NYRSF February 2013 Issue 294

by Kevin J Maroney

  Now McDonald has turned these skills to the creation of an open-ended Young Adult sequence, Everness, of which two volumes have already been published and a third is imminent (the second is Be My Enemy [2012]). The opening volume, Planesrunner, spins out a tale from the fashionable landscapes of steampunk and many-worlds cosmology to fling genius 14-year-old Everett Singh from his, and our, London in quest of his Punjabi father Tejendra, kidnapped via a Heisenberg Gate into one of the orthogonal Earths of the Plenitude.

  The reality of this multiverse comes as more of a surprise to Everett than it does to us, since we know it to the point of cliché from both popular science books and a rich heritage of sf—notably, Beam Piper’s Paratime tales, Laumer’s Imperium, Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes series, and many others. Then again, Everett does share this background; his father is a quantum physicist and gourmet cook who’s trained the young prodigy in these arcana (when the kid’s not being an ace footballer, capable of calculating his opponents’ trajectories and blocking them), and comparisons to Doctor Who and computer games are apt.

  In some respects, Everett even knows he’s in a YA trilogy. Pursued helter-skelter by thugs from yet another world, Everett mutters, “It’s a pity you don’t have a website called TVTropes” (191). In this piratical alternative world of gorgeous nano-skinned airships, he finds himself swarming “up the netting of the next cell forward two-handed, the skinripper in his teeth” (219). Yo ho, me hearties! But it’s not all Boy’s Own Adventures. McDonald is aware of the risk of slipping into such banality:

  It was a deep, dark shock, a fist clenched around the heart, for Everett to realize that every decision he had made, every action he had taken, had caused someone to pay a high and terrible price. It was never like that in the action movies. There were never any consequences. (235)

  Everett carries with him on his wanderings across spacetime a tablet computer, Dr. Quantum, containing the secret of the Infundibulum, a sort of chaos map showing not just the Ten Worlds of the Plenitude (of which Earth is the probationary E-10), but of the Panoply, the vastly greater expanse of possible and therefore real alternative universes. Trapped for most of the book in an Earth where oil never got used for fuel, he is harassed for this secret by the vile, beautiful and stylish Charlotte Villiers (a sort of Cruella de Vil, or Mrs. Coulter from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy) from an advanced Earth. Yet another Earth, E-1, is never mentioned, because of the terrible thing that happened to its Moon, evidently a nanotech goo catastrophe. He is saved from the blundering consequences of his ignorance by Sen, a wild girl of 13 or 14, a somewhat Delanyesque sprite with a white afro who proves to be the pilot of the airship found adrift by her adoptive mother, Captain Anastasia Sixsmyth.

  It would be pointless to itemize the plot vagaries, because they gain their salience from their precise settings and headlong interlockings, plus those consequences that action movies never have. What’s worth drawing attention to is the Dickensian detail of McDonald’s multiverse world. Here Everett wanders, rather shell-shocked, in the doppelganger of a location he knows from home:

  Garlic. Lots of it. Root ginger. Everything was available at Ridley Road Market. Every day, every hour there was something new to discover about this Hackney. Ridley Road Market—go past the boarded-up Knights of the Air pub, go through the tangle of pipes and valves and gas-cylinders where the Gas Office stored its helium—was one of the bigger discoveries. . . . Food and clothing and books and dodgy electrical goods, ironmongery and kitchen ware and suspiciously cheap tools. Crockery and household goods. Toys hung like a mass execution from the fronts of stalls, bolts of cloth stacked high, the lower ones flattened by the weight of those above them. Women drinking tea at stalls beneath high brickwork domes. The trains that passed regu­larly overhead shook the market to its core, shook the cups and tea-sets on the china stalls, shook drips of rainwater which formed at the tips of the stalactites leached from the arches’ cement joints, drip­ping down on the heads of the shoppers. (185)

  Everett joins the Airish, this rather despised and raffish community of skyfarers, and learns the joys of flight without roaring jet engines:

