Holt's ceaseless prolificity of plotting is energizing as well. There's a wealth of sheer incident in this book that would furnish up six lesser novels. At two points in this story, things become so complicated that both Professor Van Spee and Frank Laertides have to spend about ten pages in explanation of the tangled threads of events (the book involves time travel, alternate history, and various paradoxes as well as magic). But their infodumps, being written with typical Holt vivacity, don't become stale or tedious.
Lastly, one has to admire Holt's worldview. His take on life involves a piquant, paradoxical mix of cynicism and optimism, hope and dread, love and hate, compassion and disdain. (He identifies the two factors that motivate most human responses to whatever situation they find themselves in as embarrassment and fear.) In the end, exactly like our universe, where a slight initial imbalance between matter and antimatter resulted in everything we see today, Holt's positivity triumphs, just barely, over the innate negativity of mortal existence.
The favorite TV show of the goblin race is identified as Benny Hill's dumb and rude comedy stylings. There's a decided tinge of Hill's stoopid anarchy in Holt's novels, but elevated to a much higher plane by Holt's verbal and metaphysical cleverness. (It's that thin line between clever and stupid, identified by the rockers of Spinal Tap, that separates them.) Like Christopher Moore here in the USA, Holt takes everyday people, slices them open, and exposes their essential core of non-rational eccentricity and weirdness by placing them in fantasticated scenarios.
Holt has a character say of Paul's boss, “'Dennis Tanner is incapable of happiness ... It just sort of soaks away into him like water in the desert.'” Quite to the contrary, Holt himself is incapable of not giving joy: it bursts out of him like a fountain in the wilderness.
* * * *
The Museum of Tears
It's always a glorious mystery to me, how a book can be utterly unique and incomparable, and yet still resonate with its literary cousins. It's like siblings who exhibit shared familial traits while still remaining unmistakably individual.
Thus I find that in reading Rupert Thomson's magnificent Divided Kingdom (Knopf, hardcover, $24.95, 334 pages, ISBN 1-4000-4218-6), I am put in mind, at various points, of such writers as John Crowley and J.G. Ballard; Paul Park and Jeffrey Ford; Kate Wilhelm and Carol Emshwiller; Gene Wolfe and Ian McEwan; Michael Bishop and Ray Bradbury. If this stellar list connotes high praise, then so be it: that was my intent. Thomson has created a tale here that's far above the commonplace, worthy of inclusion with Fahrenheit 451 (1953) or The Physiognomy (1997) or “In Blue."
Divided Kingdom consists of ten chapters. Herewith, a brief synopsis.
Part One opens with the swift and believable introduction of the premise that drives the whole tale, the speculation about which you willing suspend your disbelief, and from which all else logically and unstoppably flows. Sometime in the near future, succumbing to societal pressures (pressures that are all too real, as witness the actual French riots of late 2005), Great Britain transforms itself into four separate polities, based not on religion or race, but on the four humors of classical learning. The Yellow Quarter is to hold all the choleric types; the Blue Quarter will shelter the phlegmatics; the Green Quarter will contain the melancholics; and the Red Quarter will be graced by the sanguines (who tend to consider themselves the elite). Unclassifiables become a pariah caste, the White People. The whole population is psychologically tested and assigned to new homes in the designated lands, thus splitting up families and friends.
Our hero, our narrator, is torn away as a child from his parents. His name is changed to Thomas Parry, and he's deemed a sanguine. He's given a new father, Victor, and a new sister, Marie. We watch him adapt with the traumatized flexibility of youth to his new circumstances. But scars encyst him mentally. Twenty years go by. He's now an adult in his early thirties, working for a Red Quarter government ministry, seemingly a loyal drone.
