Locus, March 2014

by Locus Publications

  Most of its anomalies lie hidden amid ‘‘untroubled landscape’’ that resembles a minor nature preserve with few attractions for scientists or tourists. While the name recalls Area 51, this is no barren desert haunted by the ghosts of UFO sightings. Nonetheless, few of the people who cross its invisible borders are likely to survive for long. The rusting debris of previous expeditions offers no clues to the mystery.

  More than two years after the last failed trek into the unknown, Expedition 12 consists of a biologist, a surveyor, an anthropologist, and a psychologist – all women, where most of the earlier investigators had been men. Our narrator (the biologist, experienced in ecosystems, parasites, and symbiosis) admits to feeling baffled, as ill-prepared as her companions: ‘‘We were scientists, trained to observe natural phenomena and the results of human activity. We had not been trained to encounter what appeared to be the uncanny.’’

  Was Area X an environmental disaster, triggered by our own military research? By this point, the last remnants of that rumor have become a ‘‘dark fairy tale’’ that people would rather forget. Expedition members don’t get a clearer version before they set out into the heart of the mystery. A death and a disappearance soon cut the group in half, and the very nature of their quest comes into doubt.

  Descending (solo) into the buried tower, which others call a tunnel, the anonymous narrator follows a glowing track of almost biblical pronouncements down one inner wall to the rhythm of a vast, potentially alien heartbeat. The lighthouse proves to be a graveyard for old notebooks and diaries, some with links to her own past, but these stray ghosts remain too tenuous to help her find her way. Where Dante had Virgil as a guide to the Inferno (and the tenets of Christianity for a moral compass or GPS), this wanderer remains a solitary castaway: ‘‘I am just the biologist; I don’t require any of this to have a deeper meaning.’’

  There’s a self-mocking irony in that confession, since the need to understand begins with the book’s menacing title, and gains more urgency with each new fragment of a puzzle that refuses to snap into shape. Dark visions of Apocalypse have stalked humanity from the first tales of sinners and damnation to the most sophisticated nightmares of futures in collapse. From the vantage of Area X, the edgy narrator begins to picture an intrusive ‘‘manifestation,’’ entity or machine, lodged like a thorn in the side of existence. From that small wound, what terrible infection might spread if left unchecked?

  As the first volume of the Southern Reach trilogy, Annihilation raises the problem, sets the mood, then swiftly wrecks the vehicle of plotline. Although it seems designed to frustrate the reviewer, it feels more like a thrill ride into Zero G, on the wings of a potent drug.

  •

  In contrast to VanderMeer’s biologist, who responds to the inexplicable with self-doubt and icy tinglings of uncertainty, the narrator of Tony Ballantyne’s Dream London is a petty hustler who views his city’s escalating weirdness more in terms of opportunity. ‘‘The streets were darker; the air had a spicier scent than ever. There was a sense of the world holding its breath waiting…. Waiting for what? For me to choose?’’ As predicted on a little scroll of prophecies (ubiquitous as cheap lottery tickets in a place where old paths of logic have gone bonkers, and touching upon everything from true love to employment), Jim Wedderburn has received two job offers.

  Accustomed to life on the shadowy margins of civilization, including a stint as an AWOL soldier overseas, he exploits his good looks and charm with the casual flair of a born con man. But when a city dreams so deeply that skyscrapers loom taller with each passing hour, and major landmarks shapeshift toward the fantastic, its population must struggle to adapt. Wedderburn senses the volatile spirit, informing us, ‘‘Dream London did something to the people here. It brutalised the men, making them both harder and more sentimental. It was softening the women, making them more submissive. Outwardly so, at least.’’ (He’s seen it in the females he pimps for, his stable of whores.) Amidst what scientists might call a ‘‘predator/prey ecosystem,’’ this minor rogue has plans to join the big cats. He starts by shrugging off the old persona of ‘‘Captain Jim;’’ from this point on, he’s James.

