Nulapeiron Volume 3

Resolution the conclusion to John Meaney’s epic Nulapeiron Space Opera trilogy, pitting Tom Corcoran against the Blight an even bigger and nastier version of the Anomaly.

Resolution is the conclusion to John Meaney’s epic Nulapeiron Space Opera trilogy

Much of the last decade has been spent on one enormous trilogy. This year he finally finished off – after six years and fifteen hundred pages – his colossal Nulapeiron Sequence comprising Paradox, Context and Resolution.

With two distinct story-lines running in tandem for almost the entire trilogy, the books are both prequels and sequels to Meaney’s first novel, To Hold Infinity, and include a 1994 short story, ‘Parallax Transform’, as well as sharing a fictional universe with a novella, ‘The Whisper of Disks.’

All three books are set on the subterranean caverns and tunnels of Nulapeiron, at the beginning of the 35th century. The first two are reviewed on this link and here respectively.

Resolution is the conclusion to the sequence, and is the best book of the trilogy, partly because it is shorter and has fewer plot threads than the others. Meaney at long last seems to hit his stride with a conclusion in sight, and does not seem to be so preoccupied with jump-cuts. The Anomaly, a bigger and nastier version of The Blight, has become aware of Nulapeiron’s existence. The Anomaly takes over people’s minds to the extent that they do not even know that they’ve been taken over. Meaney flirts with the idea that maybe Corcoran and his resistance have the wrong perspective, and has Corcoran entertaining similar doubts. But then he nails such dithering toward the end in a scene of Ethnic Cleansing ad Absurdiam. Just to show how nasty it is Meaney has previously loving couple suddenly becoming ruthlessly efficient, and tossing their disabled son into a vat of gunk because he is not perfect, and therefore easier to replace. Dramatic it is, effective it may be; subtle it isn’t.

One of the difficulties Nulapeiron shares with Lord of the Rings, A Fire Upon the Deep and other big-sellers where a plucky David is faced with an all-consuming Goliath is how to characterize rampant evil. To be honest, Meaney doesn’t even try. The Anomaly is big, its nasty, and its going to eat them all. That’s all the characterization the reader needs.

To be fair, Meaney does many things well. Corcoran is an effective lead in the Paul Atreides (from Dune) role, and there’s a huge amount of ‘tech’ on offer, such as arachnobugs, genetically engineered lorry-sized critters that scuttle through the endless caverns at near-supersonic speed. And with the amount of space to write in, Nulapeiron does at the end stand as a real world, with a genuine history.

And the Pilot sequence, at first an irritating distraction, then a seemingly endless second thread, does at last become a coherent plot thread that resolves quite nicely. There’s pretty much enough material for a short novel in the Pilot thread itself, and that the whole Nulapeiron sequence has the whiff of a trilogy more to with commerce than art. And the climax of Resolution reads very much like a recycled version of To Hold Infinity.

But if the reader likes their space opera big and fast and laced with a genuine whiff of the future, then they could do worse than give The Nulapeiron Sequence a try.

The Author of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit Answers the Riddle

J R R Tolkien, best known for writing The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, was also an Oxford University professor who answered the question, what is a fairy story?

Today Tolkien’s fame rests on The Lord of the Rings, the book which is the basis of the blockbuster film directed by Peter Jackson, but Tolkien was, first, Professor of English Language at Leeds University in the UK before in 1925 leaving Leeds to become Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University.

Professor Tolkien of Oxford University
Whilst at Oxford, Tolkien wrote and published a number of scholarly works that remain valued contributions to the academic study of English literature to the current day. Amongst these works were articles on Chaucer and the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, and an oft-cited essay on the topic of the Fairy Story (or as Tolkien called the land in which fairy stories take place, ‘faerie’).

Tolkien’s ‘On Fairy-Stories’
Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories” was originally written as a lecture to be given at Scotland’s St Andrew’s University in 1938. He revised the lecture for publication in 1947 in an Oxford University Press book titled Essays Presented to Charles Williams and the essay was then re-published by Allen and Unwin in Tree and Leaf. Tree and Leaf is a short book with the essay “On Fairy-Stories” being joined by the short story Leaf by Niggle, a story published in 1947.

What is a Fairy Story?
In his essay, Tolkien analyses the concept and practice of the fairy story and concludes that most fairy stories do not in fact have fairies in them. He cites “Puss in Boots” and “Little Red Riding Hood” as examples.

Tolkien also asks the question, who are fairy stories written for and concludes that traditionally fairy stories were not written primarily for children and argues that the association of the fairy story with children is an accident of recent history.

The most important thing about a fairy story is that the writer or, as in bygone days where oral story telling was the norm, the story teller should create a self-contained world which the reader or listener can enter and, once having entered, find it self-consistent and with its own internal logic. According to Professor Tolkien, the Fairy story should not have to rely on the sudden insertion of magic or fantasy to move the story on unless that is built into the universe that the story teller has created.

Why Should Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories” Be Read Today?
Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories” deserves to be read both by those seeking to understand the nature of the fairy story as an art form, but also by those lovers of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit who seek to understand how the author of these two great works understood the form in which he was writing. “On Fairy-Stories” lays down the ground rules by which Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit were written. It deserves to be read as much as do those masterpieces.