Part Two finds Thomas being given an assignment: to attend an academic conference in the Blue Quarter. He accepts with some trepidation, scared of the bogeymen that inhabit the foreign land. But in the city of Aquaville, Thomas will encounter an epiphany that shatters his complacency and false sense of self. There comes an official side jaunt to the Yellow Quarter in Part Four. Here a terrorist attack that sows general confusion gives the altered Thomas the perfect excuse to run away from his old life. He begins a desperate hegira across the Yellow Quarter, encountering both good and bad people. By Part Five, he's back in the Blue lands, where he thinks he can fashion a new life. But he's caught by the authorities, re-tested and re-assigned to the Green empire. He sinks into lethargy, but is finally moved to flee once more, this time impersonating a White Person. Part Seven finds him living the nomadic, almost pre-rational existence of these outcasts, before he finds his life endangered in a pogrom. He's rescued by a mysterious woman named Odell Burfoot, who helps him back to the Red Quarter in Parts Eight and Nine. Once home, Thomas learns the hidden, conspiratorial dimensions of his odyssey. Part Ten is a small coda that points toward a hopeful future, perhaps with Odell.
Thomson's beautiful, elegaic, symbolic, and acutely palpable language weaves a subcreation as vivid as, say, Wolfe's far future of the New Sun. He makes us believe that the passage of two decades can turn the familiar British Isles into something out of Orwell by way of Paul Park. (But Thomson is not intent on creating anything so simple as a polemical dystopia. His creation is too multivalent, the guilt too evenly shared by all for mere monitory finger-pointing.) Part of Thomson's magic stems from the wonderful names of the people and places he chooses. Can you imagine anything more perfect than a wasteland town named “Pyrexia, a city that manufactured chlorine, plastics and petrochemicals ... “? The whole divided kingdom is fashioned of colorful bits like this, producing a mosaic that's reminiscent of something unearthed by archaeologists. Despite the relative youth of the new lands, they reek of decay, desuetude and despair. (The Green Quarter even boasts a Museum of Tears, where the sorrowful exudates of the citizenry are kept in rows of tiny vials.)
The psyche of Thomas Parry is rich and complex enough also to sustain his travelogue. We can empathize utterly with him, from the moment he's ripped away from his parents, through the years when he wears an armor of indifference, and into his glorious, albeit confused awakening. His observations on his warped culture keep pace with his hard education, until finally at the end he's attained a kind of wordless wisdom. (As a White Person, he literally forsakes speech, for a kind of communal mentality reminiscent of that in John Varley's “The Persistence of Vision.")
Thomson's tale features many allusions to realworld touchstones. The Berlin Wall is one such, evident in the walls that divide the Quarters. The division of North and South Korea that shattered families is another. And Cambodia's descent into Year Zero killing fields, as well as Mao's Cultural Revolution, rise up like echoes and shadows as well. This is a book that is both a bildungsroman and a novel of ideas, concerned with both the freedom of the individual and the fates of nations: two things that in the end are not separate.
A smuggler named Fernandez helps to educate Thomas by telling him this: “What was so clever about the way they divided us ... was that it more or less guaranteed that we would hate each other.... It's like racism.... The new racism is psychological. What's strange is, we seem to need it—to thrive on it. If we don't have someone to despise, we feel uncomfortable, we feel we haven't properly defined ourselves."
In this day and age of polarization, of shouting across ideological walls at each other, the moral of Thomson's vibrant, touching novel of estrangement—estrangement from each other, estrangement from one's self, estrangement from humanity as a whole—couldn't be more timely and necessary to apprehend.
