Throughout the Southern Reach trilogy, Jeff VanderMeer has avoided straightforward narrative, moving between different viewpoints, voices, and plotlines. Final volume Acceptance proves to be the most devious of all. Several characters have more than one name and persona, depending on when we see them, and times range from the present to an era more than three decades ago – when the zone that became Area X may have stood on the cusp of change, but raised no more than a vague unease in its main inhabitant (the Lighthouse Keeper) or his occasional visitors.
Since all those years of scientific expeditions, theorizing, and scheming couldn’t solve the mystery, VanderMeer won’t give us a trail of clues to entirely rational answers, then end with a flamboyant QED! We readers must draw our own conclusions and make intuitive leaps, faced with a crazy-quilt of episodes where each piece reveals a little more about people, places, and the strange forces at work behind the scenes. Wherever, whenever, whomever provides the point of view, it feels immediate and touches emotions even deeper than the need to understand.
In the changing ecosystem of Area X, flora and fauna take on a special significance. The cover of Annihilation featured a plant and an insect, that of sequel Authority a white rabbit. Acceptance shows an owl, wings raised and shedding feathers. The horned owl won’t appear until almost halfway through the novel, in Part Two, a relatively brief but quite informative (and moving) account written by a scientist who played a major role in Annihilation’s band of explorers. Previous books already suggested that the biologist who returned with the survivors of Expedition 12 wasn’t the same woman who set out with them, so it may not be too much of a spoiler to note that she wrote these pages while stranded alone, unable to return to her former life – or avoid that oddly persistent bird.
It’s not some kind of magical companion or animal friend, as described in a passage that evokes the cover art: ‘‘Once or twice, it would perch at close to my height, and I would approach as an experiment, only for the owl to beat its wings and fluff out its feathers until I had retreated.’’ But in a different guise, it seems more closely linked to the spirit of VanderMeer’s title:
I had studied owls early in my career and knew that neuroses were unknown among them as opposed to other, more intelligent bird species. Most owls are also beautiful, along with another quality that is hard to define but registers as calm in the observer. There was such a hush upon that beach, and one that didn’t register with me as sinister.
Even while the biologist resists a persistent urge to shapeshift, she feels that underlying sense of calm.
The avian image also resonates with the name adopted by the current biologist. A member of Acceptance’s smaller, more rambling trek into Area X, she now calls herself Ghost Bird. As Part Three begins, she asks ‘‘What kind of life was this, where you could read a letter from your own haunted twin?’’
The scientific method (experiment, analysis) may not reveal the origins or purpose of Area X any better than it understands the detente between the original coastal ecosystem and the Otherness, ranging from a bizarre nexus point to an enormous ‘‘monster’’ transformed by Light, but scientists remain open to new attitudes and perceptions, where VanderMeer’s bête noire – bureaucracy, with its manipulative leaders – can’t get past smug preconceptions. On the new expedition’s fourth day in Area X, Lowry (chief bureaucrat at Southern Reach) refers to the zone’s creators as ‘‘the enemy’’ and distinguishes them from his own brand of self-proclaimed sophisticate by saying, ‘‘We think in terms of machines, not animals.’’ Ghost Bird already doubts the value of current technology, and over its wandering course Acceptance shows just how narrow-minded technophilia can be, compared to an active sense of wonder.
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A decade after Robin Hobb finished what seemed to be the last of her interconnected trilogies set in the Six Duchies, featuring such notable characters as magician/assassin FitzChivalry Farseer and his old friend (yet still a man of mystery) the Fool, she returns to them with Fool’s Assassin. While readers who like standalone fantasies and shorter work may prefer what she writes as Megan Lindholm (her first pseudonym), Hobb fans won’t be discouraged to learn that the new book opens another multi-volume project, stopping at a point where enigmas persist and danger has become full-fledged disaster.
I’ve been reviewing Lindholm since Wizard of the Pigeons (1985), Hobb since Assassin’s Apprentice (1995), and appreciate her talents in either guise. Where some fantasists specialize in ponderous trilogies with immense casts of characters, elaborately unimaginative world-building, and an overall aura of the ‘‘medievalesque,’’ Hobb distills similar materials into a far more potent brew. However paradoxical it seems, her epics manage to feel intimate.