  Everness followed the line of the Thames, gliding over the frozen fields of Thamesmead and Erith, now coming up on the bright, sil­very gap the river cut at Dartford in the wall of power plants and chimney stacks. Beyond it the river broadened to the sun-shimmer of the estuary. . . . The slow stately flight was hypnotic. Aeroplanes lifted you too high; you couldn’t read the details, you were discon­nected from the earth. From Everness’s bridge, Everett could see trains dashing along their lines, rails flashing as they caught the low sun. Cars and vans wound through the narrow village streets. Smoke rose from house chimneys, straight as a pencil line in the still air. A great steam-powered tractor puffed across a field; seagulls followed the plough as it turned the hard earth for early wheat. And quiet. So quiet: the electric impeller engines made almost no noise. He could hear the clack and clatter of a train; the cries of the gulls, the tolling of an iron church bell. This was how you flew when you dreamed of flying, when you just lifted your arms and because it was a dream, you lifted from the ground. Light as air. (202–203)

  So is this essentially just another steampunk faux-nostalgia wallow? The thought even occurs to Everett:

  “Steampunk. Cool,” Everett said. . . . No, not anything like steampunk. Not now. Post-steampunk. Electropunk. (94)

  How plausible is this—a world built without liquid fuel? This society has nanotech of a kind; Sen explains that the Confederate States of America—one of three partitioned Americas—have “even got this new genetically-thingeed bean that can produce oil—like your oil. Liquid fuel” (146). But of course nanotechnology can do that too—it’s the ultimate use of carbon as tech, after all, aside from living tissues—so there’s a bit of card-sharping going on here. Such nitpicking is probably irrelevant in this delicious adventure story that’s marketed at “Ages 12 & Up.” I’m in the Ages 62 & Up, and I found this first part of the series a jolly ripping yarn.

  * * *

  The latest book by Damien Broderick (with Paul Di Filippo) is Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985–2010.

  Dave Drake

  Manly Wade Wellman, Reporter

  In many respects, Manly Wade Wellman was as much a journalist as he was a fiction writer. He was close to his (two years older) brother Paul for all of their mutual lives. When Wellman got out of college in the 1920s, Paul as editor of the Wichita Beacon gave Wellman his first full-time job—as a reporter.

  At the time, newspapers were generally the voice of a particular political party. What you see today with Fox News on one side and National Public Radio on the other was even more strongly and generally the case with rival newspapers in Wellman’s day. When a Republican bought the Beacon, the entire staff marched down the street and were hired by the Wichita Eagle, whose Republican staff passed them going in the other direction because Democrats now owned the Eagle.

  Wellman’s job didn’t change, and he continued working directly under his brother.

  Wellman contributed poetry to both papers, much of it anonymous, but mostly he worked as a reporter. In Wichita at that time, crime made up quite a lot of the news. The city was a railroad hub, and drugs, heading from Mexico to Chicago and New York, passed through it. Inevitably, some of the cocaine and heroin stopped before it got further east.

  Besides drugs, Prohibition was still in force while Wellman was in Wichita. Wellman was husky and athletic—he’d been a scholarship football player at university—and was on good terms with the police, so he frequently accompanied them during operations.

  One night Wellman went along on a raid of a roadhouse. Several men were caught in the reception area when the police burst in. One of the cops handed Wellman a heavy blackjack and told him to hold the men there. The police went into the back of the building where the gambling equipment was.

  After a minute or so, one of the men in the front said,
“I’m going to get my coat and get out of here.”

  “Stay where you are!” Wellman said.

  “The hell I will,” said the man as he lifted a sheepskin jacket hanging with other coats in an alcove. Wellman slammed him across the side of the head with the blackjack. The man dropped like a stone, and the jacket thudded to the floor.

  Wellman picked up the coat and found “a revolver with a barrel this long—” while telling the story, he would spread his index fingers an unlikely twelve inches apart “—in a holster under the left arm.”