Copyright 2006 Paul Di Filippo
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
SF CONVENENTIONAL CALENDAR
Here comes Memorial Day, the biggest convention weekend of the year. Pl
an now for social weekends with your favorite SF authors, editors, artists, and fellow fans. For an explanation of con(vention)s, a sample of SF folksongs, info on fanzines and clubs, and how to get a later, longer list of cons, send me an SASE (self-addressed, stamped #10 [business] envelope) at 10 Hill #22-L, Newark NJ 07102. The hot line is (973) 242-5999. If a machine answers (with a list of the week's cons), leave a message and I'll call back on my nickel. When writing cons, send an SASE. For free listings, tell me of your con 6 months out. Look for me atcons behind the Filthy Pierre badge, playing a musical keyboard.—Erwin S. Strauss
MAY 2006
18-21: Book Expo America. For info, write: 383 Main Ave., Norwalk CT 06851. Or phone: (800) 368-9000 (10 AM to 10 PM, not collect). (Web) bookexpo.reedexpo.com. (E-mail) [email protected]. Con will be held in: Washington DC(if city omitted, same as in address) at the Convention Center. Guests will include: over 500 authors. Book trade only.
19-21: Monster Mania. monstermania.net. Cherry Hill NJ (near Philadelphia PA). George A. Romero. Horror Film.
19-21: MobiCon. Mobicon.org. Ashbury Hotel, Mobile AL. Billy West, Ellen Muth, Jody Lynn Nye.
19-21: KeyCon. (204) 669-6053. keycon.org. Radisson, Winnipeg MB. Ruth Thompson, Barron Vangor Toth.
26-28: MarCon. marcon.org. Hyatt, Columbus OH. George R.R. Martin, Jody Lee, Dave & Judith Hayman, Bill Roper.
26-29: BayCon. baycon.org. Doubletree, San Jose CA. L. Niven, J. Pournelle, J. Burns, C. Miller, J.S. Daugherty.
26-28: Oasis. oasfis.org. Orlando FL. S. Brust, E. Mitchell, C. Ulbrich, P. Anthony, B. Bova, R.L. Byers, J. McDevitt.
26-28: ConDuit. (801) 776-0164. conduit.sfcon.org. Sheraton, Salt Lake City UT. Bob Eggleton, L.E. Modesitt Jr.
26-29: MisCon. (406) 544-7083. miscon.org. Ruby's Inn, Missoula MT. Jerry Oltion, Frank Wu, Dragon Dronet.
26-28: Anime Boston. animeboston.com. Hynes Convention Center & Sheraton Boston Hotel, Boston MA. Huge event.
26-28: FanimeCon. fanime.com. [email protected]. Convention Center, San Jose CA. Guests to be announced. Anime.
26-28: Anime North. animenorth.com. [email protected]. Doubletree Int'l. Plaza Hotel, Toronto ON. Macek, Asami.
26-28: Animazement. (919) 941-5050. animazement.org. [email protected]. Sheraton, Durham NC. Anime.
26-29: BaltiCon. (410) 563-3727. balticon.org. Marriott, Hunt Valley (Baltimore) MD. Gaiman, Wolfe, Snellings-Clark.
26-29: ConQuest. kcsciencefiction.org. [email protected]. Airport Hilton, Kansas City MO. Guests TBA.
26-29: WisCon. sf3.org/wiscon. Concourse Hotel, Madison WI. K. Wilhelm, J. Yolen. Feminist SF con marks 30 years.
26-29: CostumeCon. cc24.dmsfs.org. Hotel Ft. Des Moines, Des Moines IA. Big annual costumers’ meet. “Epic Movies."
* * * *
JUNE 2006
2-4: ConCarolinas, Box 9100, Charlotte NC 28299. concarolinas.org. Marriott. Spider & Jeanne Robinson.
3-4: ColoniaCon, c/o J. O./M. J. GbR, Röntgenstr. 79, Kerpen-Türnich 50169, Germany. coloniacon2006.de. Köln.
9-11: A-Kon, 3352 Broadway Blvd. #470, Garland TX 75043. a-kon.com. Dallas TX. Commercial anime, etc., event.
9-12: ConFlux, Box 903, Belconnen ACT 2616, Australia. (0421) 005 511. conflux.org.au. Canberra. Ellen Datlow.
15-18: AnthroCon, Box 476, Malvern PA 19355. anthrocon.org. Westin Convention Center, Philadelphia PA. Furries.
