"Do you suppose that we'd sneak cargo aboard that you'd rather not carry, under cover of supplying food and water? You mistake us, Francis—we're honest dealers. We mean you no harm, and wouldn't seek to use you unawares."
What Drake actually thought was that if the celestial spiders did want to use the English ships to transport any of their produce, just as they had earlier used Master Dee's ethership, they had had plenty of opportunity already to secrete their tiny agents in Gilbert's vessels. “I trust your word, Walter,” was what he said aloud, “but I don't want to expose you to any risk. I suspect that Ruhapali's far from finished, as yet—and you might find him a more difficult opponent than you imagine."
"Within a month he'll be our staunchest ally,” Raleigh said, confidently, “and within ten years—twenty, at most—Tahiti will be a nation to compare with any in Europe, sending diplomats to China and the Americas."
Drake looked around then, as Thomas Muffet and his daughter came on to the deck.
"Thank you for hearing me out last night, Captain,” Muffet said, “and for keeping us safe aboard your vessel during the unpleasantness. I doubt that I'll be able to return to my laboratory for a while, but I can do my work in the interior."
"And will your daughter be safe there?” Drake asked, bluntly. “Are you really prepared to take her into the spider city?"
"Of course,” Muffet said. “She has no fear of spiders."
Drake looked down at the little girl, who was standing quite calmly behind her father, living up to her name. He remembered what Muffet had said about the celestial spiders’ ability to bring about internal as well as external transmutations.
"Bring the canoe alongside, Walter,” Drake said, calmly. “You may take your passengers aboard. Your other friends will fly, I suppose.” He glanced upward as he spoke to where Agamemnon was perched, surrounded by two dozen fellows.
"Would you like a parrot as a gift?” Muffet asked. “Tame ones that can mimic human voices are quite popular with sailors, I understand."
"No, thank you,” Drake said. “I'm sure your birds would be much happier at home than they would be aboard ship. We wouldn't find it easy to care for them during long periods at sea."
Muffet made certain that Patience was safe as she clambered over the rail and began to descend the rope ladder to Raleigh's canoe, but he turned to face Drake again before following her.
"Perhaps we'll meet again, Captain,” he said, “in England if not in Tahiti. I wish you felt able to stay longer—I'm sure you could be persuaded that our mission here is in the best interests of England, and of humankind."
Drake felt sure that he could be persuaded, too, if he were to give the celestial spiders the opportunity—but it was the means they might use to persuade him that he feared. Muffet and Raleigh seemed far too sure of themselves for him to believe that they were guided by mere reason—and Patience was positively uncanny. On the other hand, he had no firm grounds for deciding that they were other than human, or direly dangerous. If they were, then it was at least possible, if not likely, that there were others of their kind among Gilbert's men.
"I discovered three years ago, Dr. Muffet,” Drake said, “that the world in which we find ourselves is very far from what our forefathers believed it to be. I can only hope that John Field was wrong in his interpretation of it, and that you and Walter might be right—but I'm beginning to see, now, why Tom Digges might be more content than any of us, in being able to believe that it was all a silly dream. Perhaps it was, after all, an angel that accompanied him into a world of multifarious demonkinds."
"There's no security in illusion, Francis,” Raleigh said, from the canoe. “We must accept the limitless universe as we find it, and make what alliances we can."
"We're your friends,” Muffet added, as he climbed down to join his companions. “We always shall be, no matter what you fear or believe."
"And I'm yours,” Drake assured them.
He watched the canoe make its way back to the headland east of the harbor. There were other canoes visible on the water, further out to sea, but none made any attempt to intercept it.
Martin Lyle brought the telescope forward, and Drake turned it on the settlement. It seemed crowded with islanders, busy making their own arrangements to settle there.
"What shall we do, Captain?” Martin asked.
"We'll sail west,” Drake said. “We'll reprovision from other islands in the cluster, then head for the two larger ones that lie south-east of the Austral continent. Then we'll investigate the continent itself. We'll collect what we can to carry home to England, but we'll be sure to take as much information as we can gather about the remote reaches of the world."
"They won't believe us in England, sir,” the boy said. “There are too many travelers’ tales already about giant spiders and clever birds. They'll think us liars."