  Occasional flashes of memory can still set off waves of ‘‘homesickness’’ for the modern city where he came of age, but he can’t waste time mourning the past – better to move ahead and forge some new connections. These prove to be a diverse bunch. Honey Peppers, the moppet (‘‘six and three-quarters years old’’) with the bouncing blonde curls of a young Shirley Temple and the foul tongue of a stevedore, works for a mysterious thug known only as the Daddio. While Honey appears to be so thoroughly at home in this surreal metropolis that it might have dreamed her into existence, Mr. Monagan seems more like one of the invaders so conspicuously absent from VanderMeer’s haunted swamp. This human-sized, bipedal ‘‘frog man’’ arrives in the new London naked (revealing both orange-colored skin and a total lack of genitals), but he did bring some luggage. Our narrator describes the air escaping from that bag of clothes as ‘‘the smell of warmth and other places that waited at the dim ends of sinuous tributaries, lands lost to green moss, pickerel weed and bald cypress.’’

  While London’s once-thriving airports now lie beyond the reach of planes, and the train system has lost all contact with the rest of England, the city does not stand alone. James senses a shifting web of connections in the puff of air from ‘‘elsewhere,’’ an odd glimpse of park-land, the new river winding through it – and one special tower, among those rising ever higher in its urban heart. For a man with his abilities (and lack of scruples), the new terrain may be the perfect venue to track down lost explorers, or practice the suave spycraft of another man named James.

  Dream London never holds still long enough for anyone to take its true measure. Something must direct this host of changes, and our roving operative finally manages to penetrate the center of those energies (confined to just three floors of Angel Tower), but his time there feels more like a helter-skelter ride through a house of horrors at breakneck speed, with dizzying shifts in perspective. Where sequences of numbers can become bursts of color, and destiny rewrites itself at every turn, it’s hard to follow any plan of action. Unable to depend on the old pack of tricks or on things he’s learned under the new persona, James can only endure, and hope he will emerge intact in body, mind, and soul.

  Another spirit works from beneath the radar to break the dangerous enchantment. As a master trickster, Tony Ballantyne dares to dream small, packing his extraordinary tale within the relatively modest limits of just over 400 pages (a self-contained book, not the opening of a trilogy, like Annihilation and The Pilgrims) and setting it to the music of a marching band – a group of amateurs trudging between the home-built floats of a parade, rather than one of the vast forces that move and play in perfect unison to celebrate an army heading off to war. Their wayward, stubborn spirit succeeds beyond all expectation.

  How can stomach-churning vertigo become delight? You’ll have to find out for yourself – I’m pledged to say no more.

  •

  The Pilgrims deals with a pair of clueless travelers who cross from modern London into unknown territory through a little gateway that didn’t always exist. Despite that premise, the maps, and a Dramatis Personae where humans coexist with gods and monsters, this first volume of the Pendulum trilogy shows its rebellious streak as early as page one.

  Before we’ve even glimpsed the gate or seen a crossing, Will Elliot takes us elsewhere in a present tense that makes the scene especially vivid and unsettling. An Arch Mage and a quartet of Strategists, (‘‘reduced to spectators’’) watch the crazed lord they can no longer handle as he stands on a balcony above a pit – ‘‘once used for lecturing apprentice magicians’’ and now a dungeon – staring at several hundred naked prisoners. When he launches into what could be a schizophrenic’s mixture of rueful confession and inexplicable triumph, the painted ceiling erupts: monsters attack the pit and start tearing people to shreds, in
a welter of blood and body parts.

  This isn’t just a nightmare, though it gives way to a scene where Eric wakes (in London) to see a ghostly presence that flickers, glows, echoes the babblings of Lord Vous, and then vanishes. Despite a fondness for superhero comics that’s lasted into his mid-twenties, he can’t accept this as some kind of message. Why would any higher (or lower) being bother with a failed journalist and slacker whose self-image recently hit rock bottom? (‘‘If he slipped into a phone booth, he’d leave it buck naked, to jeers and pointing fingers.’’)

  There’s no more obvious potential for greatness in Eric’s pal and occasional chess partner Stuart Casey (AKA Case), who knows his own limitations as a homeless alcoholic and doesn’t plan to pull himself back into normal life any time soon. Nevertheless, both of them get drawn – one after another – into a very alternate reality that claims them for itself and won’t let go.

