Swan Songs by Brian Stableford
01/07/2002 . Source: Jane Palmer 

pub: Big Engine. 647 page enlarged paperback. Price: £16.99 (UK). ISBN: 1-903468-04-3.

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The Halcyon Drift

Grainger is stranded on a remote planet where a mind parasite takes up residence in his brain. A ship of the Caradoc Company rescues him and for that honour he finds himself presented with a bill he has little chance of paying.

Somewhat too fortuitously, he is offered the position of pilot on the Hooded Swan, an articulated spaceship that is flown by merging with a human pilot's metabolism. Given its near magical capacity, the New Alexandrians, who commissioned the vessel, send it to retrieve the Lost Star.

Abandoned in a virtually impenetrable region of space, many are willing to take the risk of salvaging the ship's cargo. Given that virtually no one knows what it is, on the surface the venture seems more like machismo than acquisition. As well as that hazard for Grainger, there is a lot of wading through strange vegetation with attitude.

Perhaps it was over optimistic to hope for a heart stopping twist in the plot of the first novel.

Rhapsody in Black

The premise of worms that can devour cities being let loose on the Galaxy is intriguing: the debate about whether the perpetrator should be allowed to do it, less so. Plenty of situation, though not much action and the story has a leaden quality that inevitably comes with a virtually all-male cast.

The narrative sometimes verges on a treatise about religious commitment. Stableford almost get away with it because he is a good writer.

Promised Land

A young alien girl is ostensibly kidnapped. In pursuit, Grainger unexpectedly discovers that she is important to her species who have been oppressed by the intolerant Zodiac people. They believe that they had been chosen to colonise the promised land of Chao Phrya.

Stableford has an acute grasp of commitment driven bigotry in humankind. The wading through vegetation here is livened up by the threat of two-ton arachnids that would not even fit into the bath, let alone allow themselves to be flushed down the plughole. Though the plot is somewhat pedestrian, given the way the author tells it, I did want to finish the story.

The Paradise Game

One for the anti globalisation protesters.

Multi-planetary companies are set to overthrow or at best ignore the relatively ineffectual role of the New Rome authority. Caradoc, a multi-planetary company, make a start by attempting to annex Pharos which is inhabited by the Anacaona who apparently do not evolve, let alone age. Grainger, cynic with a golden heart, is in the thick of it attempting to rationalise his way through it all. He doesn't need to - good old Nature lays down the law instead.

The Fenris Device

On the inhospitable planet of Mormyr is stranded the ship Varsovien which contains the massively destructive Fenris Device. In a story reminiscent of ‘Halcyon Drift’, Grainger finds himself caught up in a perilous enterprise to retrieve it for the ridiculously taciturn Gallacellans. The plot is pivotal on the odd concept of a human dwarf having a hang up about his size in a the universe filled with aliens, seriously enough to turn his mind and commit murder as well as hijack the Hooded Swan. This novel contains more action than the others and is strong on description. Probably the best story of the collection.

Swan Song

The tag line of the first description in this book is, 'Sam was a giant designed by a committee who wanted to go easy on materials.'

Here Grainger is apparently free of the service of Titus Charlot, a powerful force of New Alexandria, only to be pursued with his new friend, Sam, by Caradoc who need the content of the pilot's memory. The Sister Swan and crew have apparently been destroyed in the Nightingale 'nebula ' and Grainger is inveigled to pilot the Hooded Swan through it.

The wind, his mind parasite, at last describes the nature of nebulous existence more eloquently than ever managed in ‘Star Trek’. Nightingale, actually an organism, is absorbing matter, including the wind, like a black hole minus the gravity and the event horizon.

It wouldn't be giving too much away to say that everything comes right in the end. After six novels, I would have been uncharacteristically put out if it hadn't.

Very much a product of the 70s, the stories are readable, even though generously laced with pseudo-scientific explanations. In many cases, Stableford gives them a peculiar veracity which tends to condense the magnitude of the Galaxy into manageable bites. Nevertheless, the ease with which space is traversed here, despite the effort put into describing the wonderful faster-than-light drives available, can be disconcerting. The author also has a fascination with pervasive vegetation. If ground ivy ever behaved like this, gardeners would need to weed with an AK49.

While appreciating that faster than light travel needs some explanation, it usually only goes to prove that the Cosmos is far more elegant than humans dare to entertain. Stableford's attempt at confounding Einstein's theory is just as valid as any later ones.

Overall, the impression of a Galaxy immense beyond mortal comprehension is the same as much in the SF genre: a Star Trek home-to-home principally occupied with near-humanoid aliens who are either misunderstood or just out to get the human race. There is also the underlying inference that ignores the opportunism of Nature, implying that there are habitable worlds just waiting for humans to colonise.

The stories are all in first person narrative by Grainger, punctuated by dialogue with his benign mental parasite. As well as allowing the main character to hold conversations with himself, the wind, as he calls it, tempers the irrational side of a character that could well have become bogged down by his own cynicism, self-pity and misanthropy. For a hard-boiled cynic, Grainger can do a tedious amount of soul searching. Often he comes up with something worth finding, though the way there can be tortuous.

The facilities of the sophisticated Hooded Swan come over as oddly cramped and, after six books, there is hardly a flicker of lust from the Grainger apart from his a love affair with his spaceship. This is probably because there is only one notable female character and she is frequently dismissed as merely bordering on competent. In this context, the all-female inhabitants of Pharos in the Paradise Game are an anomaly to be investigated.

Apart from the last two stories, the plots have little substance, which might account for the weight of explanation that pads them out. Fortunately the author has an accomplished narrative style and frequent flashes of wit. More involvement with the alien and imaginative engagement - vegetation excepted - would have helped colour the plots. As they are, the stories assume that humans have pervaded the Galaxy. This is enough to make anyone wonder how science overcame the consequential bone loss.

This is competent workmanlike SF in a genre now being elbowed aside by the less problematic fantasy market. It is easier to create myths that do not have any demand on their own logic. Pseudo-science, whatever you think of it, requires a little more thought and discipline for the strands hold together. Brian Stableford has that a rare ability to make it read as more than jargon, however much he engages in that inhibitor of plot, explanation. To make up for this, some of his descriptions are a tour de force.

Jane Palmer

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