"Aye,” said Drake. “But not for long, I suspect. One way or another, the people of England will see the Age of Miracles reborn—and we can only hope that they won't find it unbearable as an era in which to live and dream."
Copyright (c) 2007 Brian Stableford
[Back to Table of Contents]
ON BOOKS by Paul Di Filippo
Introduction
Truly, the small or alternative presses are now an indispensable part of the genre scene, producing such a wide array of fine titles that envisioning our literature without them would be tantamount to erasing a good portion of the best work being done. Here's a smattering of what's new and worthy of your attention.
* * * *
Graphical Goodness
I hesitated to include this first item, only because its publisher, First Second, is a boutique imprint of a larger firm, Holtzbrinck. But if true editorial independence is maintained, then who's to say that this particular business model of small house sheltering within a larger one cannot still lead to a feisty underdog status? And also, I just wanted a chance to rave about the book.
A.L.I.E.E.N. (trade paperback, $12.95, unpaginated, ISBN 1-59643-095-8) is by Lewis Trondheim, whose Dungeon series I've earlier praised (and do so again just ahead!) as witty sword-and-sorcery satire. But this volume, which pretends to be an extraterrestrial artifact discovered by the author, is another species of fun entirely. The nearest comparison I can make is to the work of Jim Woodring: exotic, macabre, mysterious, disturbing, otherworldly.
On some nameless far-off planet, a plethora of bizarre creatures go through seven wordless stories depicting their outré daily behaviors. Although there are happy moments, most of the action ultimately involves catastrophe of some kind, personal or societal: killings, blindings, heartbreak, prejudice, and the drowning of a city in a literal flood of shit. Now, before you get the idea that this book is some morbid downer, allow me to state that nothing could be further from the facts. Trondheim's black humor and his jolly, colorful creatures (these pages look like outtakes from the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine [1968] or the French film Fantastic Planet [1973]) will have you chortling amid your pity. The portrayal of inexplicable but consistent alien dynamics (all the stories eventually tie together as well) lends a sense of uplifting and affirming fatefulness to this mordant cosmicomic.
Back in Trondheim's Dungeon series, co-created with Joann Sfar, we jump ahead from the heyday of that sword-and-sorcery world to its decline. Twilight: Volume 1: Dragon Cemetery (NBM, trade paperback, $14.95, 96 pages, ISBN 1-56163-460-3) finds Marvin, the heroic dragon of earlier tales, in his decrepitude, blind and ready to die. He sets out for the legendary cemetery of the title, but on the way to his desired quietus encounters a youthful rabbit warrior, slightly deranged by idealism and named after Marvin himself. Rabbit Marvin and Dragon Marvin face a series of assaults from the mysterious current master of the Dungeon, and eventually come face to face with what proves to be a familiar figure.
Trondheim and Sfar exhibit high glee and brio in this series, and they are not afraid of large transfigurative moments that are antithetical to stale, status-quo-
maintaining comic books. Readers will be continually surprised and delighted.
The back cover blurb for Stephen Notley's Bob the Angry Flower: Dogkiller (Tachyon, trade paperback, $12.95, 152 pages, ISBN 1892381341) proclaims its similarities to Zippy the Pinhead, The Boondocks, and The Simpsons. I will heartily endorse those comparisons, and add a couple of my own. If you enjoy the manic surrealism of Flaming Carrot or the rude effrontery of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, then you'll surely grok and groove to Bob.
Bob is drawn as an ambulatory daisy. He is a pure force of id. He wants what he wants, when he wants it, and his appetites are mostly primal, for food or status or glorious destruction. Every single page holds a different adventure wherein Bob and his sidekicks take the piss out of all self-righteous morality, rationality, and conventionality. Often there are SF tropes, such as when Bob builds a quantum computer, or purchases a passel of slaves from an interstellar trader. But there are plenty of contemporary referents as well. Combined, the always shifting topics provide a great mix of topicality and timelessness.
Smack dab in the middle of this book is a twenty-seven-page wordless saga titled “Pure Action,” wherein Bob performs convincing super-heroics in quest of a lost piece of fried chicken. This brilliantly anomalous bit is a bravura boast by Notley that you'll never pin him or Bob down.
