Makers by Cory Doctorow
HarperVoyager, £14.99; 416pp Buy the book

FlashForward by Robert J. Sawyer
Gollancz, £6.99; 319pp Buy the book

Songs of the Dying Earth edited by George R. R . Martin and Gardner Dozois
HarperVoyager, £25; 660pp Buy the book

Cory Doctorow’s new novel has no spaceships, aliens or mind-boggling discoveries on the final frontier, but it does what some feel is the main point of science fiction by offering well-informed speculation about the future. Refreshingly, it’s not a gloomy dystopian vision.

Makers begins in America a few years from now. There’s more unemployment and homelessness than ever before, and the property market has not recovered. But rents are cheap and bankrupt apartment complexes and abandoned shopping malls provide space where the dispossessed build shantytowns and gradually create workable local economies.

We are introduced to this world through the eyes of Suzanne Church, a business journalist reporting on a couple of “garage inventors”, Perry and Lester, who turn rubbish into saleable items, such as funny robots. Her interest provides the catalyst that leads to “New Work”, a movement that promises economic recovery. But, like the dot-com boom, the reality is more disappointing.

Parts of the book read like one of those long, well-researched, intelligent articles by Malcolm Gladwell, and the effect is to make even the wildest of Doctorow’s inventions seem plausible. I particularly liked the fatkins — formerly obese people who get a treatment based on hummingbird genes to make their metabolism burn 10,000 calories a day even when they do nothing. I was less impressed by the middle section, where the author’s almost worshipful obsession with Disneyland gets a bit out of hand.

Despite its flaws, Makers is fresh and full of thought-provoking ideas, a book about tomorrow that demands to be read now.

Robert J. Sawyer’s FlashForward is set in 2009, which was more than ten years in the future when he wrote the book. Like the TV series of the same name (set in our own 2009), Sawyer’s novel has everyone in the world blacking out in the present for two minutes as they glimpse the future. On TV the glimpse is six months ahead. In the book it’s 20 years. And instead of being FBI agents in pursuit of sinister conspirators, Sawyer’s characters are physicists working for CERN. (It wasn’t a conspiracy — the Large Hadron Collider did it.) Although it was turned for TV into a race-against-time thriller, the novel is an intellectual puzzle, drawing on theoretical physics to raise questions about time and space and the existence of free will, and proves once again that good science fiction does not need visual special effects to thrill.

Jack Vance, an American writer now in his nineties, may not be well-known outside the genre, but his imaginary worlds, brought to life in his richly baroque yet coolly ironic prose style, were a major influence on the development of modern fantasy. George R. R. Martin considers Vance’s Dying Earth to rank with Tolkien’s Middle Earth as “one of fantasy’s most unforgettable and influential settings”, and has collaborated with the award-winning editor Gardner Dozois in assembling a tribute anthology, Songs of the Dying Earth.

I read The Dying Earth in my teens, when I read anything I could find that looked like science fiction, but although I enjoyed it at least as much as the works of A. Merritt or Clark Ashton Smith, they didn’t inspire me the way Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon did. Obviously many other writers feel differently, and after reading the heartfelt accolades to Vance’s talent from 23 very different and talented writers (including Neil Gaiman, Dean Koontz and Dan Simmons) I feel moved to go back and give it another try.

Despite similarities beyond the shared background, these new stories are surprisingly varied, and enjoyable on their own terms. I especially liked Tanith Lee’s wickedly funny Evillo the Uncunning, Jeff VanderMeer’s bizarre The Final Quest of the Wizard Sarnod and Martin’s A Night at the Tarn House, and while a few writers get a bit carried away in their attempt to channel Vance, others, such as Howard Waldrop and Phyllis Eisenstein, stick to their own style of storytelling, with happy results. A great big satisfying anthology.

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