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Heliotrope
Adam Roberts,Justina Robson
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
3 people are currently reading
101 people want to read
About the author
Justina Robson
66 books286 followersJustina is from Leeds, a city in Yorkshire in the north of England. She always wanted to write and always did. Other things sometimes got in the way and sometimes still do...but not too much.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
October 31, 2023
7,5 There were some very good stories in here - surprising, with vividly imagined worlds, interesting explorations of concepts and thoughtful characterisation. Some that stayed with me after I read them. But not for their conclusion or twist. More for their set-up. The situation explored. Some of the best stories turned out to be set in narrative worlds from previous novels by the author. This, to me, is saying something - the author seems to be more at home in longer form, where she has more space to built up worlds (sometimes convoluted) and let situations play out across hundreds of pages, letting a resulation develop organically. From her story notes she seems to be a bit of a 'pantser' - letting the 'pixies' dictate the way the stories go. These stories seem to be all her short fiction work from 1994 up to 2011. In the mean time she published more than a handful of novels. This confirms my suspicion that she is more of a novel-writer than a short story-author and to really appreciate her work I'll have to give her novels a chance. So this collection would be something for the fans of her novels, wanting something more, instead of a collection for afficionado's of the short story format.
Still, there's a foreword by Adam Roberts here, so it would be too easy to dismiss this collection. And looking closer, there is a lot of thematic richness in these stories. These are not fantasy or SF-stories that fit easily into tropes without something to say of themselves. Neither are they straightforward explorations of scientific or sociological concepts. These seem to be more influenced by the New Wave, by the way of cyberpunk. There is a Philip K. Dick-like questioning of reality here - if our perception can be manipulated, even our perception of ourselves, how can we be sure of the world we live in and our place in it? In the often pretty pessimistic or even nihilistic conclusions I tasted a bit of Ballard even.
In the fantasy stories this theme is realised in putting artistic inspiration and obsession over against religious fervour and madness. Or putting the vision of an archaeologist of the past up against a vision of the past. Or asking whether the woman who says the new help in the hospital is really Legolas is mad - when this conviction leads to a better live. In the SF-stories this question of perception and identity is filtered through modern technology, coupled with themes like our disillusionment with modern society and the rise of corporations (Robson is most well known for her 'Quantum Gravity' series of cyberpunk novels). There are stories about a drug that changes people's identity and makes them play pre-programmed roles in society (like a girl who believes she is a superhero sent to target a poet), or constructs, upgraded forms of humanity, sharing the solar system with old fashioned us - what remains of a human being when he or she is 'forged'? And then there are some stories that are not as cyberpunky, but still play with perception and identity, like the final story about a possible Bigfoot on Mars.
Interesting to delve a bit deeper in these themes, but I would have preferred the stories to have more conclusive endings myself. Here there is a bit too much ambiguity for my tastes.
Still, there's a foreword by Adam Roberts here, so it would be too easy to dismiss this collection. And looking closer, there is a lot of thematic richness in these stories. These are not fantasy or SF-stories that fit easily into tropes without something to say of themselves. Neither are they straightforward explorations of scientific or sociological concepts. These seem to be more influenced by the New Wave, by the way of cyberpunk. There is a Philip K. Dick-like questioning of reality here - if our perception can be manipulated, even our perception of ourselves, how can we be sure of the world we live in and our place in it? In the often pretty pessimistic or even nihilistic conclusions I tasted a bit of Ballard even.
In the fantasy stories this theme is realised in putting artistic inspiration and obsession over against religious fervour and madness. Or putting the vision of an archaeologist of the past up against a vision of the past. Or asking whether the woman who says the new help in the hospital is really Legolas is mad - when this conviction leads to a better live. In the SF-stories this question of perception and identity is filtered through modern technology, coupled with themes like our disillusionment with modern society and the rise of corporations (Robson is most well known for her 'Quantum Gravity' series of cyberpunk novels). There are stories about a drug that changes people's identity and makes them play pre-programmed roles in society (like a girl who believes she is a superhero sent to target a poet), or constructs, upgraded forms of humanity, sharing the solar system with old fashioned us - what remains of a human being when he or she is 'forged'? And then there are some stories that are not as cyberpunky, but still play with perception and identity, like the final story about a possible Bigfoot on Mars.
Interesting to delve a bit deeper in these themes, but I would have preferred the stories to have more conclusive endings myself. Here there is a bit too much ambiguity for my tastes.