Anyone fascinated by the uncanny photographs of J.K. Potter or Jan Saudek, or by the psychological horror of authors like Michael Blumlein or Thomas Ligotti will be likewise entranced by Chad Michael Ward's Autopsyrotica (NBM, trade paper, $17.95, 80 pages, ISBN 1-56163-462-X). Using a bevy of beautiful women, Ward manages to turn them, via props and digital manipulation and clever lighting, into a gallery of spooky archetypes. Horned, winged, fanged, entubated, chained, pierced, with large expanses of naked skin resembling baked soil or ravaged porcelain, these Suicide Girls are icons from deep layers of the male mind. Ward's text offers some self-reflective insights into his art, which certainly merits the term “haunting."
Writer Chris Blythe and artist Steve Parkhouse produce a very elegant and subtle ghost story in Angel Fire (NBM, trade paper, $17.95, 112 pages, ISBN 0-9549944-0-X). John Dury is a low-level thug with some shreds of morality. His main anchor in his life of drugs and violence is his wife Tessa. But with her death he plunges into weird strata of unreality, abetted by the new drug named angelfire. His hegira through the uncanny culminates in a Scottish manor, where his life story will dovetail dangerously with that of an ancient monk.
Blythe manages to make Dury sympathetic and fascinating: a good thing, since he's “onstage” every minute. Parkhurst's art combines meticulous, sinuous realism with moments of explosive fantasy. Together, the two creators have produced something equal to the best classic episode of Hellblazer or Hellboy.
There are over one hundred and sixty full-color paintings in Cover Story: The Art of John Picacio (MonkeyBrain Books, hardcover, $39.95, 200 pages, ISBN 1-932265-16-3), and every one of them is practically worth the price of admission solely on its own. But in addition, you get innumerable B&W sketches, Picacio's insightful commentary, and a full interview with the artist. I call this the best bargain in art books to come along in a while.
You've seen Picacio's art if you've so much as stuck your head in a bookstore over the past five years or so. He's provided cover images for everyone from Silverberg to Moorcock to Pohl, as well as a host of newer authors, such as Justina Robson and Dale Bailey. His covers all leap off the page with a bright palette, iconic tropes, and sophisticated compositions, often featuring layered planes of images. But he also does full-blown moments of frozen narrative, such as his cover for the first volume of the Adventure anthology (page 133). Some of his most striking work involves Cornell-style shadowboxes (one weighing forty-five pounds when completed!). In all cases, his art reflects immense thought, taste, and intelligence. He's able, as John Clute says in a blurb, not only to “illustrate” but to “illuminate” a work. This book, designed by Picacio himself, is a wonderful compendium that succeeds in illuminating a career that is barely begun but already rich with accomplishment.
* * * *
Nonfiction Titles
I'm enjoying Don D'Ammassa's Encyclopedia of Fantasy and Horror Fiction (Facts On File, hardcover, $65.00, 488 pages, ISBN 0-8160-6192-0) even more than I enjoyed the earlier companion volume, Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2005). That's simply because the new book contains more information that I didn't already know, and I'm always avid and grateful for knowledge. So far as issues of quality and comprehensiveness go, the pair are equal.
In this second volume D'Ammassa hits every possible camp of fantastical writing, from the subtleties of John Crowley to the blunt instruments of franchise fiction. As before, the entries range from authors to series to individual novels and stories, and D'Ammassa's generously catholic tastes ensure that you never know whether he'll choose to discuss high art (Disch's “Descending") or lowbrow schlock (Stephen King's “The Raft"). He's fair yet opinionated in all cases. (Not to draw the wrath of King fans down on D'Ammassa: he likes “The Raft” as much as he likes Disch's piece.) When an entry here—on, say, Avram Davidson or Roger Zelazny—has an antecedent in the SF volume, the second entry is completely different and apposite to the new topic.
Together, these two one-man symposia form an invaluable map to the lands of imagination where we all really live.