  Not all Wellman’s memories of journalism were quite so dire. One night at dinner, somebody mentioned a public figure who had made an inadvertent statement to the press. Wellman laughed and said, “I know how that goes. ‘Tell him he can talk to me now or we’ll print what we’ve got!’”

  Sometimes, though, Wellman’s memories were very dire. A smalltime crook and hophead named Rabbit had a very beautiful wife. She was far too beautiful for the likes of Rabbit, and before long she was keeping company with one of Wichita’s major crime figures. One day, she and her new boyfriend were in a car which rival gunmen ambushed, killing both of them. This was front-page news—and the paper wanted a before picture of the girlfriend. Wellman, who knew Rabbit, said he could find one.

  Rabbit lived in a shotgun shack—a two-room house—across the tracks. Manly drove down to it. No one answered to his knock, but the door wasn’t locked; he opened it and went in. There, on a table in the front room, was a glamour photograph of Rabbit’s late wife. Wellman crossed the room and grabbed the photo. He was just about to hide it under his jacket when he heard a click behind him and turned.

  Rabbit stood in the doorway, “pointing a revolver at me with the hammer already roostered back.” Rabbit’s pupils were shrunk to pinpoints from the cocaine he’d been sniffing.

  Wellman had a sharp mind, and he held up the wife’s photograph and said, “Oh, Rabbit, I’m so sorry! I came right over when I heard about Nancy!”

  For a moment, nothing happened (which wasn’t the worst possibility). Then Rabbit lowered the gun and said, “Aw, Manly, you’re my only friend in the world. I know she was no good, but I loved her anyway.” And then he started to cry.

  Wellman led him over to the couch and sat down with him. They talked for some while, with Rabbit repeating how lovely Nancy was and how much he missed her and Wellman agreeing.

  Finally, Wellman said that as a favor to his friend, he could get Nancy’s picture on the front page of the newspaper so that everybody would see how pretty she was. Blubbering his thanks, Rabbit sent Wellman on his way with the photograph—silver frame and all.

  Wichita was on the transcontinental train route between New York City and Los Angeles (Hollywood). Wellman’s paper would regularly schedule interviews with celebrities passing through, even though the train would not be stopping for any length of time in Wichita.

  Wellman would either ride up to the station, board the train there, and conduct the interview as the train approached Wichita, where he would get out and file the story; or ride with the celebrity to the first station below Wichita, then return by the next train in the other direction. Among people whom Wellman mentioned interviewing in this fashion were Bennett J. Doty, promoting his Foreign Legion memoir Legion of the Damned; and Edgar Wallace, on his way to Hollywood to write the script for King Kong.

  By the early ’30s, there were transcontinental airline flights, but the planes had to stop for fuel along the way. Wichita was one of the refueling stops, and Wellman interviewed a number of celebrities at the airport while their plane was being serviced. He mentioned two, both Hollywood actresses. One was Lupe Velez, “the Mexican Spitfire,” whose flight had been a rough one. All Manly remembered her saying during the “interview” was, “Ooh, I am so seeck!”

  The other was Ginger Rogers, whose plane landed before dawn and needed minor repairs as well as fuel. Wellman looked at the available time and asked Miss Rogers if she would be willing to come back to the paper with him and give the guys in the city room a thrill. She was willing, so Wellman bundled her into his car and ran back to town.

  Fifty years later, Wellman still smiled when he talked about it. Ginger Rogers was the most charming woman he had ever met. She’d had coffee and doughnuts with them until it was time to get her back for the flight. The hard-bitten reporters of the Eagle were still thanking Wellman days later for bringing her by.