16-18: Locus Awards Weekend, Box 13305, Oakland CA 94661. locusmag.com. SF Hall of Fame, Seattle WA. Willis.
16-18: GaylaxiCon, 1206 Dunfield Ave #44, Toronto ON M4S 2H2. gaylacticnetwork.org. For gay fans, and friends.
16-18: ConCertino, 18 Cottage Av., Arlington MA 02474. concertino.net. Whitaker, Crowell. SF/fantasy folksinging.
16-18: Anime Next, Box 1088, Pearl River NY 10965. animenext.org. Meadowlands Expo Center, Secaucus NJ.
23-25: MidWestCon, 5627 Antoninus Dr., Cincinnati OH 45238. (513) 922-3234. cfg.org. Sharonville OH. Relax-a-con.
23-25: ApolloCon, Box 541822, Houston TX 77254. apollocon.org. Artist Alain Viesca, fan Tim Miller (GoH: TBA).
23-25: HyperiCon, 6001 Old Hickory Blvd. #411, Hermitage TN 37076. hypericon.info. Days Inn, Nashville TN.
23-26: German National Con. members.aol.com/sfcl. [email protected]. Tube Youth Center, Lübeck. James P. Hogan
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
SCIENCE FICTION SUDOKU SOLUTION
THE STAINLESS STEEL RAT
* * * *
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
NEXT ISSUE
AUGUST ISSUE
Renowned British writer Brian Stableford returns next issue with our lead story for August, a sleek and playful new novella, chock-full of the kind of dazzling conceptualization that Stableford is known for, that takes us aloft on an ethership designed by the eminent alchemist John Dee, in company with Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, Edward de Vere, and others of a distinguished company of adventurers, who set out to explore “The Plurality of Worlds"—with the survival of our own world ultimately at stake! Don't miss it!
* * * *
ALSO IN AUGUST
Hugo-, Nebula-, and World Fantasy Award-winner Michael Swanwick takes us to Venus for a deadly game of cat-and-mouse played out across the inimical surface of a “Tin Marsh"; new writer Ruth Nestvold offers us a compassionate portrait of a lost and wistful young woman visiting a foreign land who finds a whole lot more there than the usual tourist attractions, in “Feather and Ring"; British “hard science” writer Stephen Baxter sweeps us along on a dangerous voyage that plunges us just about as deep “In the Abyss of Time” as it's possible to get, with some cosmic surprises waiting at The End of Days; Hugo- and Nebula-winner Kristine Kathryn Rusch explains the dangers of compassion, as she signs us up for a crash course with “Crunchers, Inc."; and Alexander Jablokov, returning after much too long an absence, invites us to go on the road and on the run with a “Dead Man,” in a taut and exciting story that demonstrates how your problems may only be beginning after you kick the bucket.
* * * *
EXCITING FEATURES
Robert Silverberg's “Reflections” column continues his investigation in “The Thumb on the Dinosaur's Nose: 2"; Peter Heck brings us “On Books"; and James Patrick Kelly's “On The Net” column hands us a box of popcorn and invites us to sit back and settle in to take a look at “Son of Movies"; plus an array of cartoons, poems, and other features. Look for our August issue on sale at your newsstand on June 27, 2006. Or subscribe today and be sure to miss none of the fantastic stuff we have coming up for you this year (you can also subscribe to Asimov's online, in varying formats, including in downloadable form for your PDA, by going to our website, www.asimovs.com).
* * * *
COMING SOON
Amygdala-antagonizing stories by the likes of Robert Silverberg, Kit Reed, Michael, Swanwick, Carol Emshwiller, Bruce McAllister, Jack McDevitt, Michael F. Flynn, Rudy Rucker, Christopher Priest, John Kessel, Tim Pratt, Pamela Sargent, Ian Watson, Tanith Lee, Robert Reed, William Barton, and many more!
* * *
Visit www.dellmagazines.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.
Asimov's SF, July 2006 Page 22