Fool’s Assassin shows Fitz in his fifties, long after he abandoned the ruthless politics and politicized magics of the royal court, trading his old job as roving killer for the life of a landholder known to most people as Tom Badgerlock, guardian of Withywood. While he can still draw upon a wide range of supernatural abilities, his outlook and his needs have changed. What persists most strongly is love for his wife Molly, though it’s increasingly apparent that they’re aging at different rates, and he faces the sad prospect of outliving her by many years.
Each chapter begins with text from a letter, diary entry or academic treatise. The quote that introduces Chapter Two shows how little we should trust scholarly and social distinctions between different kinds of magic. This Scribe calls the Skill (dominant in the Farseer line, with its generations of royalty) ‘‘the highest and noblest’’ of talents, allowing an adept ‘‘to send his thoughts afar, to influence gently the thinking of his dukes and duchesses, or to strike fear in the heart of his enemies.’’ He follows this paen with condemnation of the Wit as ‘‘a base and corrupting magic that most often afflicts the lowborn who live and breed alongside the animals they cherish.’’ Inevitably (he assumes), ‘‘The mind-to-mind contamination of communicating with beasts leads to animalistic behaviors and appetites.’’
While the Skill could almost be a supernatural version of smart phones and the Web, achieving what we get through e-mail exchanges and comments posted on Twitter, those remarks on the Wit dismiss beasts much as VanderMeer’s bureaucrat did (though more vehemently, since animals play a crucial role in pre-industrial societies). Living and working as Tom Badgerlock, Fitz has a very different perspective: he may invoke the Skill for occasional long-distance messaging, but he relies upon the Wit – both on the farm and in the woodland beyond.
He has grown wary of the Skill and other Farseer magics. When his old teacher and employer gets back in touch, wanting to make use of those talents once again, he’s repelled – yet also tempted:
I lingered in the Skill-stream, allowing myself to feel its allure. Youngsters training in the Skill are sternly warned against its addictive attraction. It’s a difficult sensation to describe. I felt complete in the Skill. Even in the midst of the deepest possible love, one feels apart from one’s partner – separated by skin even as we are joined in the act that makes two one. Only in the Skill does that sense of separation fade. Only in the Skill have I felt that sense of oneness with the whole world.
At this point, magic transcends the giddy high of technophiles who spend too much time online, stoked by junk food and energy drinks. Although it could ultimately destroy him, this ‘‘sense of oneness’’ seems more like the Light in Area X. In Fool’s Assassin, Fitz/Tom won’t resolve his mixed feelings.
While the title begins with the Fool, he lingers on the fringes through most of this work. Fitz has not heard from his old friend in years, and what may finally be a message is not delivered mind-to-mind but through a fragile human go-between who renders it in terms so cryptic, it could be a plea for help or something completely different. And then there’s Bee. Among deftly interwoven viewpoints, this one shows up late (in a plot strand that mingles diary with Unnatural History) but shares enough traits with the Fool to suggest fascinating new ways t
o understand him. Further detail would involve too many spoilers, though I will say Hobb’s non-insectile character could never find a place among the Hive that dominates the book I’ll deal with next: Laline Paull’s The Bees.
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A first novel by a playwright and screenwriter, The Bees is an intriguing fantasy of royalty, worship, strict rules, and fervent obedience (aside from some experimentalists and misfits) in a stratified society that faces dangers from within and without. Paull uses images from human cultures both to anthropomorphize her insects and to evoke forms of perception and instinctual behaviors very different from ours – though just as capable of mass brutality. People shaped much of the world around the Hive, since that world is our own.
The Prologue notes that the orchard with the beehive is for sale, ‘‘besieged’’ by speculators who want to buy it as a country town increasingly adapts to the new millennium’s light industry and managed growth. But in a rainy summer, the bees face more immediate crises. One Sister Sage (identical to all the other powerful Sage priestesses in most respects) describes the threat: ‘‘They say the season is deformed by rain, that the flowers shun us and fall unborn, that foragers are falling from the air and no one knows why!’’ This sister is conducting a very private, ‘‘privilege[d]’’ experiment centered around a new member of the lowest caste, the Floras: bees dedicated to sanitation, keeping the Hive clean.