In 1972 the world was first gifted with Philip José Farmer's Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke. This genius work of amateur scholarship (by a writer fully the literary equal of Tarzan's creator) invested its wild-child subject with more mana than he already possessed, and also debuted Farmer's grand “Wold Newton” hypothesis that connected a myriad fictional heroes into one magnificent lineage. Now this landmark work resurfaces in a handsome new edition from University of Nebraska Press (trade paperback, $19.95, 316 pages, ISBN 0-8032-6921-8), complete with introductory material and some additional essays by Farmer. (UNP has also brought back many Edgar Rice Burroughs titles in handsome complementary printings.) In this book, Farmer uses ERB's novels as primary sources in his reconstruction of Tarzan's life. Farmer recounts all the canonical milestones in Lord Greystoke's career simply and objectively, yet with a vividness that beckons almost as deeply as the originals. He uses cunning logic and secondary sources to bolster some of ERB's wilder inventions, such as the lost city of Opar, though at other times, such as with the Pellucidar adventures, Farmer flatly declares that Burroughs just made everything up in a departure from sheer reportage.
By the last chapter, when Farmer envisions Tarzan erasing his own traces from the globe so as to go into a robust retirement, we have come to accept the eternal nature of this twentieth-century icon, thanks almost as much to Farmer's loving tribute as to ERB's powers of invention.
Wesleyan University Press continues to publish a fascinating range of critical texts, the latest of which is a volume that's half fiction, and could well have been discussed just as plausibly in the “Anthologies” section of this column. Edited by critic and novelist Justine Larbalestier, Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (trade paperback, $24.95, 424 pages, ISBN 0-8195-6676-4) consists of eleven stories accompanied by eleven complementary essays. The stories are all gems, and the essays commensurately rich.
Larbalestier has chosen stories that manage to be generously representative of that hydra-headed entity known as “feminist SF” and packed with plenty of subtextual meaning for the critics to tease out; which are all excellent reading on the surface narrative level; and which are relatively overlooked in the canon. The fiction authors include Clare Winger Harris, Alice Eleanor Jones, Kate Wilhelm, James Tiptree, and Lisa Tuttle. The critics boast such well-known names as Lisa Yaszek, Andrea Hairston, L. Timmel Duchamp, and Brian Attebery.
Ranging in origin from 1927 to 2002, these fiction selections represent the evolution of the sub-genre, from surprisingly sophisticated beginnings in the pages of Hugo Gernsback's magazi
nes to the latest from Ellen Datlow's lamented online zine, SciFiction. Along the way, historical context is provided by the critics, as well as intense personal reactions, clever unpackings, and the re-ignition of old controversies. (See Joan Haran's essay accompanying Pat Murphy's “Rachel in Love” for a keen dissection of how the cyberpunk movement failed to accommodate feminism.) The one-two punch of these remarkable stories and their very readable critical exegeses makes this anthology the first stop for any reader interested in how half the human race has contributed to our genre.
* * * *
Novels and Novellas
I am about to do something cruel. I am about to review a rare book that will be almost impossible for readers to procure. But at the same time, my review will be a beneficial public service, alerting you to the existence of two marvelous stories that you will certainly want to look for in their other incarnations. But please don't hate me for owning a copy of this rarity, and please ignore my chortles of collectorish glee.
For the convention known as Capclave 2005—a gathering I did not actually enroll in—attendees received a gift: a chapbook published by WSFA Press in the Ace Double format, with striking covers by Carol Emshwiller, of all folks. This volume (unpriced, 56 pages, ISBN unavailable) contained two long stories by Howard Waldrop, than whom there is no writer more gifted: “The Horse of a Different Color (That You Rode In On)” and “The King of Where-I-Go.” Only five hundred copies were produced. Thanks to Messr. Waldrop himself, I have one, wittily inscribed.
These two stories are among Howard's best. “Horse” conflates an authentic history of vaudeville with a Grail quest, while “King” mixes tidbits of Waldropian autobiography with time-travel riffs, in the manner of James Blaylock's “Thirteen Phantasms.” Together, they provide a glorious ride through the unique mind of one of SF's finest writers.
Both stories later appeared on Ellen Datlow's SciFiction, and, for an indefinite time as of this writing, may still be viewed at those archives [www.scifi.com/scifiction/archive.html]. Both will certainly show up in various collections, including Howard's own. But the glory of reading them in their rarest, most perfect state can be obtained only in one way, by the fortunate few. So, get thee to eBay now!
Asimov's SF, March 2007 Page 21