  They’re only ‘‘pilgrims’’ because that’s the locals’ term for strangers. They haven’t volunteered as explorers, or set out on a quest. Although the gateway to the land of Levaal opens near Lord Vous’s castle (Case meets a mysterious being, with a siren’s beauty and the wings of an angel, who sends him on a mission to take a look inside), the tropes of epic fantasy keep breaking down around them.

  The little band of rebels they eventually fall in with – first seen robbing a news agent’s store on the London side of the gate – has a hedge wizard for its Gandalf, a ‘‘half-giant’’as the primary muscle, a self-proclaimed hero who’s a flagrant liar, and a leader troubled by some kind of magical post-traumatic stress syndrome that plagues him with appalling images of death in the midst of ordinary conversations.

  Levaal has a gateway, but it’s not a world. Though it could be a buffer zone between Earth and someplace truly nasty, neither Lord Vous’s ongoing Project to make himself immortal nor the activities pursued by its eccentric gods (some young, some old) seem capable of holding up the barriers much longer. If there’s a sleeping Dragon at its heart, he’s deep in hibernation.

  The Pilgrims is just the first stage in a gloriously wayward journey through the shattered relics of standard epic fantasy that left me eager to continue, wherever Volume Two chooses to go next!

  •

  All the ghost stories in Miyuki Miyabe’s collection Apparitions occur within the limits of Old Edo, the city that we now call Tokyo, but they’re the work of a noted historical novelist who seems to know every gritty detail about its already-enormous patchwork of neighborhoods, districts, landmarks, social classes, professionals, and dreamers.

  A few of those dreamers were master painters/print makers (including Hokusai, whose print ‘‘The Plate Mansion’’ serves as this book’s striking cover image). Although they spoke of Edo as the ‘‘Floating World,’’ the phrase wasn’t intended to evoke a self-contained yet insubstantial Entity liable to wander off-track like Ballantyne’s London. In any major city, the human population shifts – with the seasons, the development from childhood through maturity to age, or the larger patterns of history. Apparitions evokes them through solid evidence they built and left behind, from grand villas to temples, slums, and sushi bars.

  Some of Edo’s ghosts can only appear where they died, like the cover’s spirit rising from the well that drowned her as a human head, a coiling body, and a minor puff of smoke. Others roam through dreams – in ‘‘Cage of Shadows’’, a house where seven people were murdered still breeds nightmares for visitors, but the retired clerk who tells the tale has found a way to join one apparition. (‘‘Then we slip right out from between the bars of that sturdy cage and are free to go wherever we want.’’)

  Whether they’re living, dead, or in some Limbo in-between, Miyabe’s characters all merit our attention. So do the many forms and cultures of their city.

  –Faren Miller

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: RUSSELL LETSON

  Lockstep, Karl Schroeder (Tor 978-0-7653-3726-9, $26.99, 351pp, hc) March 2014. Cover by Edward Miller.

  V-S Day, Allen Steele (Ace 978-0-425-25974-0, $26.95, 308pp, hc) February 2014.

  Karl Schroeder seems to like the motif of the displaced kid: Ventus, Lady of Mazes, and the first volume of the Virga sequence all begin with a young person being removed from a home context and set adrift in a world (or even a world-of-worlds) of wonder. Lockstep repeats that pattern. Seventeen-year-old Toby McGonigal, eleven light-hours out from Sol on a mission to help nail down his family’s claim to the ‘‘orphan planet’’ Sedna, awakens from hibernation to find himself marooned not so much in space as in time – his damaged ship has been lost for 14,000 years. The spaceborne civilization he finds on the other side of this nearly unimaginable gap is both familiar and alien. Using technology developed by his family (and still controlled by them), tens of thousands of otherwise-unexploitable worlds out in the extreme fringes of the solar system are able to harvest the thin resources and energies between the stars and maintain economic and cultural ties. That collection of technologies and protocols is ‘‘lockstep,’’ a synchronized system of hibernation-and-awakening that has, internally, been operating for only decades, while out in realtime, millennia have passed. Toby learns that not only are his mother and younger brother and sister still alive but that he is a famously lost heir and that his brother Peter (once younger, now middle-aged) wants him dead. Eventually there are even stranger and more uncomfortable and applecart-upsetting discoveries.