Flora 717 may look unnaturally large, with a coarse-furred black carapace and a tongue that grants her the ability to speak as well as sip nectar, but her first public statement is the universal mantra of loyalty to the Queen and ruling classes, ‘‘Accept, Obey, and Serve’’ – a faith she genuinely feels, as her keen senses and alertness to the Hive Mind reinforce belief in the Queen’s sacred perfection. Nonetheless, she’s eager to go beyond the usual limits of her kind, joining the esteemed caste of foragers (with some help from chemical memories passed along by an old scout and gatherer) to make her way past the orchard and return to ‘‘dance’’ the information for her sisters to follow.
These foragers rev ‘‘engines’’ before they fly, and dine on many kinds of ‘‘pollen bread’’ (coarse and stale when food is scarce). Flora 717 learns crucial events from the lore and history of the Hive when a brave deed draws her to the Queen’s attention and she’s encouraged to explore famed murals in the royal Library. Since bees are short-lived, one legendary apocalypse – the Visitation – returns from the mists of the past, leaving the bees traumatized by what we see as ‘‘an old man in a red dressing gown and bare feet’’ (the beekeeper) smoking them out so he can plunder the Treasury of honey.
Humans may ravage hives and fatally sicken their inhabitants with poisoned fields and polluted rain, but some of the most horrific scenes in this often violent book are based on natural cycles of insect behavior. The Bees’ mass rituals and strict laws, ruthlessly enforced by ‘‘fertility police,’’ serve as metaphors, as the fables translate instincts into terms that we can better understand: amours and ambitions, feuds and bloodbaths, delight and shame… ultimately (perhaps) miraculous survival.
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A professor of creative writing and author of nonfiction and short stories, Sharona Muir has managed to link Invisible Beasts closely enough to its supposed author Sophie and her science-minded family (always with at least one member capable of viewing creatures most of us can’t see) that the publisher can compare it to Aesop’s Fables and then call it a ‘‘first novel.’’ It may be even more piecemeal than Acceptance, yet its recurring characters and exploratory spirit provide a sense of wholeness not typically found in collections of stories, vignettes, and comments.
Family history mingles with commentary in its introductions, to the concept of Invisibles and (more briefly) to individual stories, but also to sections featuring different kinds of beasts: Common, Imperiled and Extinct, Rare, ‘‘in Print’’, and Cyclically Invisible (‘‘Beacon Bugs’’ that seem to invoke the spirit of VanderMeer’s lighthouses). If you come here directly from The Bees, you may pay special attention to ‘‘Feral Parfumier Bees’’ or ‘‘The Spiders of Theodora’’, but all these creatures are vividly portrayed.
As the book continues, they become even more significant. ‘‘Think Monkey’’ begins with notions that gave me a fresh perspective for these reviews:
Some beasts are good to eat, some are good to live with, but all are indispensable for thinking with. We think about ourselves with the help of other animals – we are mulish, catty, busy as bees, cold fish, small fry, dogs in the manger, doves, hawks, bearish, bullish, sheepish, cowed, elephantine; we ferret or worm things out; we horse around, clam up, get crabby; some of us are paid moles, and I, personally, am a real bitch. Lacking a beast that precisely suits the purpose, sometimes we have to invent one.
Muir’s Epilogue (‘‘The Naturalist Reads a Love Letter, with Pluto and a Dog’’) extends the concept, asking questions that resonate beyond its fictional version of the author:
Do I still believe there is no spiritual aspect of my life that is not, in some way, animal? It’s the belief of a naturalist, a scientific observer of animals. I’m animal through and through. But how shall I apply my belief to the spiritual scent of this letter?
Mainstream writers still tend to set mankind apart from beasts, while some genre works make superficial use of their dragons, aliens, and such as exotic window dressing or homage to old tropes, rather than finding ways to make us see ourselves more clearly, looking deeper. But all four of the writers I deal with this month draw upon knowledge of where we came from – and where we still belong.
–Faren Miller
Return to In This Issue listing.
LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: RUSSELL LETSON
Cibola Burn, James S.A. Corey (Orbit 978-0316217620, $27.00, 581pp, hc) June 2014.
