whose uncle builds a washing machine for the local workers and ponders the worth of stories. The boy walks away, pondering. I got nothin’.
*
Poyekhali 3201
By Stephen Baxter
Yuri Gagarin completes his historic flight and orbit around the Earth. Or does he? A shade of the Sam Rockwell movie Moon defines a peculiar monument to Gagarin, as versions of him (machines? Holograms? The same being, but on a loop?) complete the flight over and over, and one of them accidentally catches on. Interesting, but too quick to really grasp hold of anything. Such is the character’s lot, to be fair.
*
King’s Chamber
By Dominic Green
…and suddenly things get really weird. Set in (probably) a future Earth, long after some cataclysm and the splintering of intelligent life into three forms, two of them – man as we know him, and a kind of wibbly amphibian that communicates partly by colour – occupy the planet in an uneasy arrangement. The amphibians live their lives around a shared dream, and the humans (?) begin making inroads about that, which blossom into a psychic attack. This, in turn, leads to a reckoning, and then a better understanding of who the inhabitants are in relation to one another.
Honestly, it’s a lot, but it gets a more generous page-count to flesh out its barking mad imagery. The verbiage is all pleasingly strange – I bet Jim Mortimore loved it – and by the end, I was invested.
*
City Of Hammers
By Neil Williamson
A visit to a mysterious city is shared by a man and his old flame, the latter suffering from a degenerative disorder. You can sense the writer’s excitement at describing this weird closed system of a city, but it’s somewhat over-written here and indeed elsewhere, with character interactions tediously micro-managing their movements and inflections. The real problem though is the characters: Cal is a bitter, dull man who only thinks about himself, while Yanni – essentially dying, wanting to see a remarkable place with an old friend, clearly the character with the most interesting stuff going on here – has almost no input except as an object Cal can mope over or be mad at. I was glad to leave them.
*
Painting In The Age With The Beauty Of Our Days
By Mike O’Driscoll
This wastes no time in announcing that it will be edgy as all heck, muddy funsters! Profanity, sex and drugs are fired at the reader in a manner certain infamous New Adventures could have only dreamed of, as a totally way cool and not at all insufferable protagonist plumbs the depths of depravity to discover whether anything can be art, including terrorism. It has some ideas about artistic expression and how modern day ennui makes it harder to feel anything. The latter is perhaps intended to paper over the lack of any character you could empathise with, but the sheer revolting glee of its excesses (including, but not limited to, necrophilia), the giddy sprinkler system of edge-lord swearwords and the dash of misogyny around its one female character make it difficult to respect what it’s doing so much as want to chuck the book in the bin with embarrassment.
*
The Judgement Of Solomon
By Lawrence Miles
Oh thank god, Bernice is here. Actually wait a tick – Bernice can be in these? Why the blithering heck isn’t it a collection of Bernice stories, then? Sure, variety is the spice of life, I've nothing against a collection of straight sci-fi, but it seems fairly self evident by her appearance here that if you have Bernice, it will improve book. (Gazing at my frequent resource, Bernice Summerfield – The Inside Story, it appears Miles genuinely believe this was intended as Bernice collection. Ah well, certainly no harm done!)
Mind you, some of the credit is due to Lawrence Miles. We can perhaps thank the shorter word-count for a stronger sense of purpose than there was in his last Virgin work (the colourful, swampy Christmas On A Rational Planet), but it’s also just a bloody good application of Bernice Summerfield: archaeologist. Visiting ancient Baghdad (I don’t think they say how but ehh) to settle the question of impossible technology turning up in history, we are soon privy to the story of the old King Solomon and how that relates to the fascinating wonders (natch) of this city. There is beautiful, melancholy writing here, all buoyed by Bernice being fabulous.
*
The Milk Of Human Kindness
By Elizabeth Sourbut
Definitely a unique idea, and very well written, but this one might cause some discomfort. What if everybody started breast feeding? Just a pandemic of that? What would cause it, and then what would happen? There are some disturbing moments, from a man pretty much getting off on it to a war zone. It’s a fascinating story, and a very good example of how SF threats don’t have to be aliens or zombies. Also it seems like a uniquely female idea. But still, your eyebrows will raise reading it.
*
Bibliophage
By Stephen Marley
Ahhh. I’ve missed Stephen Marley. His Managra was one of the most memorable Missing Adventures, and Bibliophage shares its chaotic interest in literature. A likeable duo of adventurers visit a paradoxical library that contains and affects the entire universe, seeking to find out why one of them is disappearing from history. It’s a deliciously clever and funny story, even if the character writing is a little mannered. I’m glad he’s written two in this collection.
*
Negative Space
By Jeanne Cavelos
This is compelling stuff, if a bit more at the traditional end of sci-fi than a lot of this collection: it’s a good old fashioned space expedition gone wrong. Where it gets interesting is the lack of a fully realised alien threat; instead the crew are investigating, and soon endangered by a series of alien “sculptures” and the unusual life-forms that constructed them. Jeanne Cavelos – another female writer, what are the odds! – imbues this with reflections on art and the response to art that raise more questions than they answer, but that’s often the way with gently mind-expanding SF.
*
Dome Of Whispers
By Ian Watson
A short, interesting encounter within an ancient dome that records and repeats every utterance forever. It doesn’t go quite how the tour guide would have liked. Not a lot to say about this one – it’s neat and it works. I wonder if they commissioned an itty-bitty story to work around the longer ones. (The previous story was about 50 pages.)
*
Waters-Of-Starlight
By Stephen Marley
If you’re concerned about the same author showing up twice (and to be fair, it’s sort of unfair) at least these are very different stories. This Stephen Marley is not the frothy, funny one from Bibliophage: Waters-Of-Starlight is not frivolous, as much myth as sci-fi.
In the distant future a woman is parted from her husband, and must honour their pact: the one who doesn’t die must go up the great river. She is pursued by her husband’s vengeful brother. It all gets a bit metaphysical, but I enjoyed its grand ideas even if I only glimpsed them through unearthly waterfalls.
*
The Place Of All Places
By ???
Based on an idea by Nakula Somana
Just a little capper really, touching on what we’ve learned. Like Jim Mortimore in the About The Authors segment, it is.
*
I don’t have much love for short story collections. This is, to be clear, my problem and not theirs: when reading a book I find the story’s momentum is essential to stave off distraction, and I don’t get that when the story has to start again and again. A sci-fi collection with no linking theme or character and (almost) no commonality in its writers is sort of a worst case scenario for me, with each fresh start meaning I might have to construct a world out of mental whole cloth every time. So, I found Decalog 5 hard going more because of what it is than how good it was. (Yeah I know – boo hoo.)
The important question is, how good are the stories? On balance: pretty good! King’s Chamber and Negative Space are strong pieces of sci-fi. The Judgement of Solomon and Bibliophage are great, fun stories. The Milk of Human Kindness probably can’t be called fun but it’s a devious piece of work. Really the only bits that didn’t work for me are City of Hammers (needed character work and the style perhaps wasn’t my thing) and Painting In The Age With The Beauty Of Our Days (thought it was dreadful, other opinions available), so not a bad average.
Do I think they should have done more weird, unmoored Decalogs? Well, they didn’t, but I think they’d have got a stronger handle on this broader (deeper?) remit if they had. What we got though was still mostly worth your time, and the hits can comfortably compete with the more recognisable Decalogs.
7/10
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