John Guy Collick

It's a bit unusual to come across a novel that sets out to celebrate the two main strands of science fiction, its intellectual/visionary strand and its unashamed fantastic adventure strand. But The Star Tsar by John Guy Collick does just this.

The setting is one that's not been used before - the Russian Civil War in the 1920s, with the fading of the early Bolshevik dream in face of the coming of the Stalinist terror - and although the plot premise isn't entirely new (aliens visiting Russia in the early 20th Century and causing the Tunguska event), Collick has made this the vehicle for a meeting of mind-sets: one of his protagonists is a Commissar with a love of the work of H.G.Wells, whilst the other is an itinerant Yorkshire engineer with the only seemingly unlikely name of Banjo Hawkridge whose preferred reading is Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom adventures.

They meet in an abandoned steel works in the middle of the Siberian forest in winter. An Agitprop train, complete with artists and a theatre troupe, has disappeared. Unfortunately, one of those missing is NKVD head Felix Dzerzhinsky's cousin, and so a small force of Cossacks has ben despatched to find it, under the command of an experienced Red colonel, but with a Commissar, Alexandra Lobachevsky, to ensure compliance with the political needs of the State. What they find sets both of them challenges, to their own belief systems and their own ideas of what ought to be possible in the New World of the Soviet Future....

But there is a problem with the book: Collick wanted to contrast his protagonists and show them meeting the challenges of extraordinary situations, so whilst the Commissar is a lesbian, Banjo Hawkridge is a chauvinist through and through. This is doubtless deliberate on the author's part; how can you show someone changing their mind unless you show what they were like before?

Of course, Collick knows his Russian history even better than it seems. For all his foul-mouthed, scatological utterances, Banjo has hacked around the world enough in the course of the first twenty years of the 20th Century to have acquired no little sense of enlightened self-preservation. Alexandra begins to see him as a sort of artisanal Holy Fool, a figure known from Russian history who could be the one person to tell the Tsar unpleasant truths to his face, which become acceptable because they are the words of a fool.

Nonetheless, I suspect that there are readers who would bump up against things they don't like early on and reject the book out of hand. And for 'readers', read also 'publishers'. Which would be a shame. The Star Tsar exposes readers to something they may be unlikely to have come across before, as well as suggesting that those we disagree with may just be capable of change and redemption. I know that John Guy Collick has an agent; it would be good if this book could find a mainstream publisher rather than having to languish in the wilderness of the self-published.… (mer)