Reach for Infinity, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Solaris 978-1-78108-203-4, $9.99, 339pp, tp) May 2014. Cover by Adam Tredowski.
In this fourth book of James S.A. Corey’s (Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck’s) sequence that began with Leviathan Wakes, Caliban’s War, and Abaddon’s Gate, the series over-title, The Expanse, finally kicks in. This refers, one presumes, to the explosion of humankind out of its home solar system into a galaxy of habitable planets, the empty nests of a long-abandoned culture of star-dwellers. I kept wondering about that label during the first three novels, the story arc of which employed an omnium-gatherum mix of alien-technology threats, bizarre deaths and transformations, corporate skullduggery, future-cop-drama, and space warfare in an industrialized and partly-settled Sol system. But all that (and there was a great deal of ‘‘that,’’ along with related sideshows, sub-plots, setpieces, and general Blowing Stuff Up) would seem to have been just the prelude to a new arc exploiting another set of classic SF tropes: planetary pioneering, alien-environment-exploration, and colonial rebellion. Oh, and also Blowing Stuff Up, a scene of which sets off a plot filled with crises, disasters, social and personal conflicts, miscalculations, ingenious coping, narrow escapes, and the persistence of the pathological and heroic varieties.
To back up a bit: A ship filled with refugees from the chaos and destruction that plagued the Outer Planets Alliance in the first three books has dashed through the alien-generated interstellar portal that was the bone of contention in Abbadon’s Gate. On the other side, on one of the worlds wiped clean of precursor life a billion years earlier, these Belter refugees establish an unauthorized, hardscrabble settlement and name the planet Ilus. The native flora and fauna range from useless to annoying to lethal, and the enigmatic, miraculously preserved remains of the original builders’ facilities loom over a desert in which the humans hope to establish an Earthlike ecology. When an official, UN-chartered corporate expedition arrives to explore, evaluate, and emphatically not set up a permanent colony on the planet (which the UN has named New Terra), one refugee faction sabotages the landing site, with the unintended consequence of destroying a shuttle full of supplies (and researchers and unwel
come administrators) that would have made life not just comfortable but possible. A predictable consequence of the sabotage is the decision by the corporate security chief still up in orbit to treat the colonists as terrorists and rebels and to generally behave like an occupier. That has its own set of consequences, including the back-home authorities’ decision to dispatch James Holden, captain of the Rocinante and hero of the late unpleasantnesses, as a mediator.
We see the cascading problems from the viewpoints of four key figures, each of whom is given a thread of chapters: the guilt-ridden refugee family-guy Basia, the contract exobiologist Elvi, the corporate-security second-in-charge Holdstock, and Jim Holden. Then there is the alien entity called The Investigator, which is looking for something – its leitmotif is ‘‘it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out.’’ This composite being is not itself sentient, but some of its aspects retain their individual identities. One such component is the reconstituted personality of the late Detective Miller (dead or at least discorporate since the first book), whose investigative function also involves advising Holden and nudging him toward the Investigator’s goals.
But then, the announcement of the overarching ‘‘Expanse’’ theme was right there in Leviathan Wakes, when the then-living Detective Miller recognized in the original Belters ‘‘[t]he impulse to explore, to stretch, to leave home. To go as far as possible out into the universe.’’ But the refugees bring more with them than pioneer spirit – they and their corporate rivals have also imported to this new world all the old familiar tribal tensions and bigotries that they reinvented during the early waves of solar-system settlement, so that Belters and Earth-Mars natives automatically dislike and distrust each other.
Other elements of the earlier books also return, adapted to the new thematic environment. The Belter vacuum welder Basia, like Praxidike Meng in Caliban’s War, is motivated not only by the pioneer/refugee spirit but also by domestic guilt and anxiety: he left behind a child in the evacuation of Ganymede and now is determined to preserve what is left of his family. Holdstock – who was Miller’s partner in an earlier life – is a man in the middle, too decent for the worst kind of behavior his job might require, but not the reflexive hero that Holden is. Just as well, since his sometimes-reluctant loyalty to his job and duties gives him a pivotal role in the three-sided tug of war over who will call the shots (or even have naming rights) on Ilus/New Terra.
Locus, August 2014 Page 10