  But before applecarts start tipping over, Toby is treated to a series of further displacements as he, with the help of a group of lockstep stowaways and fringe-dwellers, escapes abduction and possible murder. Along the way he passes through a series of ingeniously devised environments that show off the variety of settled lockstep worlds and their societies: the bubble-worlds of Wallop, the color-shifting skies of Thisbe in the Laser Wastes, an ancient Mars remade as Barsoom. This linear guided-tour-of-worlds and wonders is accompanied by what might be called concentric revelations, as the implications, possibilities, and necessities of the lockstep arrangements are unfolded.

  Because Toby is young and a bit disoriented by his displacement, and is in any case kept busy running, he doesn’t get around to asking questions that the reader, safe and comfy on the sofa, will think of. For example: do all settled worlds run in lockstep? Who decides on the frequency and how is the synchronization enforced? What else has been going on in the 14,000 intervening years outside the lockstep polities? Toby doesn’t ask those questions until some event jogs his elbow, so we have to wait for the full extent and complexity of this future and the implications of its central technological idea to be unfolded bit by bit.

  So once again I face the question of exactly which of the novel’s machineries and innovations are available for a discussion in a review and which should remain behind the Spoiler Curtain, to be puzzled over and enjoyed by the reader. I believe it is safe to reveal that not every inhabited place operates in lockstep, and that the unfolding implications of that fact make for the kind of world-redefining revelations and interventions that readers of Ventus and the Virga sequence will recognize. I can also disclose something of the central ideas of Lockstep. My first reaction was that the whole odd arrangement was like those ingenious-but-unlikely sciencefictional worlds of the ’50s and ’60s: Star Bridge, Non-Stop, Dark Universe, and the range of satirically distorted societies that Kingsley Amis called ‘‘comic infernos.’’ Schroeder makes the case not only for the workability of lockstep but its necessity as a solution to the problem of maintaining a civilization of near-interstellar scale while operating within the lightspeed limit. The existence of civilizations running in realtime, outside the lockstep time-bubble, makes for some really interesting wrinkles. This future, like Paul McAuley’s Quiet War history (though much deeper), has seen a long, tangled succession of civilizations. Toby learns that not all of humankind joined the lockstep worlds in their slow-motion, resource-starved way.

 
For centuries of realtime, all the action was around the stars. Empires rose, posthuman species came into being, there were wars and crashes and exploration and terraforming and everything you can imagine and lots you can’t.

  And later:

  [H]umanity and its many subspecies, creations and offspring had experienced many rises and falls over the aeons…. They gave rise to godlike AIs, and these grew bored and left the galaxy, or died, or turned into uncommunicative lumps, or ran berserk in any of a hundred different ways. On many worlds humans wiped themselves out, or were wiped out by their creations. It happened with tedious regularity.

  Lockstep worlds are not closed off from realtime, only out-of-synch with it. They are permeable, and much of Toby’s cultural whiplash is the result of the mixture of the familiar and the 14 millennia’s worth of exotica and galactic back-story that have leaked into the locksteps, compressing and layering all that history.

  Nor is this big-picture context the only story-space the book leaps over. The immediate (to Toby) back-story of the McGonigal family situation would make a nifty novel all by itself: Earth and eventually the entire solar system has become dominated by ‘‘the trillionaires,’’ who run a plutocracy in which even the merely rich remain clients of an oligarchic owner-class. A severely divided world provides the crisis that drives the McGonigals and their allies out into not-entirely-empty interstellar space in search of an environment these powers have yet to exploit. That crisis also indirectly generates the lockstep social system, which evolves from a gaming world, Consensus, which Toby had designed to deal with his brother Peter’s traumatized, damaged personality.

  Lockstep tells a dense and textured story: a family-history mystery, a revolutionary adventure, and glimpses of Stapledonian panoramas, all studded with marvels and vistas and appealing sciencefictional ideas and devices (my favorites: the genetically engineered cat-otter pets called denners and the AI/simulation-game-based/statistically representative government called a demarchy). As with Ventus and Lady of Mazes, the resolution opens out into an equally spacious world of ethical and social considerations as dizzying and rich as the physical settings.