June 2, 2011
Justina Robson's sf/fantasy novels stand in an exceptional category entirely on their own, unique. No one has a voice like hers.
In this collection we get that voice in little microcosms - some of which refer back to her novels like the amazing LIVING NEXT DOOR TO THE GOD OF LOVE, and also (in the excellent pure fantasy story 'An Unremarkable Man')the Quantum Gravity series, but always in her imimitable voice. My own favourite is THE GIRL HERO's MIRROR SAYS HE'S NOT THE ONE, which does a typical Robson thing: it takes a universal sf/fantasy dream--come-true convention(to be a superhero) and looks at it from the inside, from the real life lived instead of the concept - where of course it's the normal, maybe even the boring life, in fact all the other considered possible lives the superhero could be living out there that look so very vivid, and the girl hero is not satisfied. In fact, that reaching out for the perfect life, trying to figure it out, needing to mix reality and imagination to have any chance of being fulfilled, is a wonderful thread running through this collection. As Robson herself puts it in her (all too brief) notes appended to the final story 'Regardless of prgoress in technology human beings have yet to deal with the real problems that have always driven them - the tensions created by their existence as individuals and animals of limited powers but powerful imaginations, for whom biology is still destiny and that destiny is death.' In this collection, Robson looks at this and much else with power and a lot of humour too.
Adam Roberts introuction is also very good, a serious, indeed almost academic assessment of her work, which is the very least this remarkable writer deserves.
In this collection we get that voice in little microcosms - some of which refer back to her novels like the amazing LIVING NEXT DOOR TO THE GOD OF LOVE, and also (in the excellent pure fantasy story 'An Unremarkable Man')the Quantum Gravity series, but always in her imimitable voice. My own favourite is THE GIRL HERO's MIRROR SAYS HE'S NOT THE ONE, which does a typical Robson thing: it takes a universal sf/fantasy dream--come-true convention(to be a superhero) and looks at it from the inside, from the real life lived instead of the concept - where of course it's the normal, maybe even the boring life, in fact all the other considered possible lives the superhero could be living out there that look so very vivid, and the girl hero is not satisfied. In fact, that reaching out for the perfect life, trying to figure it out, needing to mix reality and imagination to have any chance of being fulfilled, is a wonderful thread running through this collection. As Robson herself puts it in her (all too brief) notes appended to the final story 'Regardless of prgoress in technology human beings have yet to deal with the real problems that have always driven them - the tensions created by their existence as individuals and animals of limited powers but powerful imaginations, for whom biology is still destiny and that destiny is death.' In this collection, Robson looks at this and much else with power and a lot of humour too.
Adam Roberts introuction is also very good, a serious, indeed almost academic assessment of her work, which is the very least this remarkable writer deserves.
June 29, 2011
Very uneven story quality-- several of the pieces feel unfinished, or like the beginnings of longer works, and having Robson confirm as much in her afterwords ('The Adventurers League', for example) does not help the reader feel like they are getting value for money.
Her best pieces are quite good indeed, particularly the excellent 'Erie Lackawanna Song' and 'Cracklegrackle', but overall, the book feels rushed into production in an effort to cash in on Robson's Guest of Honour appearacne at Swancon 2011, an impression not helped by the awful quality of editing-- the book is riddled with typos, missing words, and grammatical errors: the 5 page introduction contains no less than 16 such errors, and they appear regularly throughout the rest of the volume-- which leaves the reader feeling that the book was not so much edited as assembled from extant pieces like a jigsaw without any time taken to make sure those pieces actually fit.
This could have been a really good book-- Robson is obviously a talented writer. But the execrable editing and suspicion that there just isn't enough good material to support a book of this length, have resulted in a frustrating and disappointing package.
Her best pieces are quite good indeed, particularly the excellent 'Erie Lackawanna Song' and 'Cracklegrackle', but overall, the book feels rushed into production in an effort to cash in on Robson's Guest of Honour appearacne at Swancon 2011, an impression not helped by the awful quality of editing-- the book is riddled with typos, missing words, and grammatical errors: the 5 page introduction contains no less than 16 such errors, and they appear regularly throughout the rest of the volume-- which leaves the reader feeling that the book was not so much edited as assembled from extant pieces like a jigsaw without any time taken to make sure those pieces actually fit.
This could have been a really good book-- Robson is obviously a talented writer. But the execrable editing and suspicion that there just isn't enough good material to support a book of this length, have resulted in a frustrating and disappointing package.