  * * *

  Dave Drake lives near Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

  Andrés Lomeña

  Ways of Reading Fantasy: An Interview with Farah Mendlesohn

  Andrés Lomeña: First of all, congratulations on your intellectual dedication to fantasy. I know of many studies on science fiction, from Darko Suvin to Fredric Jameson, but not too many studies about fantasy. (Spanish scholars distinguish between “the fantastic” of Todorov and fantasy.) A Short History of Fantasy and The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature were both published in 2012. What are the critical responses to your recent works? I think that you are filling an important theoretical gap.

  Farah Mendlesohn: A Short History of Fantasy didn’t arouse much critical response except of the “you missed out X and Y.” One or two of those omissions I am deeply embarrassed about. One of them I want to shake critics by the scruff and say, “Have you checked his dates? How were we to know he’d be a big thing the year the book came out?” (And the same omission affected The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature.) But more significant than the mistakes is the way the mistakes came about. In order to select what was important, we used a lot of award lists, and although we tried to compensate for the “important book which fails to win awards,” we forgot that one major area of fantasy—the epic—is barely recognized at award season (although that has changed recently with the David Gemmell Award). For the record, I don’t much like epic fantasy, but my partner does, very much, so there was no conscious decision to play it down. What does emerge from that book and from the criticisms of it, however, is that the field is so big now that how you see and frame the world of fantasy is a matter of perspective. If most of your fantasy is bought in chain shops, then your reading will be dominated by epic or urban fantasies. If you buy on the advice of Locus, then the delicately edgy New England Fantasy (I just made that up by the way) will be your frame.

  It was this last realization, that the world of fantasy is now made up of overlapping frames,that influenced the structure of The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature. It’s intended as a teaching book, so it is not particularly radical, but the decision not to try and do everything but to have a section on different ways of reading, and then a section of clusters or ways of selecting a bunch of texts, was part of that “no one canon fits all.” I’d say that, with the exception of Brian Attebery, most of the major theorists in the field got bogged down in the idea that you could define fantasy comprehensively. Much more interesting, I think, is the very fact that the genre keeps remaking itself, in part because it’s a genre less of tropes (though they matter) but of language. Really fine fantasy writers spin the fantastic from the way they put words together. I lack their elegance—I’ve never been a writer, really, just someone with stuff to say—and cannot pinpoint what it is they do, but I hope Rhetorics of Fantasy is a stage on the way.

  Which I suppose brings me to the response to Rhetorics of Fantasy. I wrote the book when I was still in a history department. By the time it came out, I was teaching creative writing. It must have been Meant, because although the book has had mixed reception from academics—justifiably so, it’s a thought experiment, and like all thought experiments, it creaks—it escaped into the writing community and now into the wild, and it seems to have achieved the ultimate accolade in that the terminology I invented is now being used as if it just is, without citation. The next stage, of course, is some bright spark will come and challenge it, but at the moment it’s in the intermediate stages.

  As Michael Swanwick said in his review (NYRSF
242), what Rhetorics did was to enable a writer to look at a piece of work that wasn’t working and identify why and how to fix it. Adam Roberts is not wrong when he says the book is not a good work of literary criticism. It’s a tool box, and you need a mechanic’s mentality to appreciate it: a lot of fans and writers have that, but academics less so, I think. I have never been a literary critic (a thing you may not know, my PhD and first book is called Quaker Relief Work in the Spanish Civil War), and as much as I work on literature my model is a theorist named Franco Moretti. Graphs, Maps, and Trees (2007) showed what you could do with a very large pile of books if you sat back and thought about the patterns that ran across them. I did this with my book on Diana Wynne Jones, Diana Wynne Jones: Children’s Literature and the Fantastic Tradition (2005), (she wrote over fifty books) and with my book on science fiction for children and teens, The Intergalactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children’s and Teens’ Science Fiction (2009) (I covered over five hundred books). I am aware of Adam Roberts’s criticism that it is simply seeing patterns because we are designed to see patterns, but I feel much the same way about theory, that all too often if you impose a theory on a text, it involves cutting off all sorts of different bits. Stanley Fish once wrote that all theories work, but for me the interesting thing about theories is where they don’t work.