January 10, 2014
Smart, strange, wonderful short stories. The very first one in this collection would have turned me into a Justina Robson fan even if her novels hadn't already drawn me in years ago.
July 11, 2020
The lead story Heliotrope is all that has surfaced from the author’s “Massively Unpublishable First Fantasy Epic” and at times the writing betrays its inexperienced origin. In it an artist finishing her apprenticeship is given by her ageing tutor the task of encapsulating the essence of dance master Jalaeka who inspires widespread devotion and can float. He can also drain his followers dry.
The McGuffin in Body of Evidence is a device which lets the wearer know what everyone is really thinking when they are speaking. Our heroine finds this even more excruciating when she meets another person trialling the device.
The Adventurers’ League was first published in an anthology dedicated to the style of Jules Verne. Voyager Lone Star Isol has returned from interstellar space in a manner suggesting it has been able to return faster than the speed of light. The journalist narrator Riba, is sent to investigate. Isol is one of the Forged people and there is the possibility of a war between them and Original humans. Riba is pushed off a transatlantic helium airship to fall oceanward. He is saved from death by the actions of an immense tentacled creature, which turns out to be a floating organism on which he meets avatars of Jules Verne, Captain Nemo, Sinbad, the Mermaid Silene, Ahab, and Sir David Attenborough, Forged people anxious to avoid war. The story has a fair degree of intrusive information dumping.
The Girl Hero’s Mirror Says He’s Not the One is set in Robson’s Mappa Mundi universe. The Girl Hero is sent to assassinate a poet who her mirror assures her will not the one to kill her. Biut he does have a device that resets internal software.
In The Bull Leapers a woman whose husband is in Knossos for an archæological dig encounters three Greeks who practice the old art of bull-leaping. They are also in touch with the Labyrinth, to where they take her for the story’s transforming episode.
Deadhead is narrated by Lois, a fourteen year-old girl. Her six years older sister Clem has Asperger’s and Lois always resents having to looking after her. She and their mother come to a better understanding after Clem communes with a dead horse’s head.
Erie Lackawanna Song starts off at the Hoboken ferry terminal with a man looking at the derelict Erie Lackawanna jetty next door. Hios journey across the river takes a different turn from usual when his nodding and sometimes speaking acquaintance, Claire Glick, asks him to look at a phial of liquid she has taken from work. It contains a substance that can rewrite brain synapses.
Cracklegrackle sees a man helped by one of the Forged (one who can “see” at all wavelengths) to find his daughter, kidnapped on Mars some time before, on Jupiter, much changed.
In No Man’s Island, on the day she finds she has not got the job at CERN she longed for Mariann Harris consoles herself with her discovery of traces of an alien spaceship having used an Alcbierre warp drive. Meanwhile her husband embarrasses himself with a customer of the shop where he works. Both find solace with their dog, Bing.
Robson’s first published story, Trésor, is understated horror wherein a prostitute has been waiting for her mark.
The Seventh Series is a mythical set of yoga exercises Davey is writing into a computer game. Then he finds that there is a video of that title and goes searching for its origin. The explanation at the story’s end is rather mundane though.
The Little Bear is one of the few SF stories to address the fact that time travel is also space travel and vice-versa. Ronson examines this through a series of vignettes set in different time-lines but with the same characters, each lamenting the human loss they incurred when an experiment involving the teleportation of a bottle of wine changed their world.
In Legolas Does the Dishes an inmate of a mental hospital envisages that the man who doe sthe dishes in the institution is Legolas from Tolkien’s Hobbit universe. Her viewpoint is emphasised when she tells us, “I don’t need to say what might happen if you got a shard in your eye and started to see the world through another lens. Who knows what might be revealed?” It is left open as to whether she is deluded or he really is Legolas.
Dreadnought is the intelligence of a spaceship as mediated through its units which can not exist without a human host.
An Unremarkable Man is the tale of two supernatural women trying to be ordinary, a Viscus Diabolique and the ensuing trade with a non-descript man who materialises from nowhere.
A Dream of Mars is suffered nightly by our narrator who was sent to recover the remains of the dead from a downed cable car in the Martian New South Face Woodlands and destroy the human created Bigfoot who had been intended as a tourist attraction only to form a bond with him instead.
The McGuffin in Body of Evidence is a device which lets the wearer know what everyone is really thinking when they are speaking. Our heroine finds this even more excruciating when she meets another person trialling the device.
The Adventurers’ League was first published in an anthology dedicated to the style of Jules Verne. Voyager Lone Star Isol has returned from interstellar space in a manner suggesting it has been able to return faster than the speed of light. The journalist narrator Riba, is sent to investigate. Isol is one of the Forged people and there is the possibility of a war between them and Original humans. Riba is pushed off a transatlantic helium airship to fall oceanward. He is saved from death by the actions of an immense tentacled creature, which turns out to be a floating organism on which he meets avatars of Jules Verne, Captain Nemo, Sinbad, the Mermaid Silene, Ahab, and Sir David Attenborough, Forged people anxious to avoid war. The story has a fair degree of intrusive information dumping.
The Girl Hero’s Mirror Says He’s Not the One is set in Robson’s Mappa Mundi universe. The Girl Hero is sent to assassinate a poet who her mirror assures her will not the one to kill her. Biut he does have a device that resets internal software.
In The Bull Leapers a woman whose husband is in Knossos for an archæological dig encounters three Greeks who practice the old art of bull-leaping. They are also in touch with the Labyrinth, to where they take her for the story’s transforming episode.
Deadhead is narrated by Lois, a fourteen year-old girl. Her six years older sister Clem has Asperger’s and Lois always resents having to looking after her. She and their mother come to a better understanding after Clem communes with a dead horse’s head.
Erie Lackawanna Song starts off at the Hoboken ferry terminal with a man looking at the derelict Erie Lackawanna jetty next door. Hios journey across the river takes a different turn from usual when his nodding and sometimes speaking acquaintance, Claire Glick, asks him to look at a phial of liquid she has taken from work. It contains a substance that can rewrite brain synapses.
Cracklegrackle sees a man helped by one of the Forged (one who can “see” at all wavelengths) to find his daughter, kidnapped on Mars some time before, on Jupiter, much changed.
In No Man’s Island, on the day she finds she has not got the job at CERN she longed for Mariann Harris consoles herself with her discovery of traces of an alien spaceship having used an Alcbierre warp drive. Meanwhile her husband embarrasses himself with a customer of the shop where he works. Both find solace with their dog, Bing.
Robson’s first published story, Trésor, is understated horror wherein a prostitute has been waiting for her mark.
The Seventh Series is a mythical set of yoga exercises Davey is writing into a computer game. Then he finds that there is a video of that title and goes searching for its origin. The explanation at the story’s end is rather mundane though.
The Little Bear is one of the few SF stories to address the fact that time travel is also space travel and vice-versa. Ronson examines this through a series of vignettes set in different time-lines but with the same characters, each lamenting the human loss they incurred when an experiment involving the teleportation of a bottle of wine changed their world.
In Legolas Does the Dishes an inmate of a mental hospital envisages that the man who doe sthe dishes in the institution is Legolas from Tolkien’s Hobbit universe. Her viewpoint is emphasised when she tells us, “I don’t need to say what might happen if you got a shard in your eye and started to see the world through another lens. Who knows what might be revealed?” It is left open as to whether she is deluded or he really is Legolas.
Dreadnought is the intelligence of a spaceship as mediated through its units which can not exist without a human host.
An Unremarkable Man is the tale of two supernatural women trying to be ordinary, a Viscus Diabolique and the ensuing trade with a non-descript man who materialises from nowhere.
A Dream of Mars is suffered nightly by our narrator who was sent to recover the remains of the dead from a downed cable car in the Martian New South Face Woodlands and destroy the human created Bigfoot who had been intended as a tourist attraction only to form a bond with him instead.
October 31, 2024
Wonderful stories. These are more accessible than Robson's novels; you can tell more easily what is going on. At the same time, they are not overly simple. As always, I take more time and read every word of her writing, and that attention is rewarded. This collection includes several stories in the worlds of her novels. The three that had elements of the Natural History/Living Next Door To The God Of Love universe actually clarified that world more for me. I enjoyed Robson's notes about each story. The stories tended to have ambiguous endings, which I generally don't like, but here they worked well.
May 9, 2018
I don't really enjoy short stories, I never have and yet I still keep on trying with authors I know I like and, guess what, I still keep being disappointed...
May 5, 2016
note: this contains an excellent intro to her work by Adam Roberts. this short story collection includes some short stories set in her Natural History and Quantum Gravity Universes, making the collection of some interest to completists. but Robson doesn't seem comfortable with the short story form, and tends to pursue small notions with it that do not offer these stories any power of their own.
May 14, 2013
Standard Ticonderoga Disclaimer: We published this book because we loved it!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews