Locus, August 2014

by Locus Publications

  The Corey acting company seems to require not only put-upon or conscience-haunted Regular Guys and Gals but variations on the Inflexible Man on either side of the Good Guy Divide. We already know how strongly Jim Holden is bound to his code of decency and to his crew, and here he meets a fittingly mighty opposite in corporate security head Murtry, who is not so much a villain (though he is a cold-hearted SOB) as an antagonist, a high-functioning psychopath who has found his niche in the world of strict command structures and contractually-permitted violence.

  The character that dominates without having chapters named after it is the planet itself, with its enigmatic deep history and puzzling nature – if ‘‘nature’’ is quite the right word. One of Elvi’s colleagues says of New Terra, ‘‘Nothing here is natural. The whole planet was machined,’’ and when the Miller component of the Investigator finds its way to a particularly interesting spot, it realizes,

  Something built all this, and left its meal half eaten on the table. The designers and builders who spanned a thousand worlds had lived here and died here and left behind the everyday wonders like bones in the desert…. The world is a crime scene….

  So on top of a bloody political-economic conflict, short supplies, and the natural hazards of an alien biosphere, there is the likelihood that sooner or later some ancient technology is bound to rear whatever it has instead of a head.

  The cascading-problems storyline teeters on the edge of one-damn-thing-after-another, but the authors manage to maintain credibility, thanks to an ingeniously constructed alien environment and their convincing portrait of human cussedness, which can produce reluctantly heroic welders and exobiologists as well as relentless control-freak villains.

  The introduction of a new set of old tropes and conventions suggests that while The Expanse is going to be organized in sets of three, these are not ordinary trilogies. Instead, it reminds me of the story-arcs-within-arcs of C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner sequence or (in a different direction) Larry Niven’s milieu-driven Known Space open series. It’s always a pleasure (about which I refuse to feel guilty) to have at hand a commodious story-space waiting to be filled with wonders and adventures.

  •

  The stories commissioned by editor Jonathan Strahan for Reach for Infinity (successor to Engineering Infinity and Edge of Infinity) occupy the same thematic space as Corey’s sprawling Expanse: middle-distance futures in which the solar system is being settled and industrialized, if not fully tamed. Most of these fourteen entries deal directly or implicitly with (to once again purloin John Wyndham’s phrase) the outward urge, the romantic notion that humankind, or some important fraction of it, is destined to spread beyond our home world or the solar system. The anthology’s other unifying factor is that these are more or less ‘‘hard’’ SF, featuring ingenious, inventive speculations tethered to the possible, the manageable, or at least the fudgeable.

  I am particularly fond of decidedly un-cozy portraits of space and colonies-in-progress as workplaces. In ‘‘The Fifth Dragon’’, Ian McDonald sees the moon as an industrial landscape, a lunar North Dakota, all hazard pay and expensive tight living quarters. And, like the Bakken oil fields, it offers opportunities for the ambitious and enterprising, though not without personal cost.

  Pat Cadigan’s witty quasi-documentary ‘‘Report Concerning the Presence of Seahorses on Mars’’ packs a nifty double payload: a Mars colony funded by its service as a reality-show drama and an unexpected turn on the nature of and motive for a colonial-revolt scenario (which ought to boost ratings, eh?). Linda Nagata offers a non-satirical variation on the idea of an entertainment-biz/space-development nexus in ‘‘Attitude’’, which also joins the relatively select group of portraits of sciencefictional sports. (Much better than rollerball and as vivid and convincing as Jack Vance’s hussade.)

  The Mars of Ailette de Bodard’s ‘‘The Dust Queen’’ isn’t even ready for occupation yet, with humans in orbit overseeing a multi-generation terraforming project. Here the focus is less on the world-transforming work than on art, memory, and homesickness for an Earth nearly as changed as Mars will be someday. It has a companion in Karen Lord’s ‘‘Hiraeth: A Tragedy in Four Acts’’, a bracingly direct look at the costs of going up against the serious mental and physical challenges of adapting to environments beyond Earth – even to the point of giving up most of our humanity in order to endure them. The possible companion here is Alastair Reynolds, ‘‘In Babelsberg’’, a Silverbergian account (with the tiniest hint of ‘‘Fondly Fahrenheit’’) of a robotic space-explorer/celebrity’s homecoming tour. (The chat-show gig with Derek the hungry T. Rex host is a non-thematic high point.)

  There are more familiar costs and hazards Out There, even in a carefully-designed and -managed space-transport system. Greg Egan’s ‘‘Break My Fall’’ is built on a sturdy hard-SF foundation of orbital mechanics, solar weather, and an ingenious infrastructure, but it gets its punch from what those components do to the characters when they get caught in the gears.

  The aforementioned outward urge is often uncritically accepted in SF, but Peter Watt’s ‘‘Hotshot’’ roots around in its psychological sources – in the sources of all urges, for that matter. The background, lightly sketched in, is of an interstellar-expansion project that will occupy tens of millennia, but the foreground is occupied by a meditation on the notion of free will itself, again strongly reminiscent of Silverberg’s more cosmic moments.

  I am bounced back in time and genre-space to ’50s satire, New Wave screeds, and poetic parables by Adam Roberts’ ‘‘Trademark Bugs: A Legal History’’ and Hannu Rajaniemi’s ‘‘Invisible Planets’’. The Roberts is a faux document – a legal-history article – that outlines a comic-inferno scenario right off the Pohl & Kornbluth addictive-product-cycle menu, with a side order of Orwellian linguistic jiu-jitsu in which spreading tailored diseases becomes a public-health benefit. The ramifications of the generating idea are worked out at perhaps greater length than I needed, but I do admire Roberts’ thoroughness. Rajaneimi’s epigraph acknowledges Italo Calvino; appropriate, since, despite the language of contemporary SF, it has that old Modernist vibe that doesn’t completely literalize its metaphors but leaves their rhetorical and fabulatory machinery visible for us to observe.

  Three stories remain Earthbound, though two of them do yearn outward. Ken MacLeod’s ‘‘‘The Entire Immense Superstructure’: An Installation’’ is another report, this one tracing the progress of a project undertaken by a more-than-eccentric artist whose climactic performance is, um, explosive. Ellen Klages’s ‘‘Amicae Aeternum’’ is similar in its indirectness, though nostalgic and gentle where MacLeod is antic-satiric. Two girls take a bicycle trek through their halcyon home town, and one reflects on what she is giving up in exchange for a future among the stars. Karl Schroeder doesn’t really get off the ground in ‘‘Kheldyu’’, though his characters do clamber about on a tower that has Babel-ish symbolic overtones. Instead, his focus is on means and ends and the role of profit and other motives in devising world-saving technologies.

  Kathleen Ann Goonan’s novelette ‘‘Wilder Still, the Stars’’ is the longest story, and it feels like a highly condensed novel. It is a thematic companion to This Shared Dream, an impression strengthened by the centrality of a lovingly described home that echoes the wonderful Halcyon House of Dream. Here, instead of mysteriously gifted children we have APs – Artificial Persons, manufactured and custom-tweaked, with special talents. Here also are nanotechnology and computational miracles and neuroplasticity and jazz and that familiar Outward Urge and a generous hope-for-transformation, despite a serious and frustrated anger at standard-issue human narrow-minded folly. In a volume of very strong, densely textured stories about yearning, achievement, and loss, it is the one I found most moving.

  –Russell Letson

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  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: ADRIENNE MARTINI

  The Silk Map, Chris Willrich (Pyr 978-1-61614-899-7, $15
.95, 450pp, tp) May 2014. Cover by Kerem Beyit.

  Full Fathom Five, Max Gladstone (Tor 978-0-7653-3574-6, $25.99, 268pp, hc) July 2014.

  Peacemaker, Marianne de Pierres (Angry Robot 978-0-85766-418-1, $7.99, 352, pb) April 2014.

  Fortune’s Pawn, Rachel Bach (Orbit 978-0-316-22111-5, $15.00, 346pp, tp) November 2013.

  Honor’s Knight, Rachel Bach (Orbit 978-0-316-22108-5 $15.00, 378pp, tp) February 2014.

  Heaven’s Queen, Rachel Bach (Orbit 978-0-316-22112-2, $15.00, 394pp, tp) April 2014.

  The first Bone and Gaunt novel, Chris Willrich’s The Scroll of Years, was a detailed and gorgeous tapestry that wove the stories of several relationships onto an Asian-inflected warp. The plot structure was episodic rather than climactic, and all of the little seemingly off-topic side tales told by Willrich informed the main narrative in wonderful ways. Plus, the relationship between the married, and soon-to-be parents, poet Gaunt and thief Bone felt grounded in reality. Theirs is not a simple relationship. The romance itself burbles underneath the pragmatic needs of two individuals who do more than hang on each other’s every word.

  So much of what was wonderful about Scroll is still in the continuation, The Silk Map. Bone and Gaunt are a little rougher with each other; she blames him for the literal loss of their newly born son. He’s trapped in a scroll, you see, and Bone flung it off of a cliff. They’ve teamed up with Snow Pine, whose daughter is also in the lost scroll. The trio sets off on a shaggy quest to find what has been lost – and run into all manner of mysteries, like a monkey god and a sentient carpet.

  There’s a lot to love about Map. Gaunt and Bone are delightful to spend time with, as is the aforementioned talking carpet. The intersections between Willrich’s world and ours are fun to spy, too. Take this bit of poetry that helps inform the main quest:

  In Xembala did Mentor John a lofty

  lamasery raise

  Where Aleph the holy river flows

  Through labyrinths that no man knows

  To an ocean innocent of days.

  There are many little moments in Map that shine bright. The problem is that all of these moments get lost in the larger story, which then seems to get lost in its own head. Part of what made Scroll so wonderful was all of the little feints and jaunts the narrative made; here, there are so many of them that the story never really gains enough momentum to keep it going when it meanders. Willrich is a smart writer whose larger observations on the importance of stories and of family get lost in his enthusiasm to show the reader every neat thing he can do. Hopefully, the next book in the saga – because the ending of this one isn’t so much of an ending as it is a set-up for the rest of the story – rediscovers its sense of purpose enough to keep us moving through the lovely scenery.

  •

  Max Gladstone’s Craft books just keep getting better, which is high praise because the first two – Two Serpents Rise and Three Parts Dead – were already pretty dang good. Now with Full Fathom Five, Gladstone has pushed himself even further.

  The general world is the same as in the first two novels. Here there be literal dragons and gods made flesh. Goods and services are bought with pieces of your soul. But Gladstone doesn’t make those larger-than-life characters his heroes. Instead, he focuses on the people who work in mundane jobs, like actuaries and risk managers. Full Fathom Five’s protagonist Kai is an investment banker, of sorts. Her firm on the Hawaii-esque island Kavekana makes its bones by offering the rich a place to hide their assets from the Old World Gods who want a piece of it. Kai isn’t on the sales team, mind, but is responsible for the details of the contracts and is the one who interfaces with the pseudo-gods the sales team designs.

  Until, of course, she makes a decision that blows her predictable world apart. Kai leaps to save an avatar from certain (and scheduled) destruction and is nearly torn to bits. But as she pulls herself back together, she figures out what’s going on beneath her tranquil island’s surface.

  With that set-up, Gladstone is off. While it’s the richness of the world that initially draws a reader in – his places feel fully lived in rather than meticulously constructed – it’s his voice that keeps you there. It’s by turns poetic and witty. Like this exchange between Mako, a blind barkeep who is hitting golf balls into the ocean, and Kai:

  ‘‘Find what’s wrong with the foundation, then fix it.’’

  ‘‘You think I won’t be able to move forward until I settle this question.’’

  ‘‘I was talking about my swing,’’ he said, fishing for another ball. ‘‘But why not?’’

  Gladstone’s focus is always on his characters, which means that he can talk about topics like corporal punishment and gender dysphoria without ever making the story simply about those issues. It’s a neat trick and one that is harder than Gladstone makes it look. But, mostly, Full Fathom Five is a great story told well.

  •

  I know the comparison is an unfair one, but Australian Marianne de Pierres’s Peacemaker, a story about a woman in a futuristic and engineered analogue of the American Wild West who is tasked with solving a Very Big Problem, immediately called to mind John Varley’s Steel Beach. The books differ in almost every other way besides basic loglines. Beach is both light and deep, somehow, while Peacemaker is oddly somber. Varley worked his subtext about SF tropes, gender, and AI pretty hard; De Pierres tells one story straightforwardly. Beach was nominated for a bucketful of awards. Peacemaker likely won’t be.

  Like I said, totally not a fair comparison – but that’s the book the deep recesses of my hindbrain kept trying to make it into.

  What Peacemaker strives to be – and mostly achieves – is a fun-enough adventure with a tough female lead, Virgin Jackson, who feels most comfortable in a desert that exists only because the city around it is protecting it. She’s a typewriter repairman in a computerized world, figuratively.

  Virgin witnesses a murder out on the range, in a place where no people could possibly be. She starts to have a familiar hallucination about a bird, which is more than a mind trick. A US Marshall is called in. Virgin’s stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold boyfriend turns up. A police detective becomes her nemesis. And off we go.

  It doesn’t hold together as well when De Pierres tries to explain how all of what has happened happened. There’s some handwaving about controlling the world’s mythology in order to control the world’s people. There’s talk of science-y magic that involves other dimensions. While the story and characters are interesting and mostly grounded, the world itself never quite coalesces into a reasonable whole. But my back-brain might have damned the book from its first paragraphs, given the Varley factor.

  •

  The advantage to not really noticing Rachel Bach’s Paradox trilogy until April 2014 is that they’d all been published by then and I could devour all three books without delay. This is a good thing.

  These three titles – Fortune’s Pawn, Honor’s Knight, and Heaven’s Queen – tell the story of Devi Morris, a young female mercenary fresh out of her mandatory years of service. Devi is looking for a new gig, one that will lead to her becoming a Devastator, a member of an elite group of military muscle in the Paradoxian planetary system. She signs on with a captain whose ex-guards almost always are drafted by the Devastators – if they can survive their year of service on this captain’s ship. It’s not a given, not even for the talented Devi, who quickly finds herself hip deep in combat, mystery, and more combat.

  The first book, Fortune’s Pawn, is almost Firefly-esque in its concept of a rouge-ish spaceship family whose members may be diverse and prickly but who always have each other’s backs. There’s a love interest, too, as Devi falls for the enigmatic Rupert, the ship’s chef who has his own agenda. It’s a slice of spacer life. The crew eats, plays cards, and bonds between skirmishes. Devi opines that ‘‘the movies they make back home about the nonstop action of merc life never show how much time you spend on cleanup.’’

  About three-quarters of the way through the first ti
tle, however, the story shifts and nicely subverts expectations. Over the course of the next two books, which build on each other and are best read sequentially, the narrative never quite goes where you expect it to, in a good way. There are surprises here; even though Bach is clearly working from space opera/military SF/romance impulses, she never gets mired in easy shorthand that betrays her characters. Devi is a badass with a heart who learns her weaknesses and grows. The central romantic relationship is fully earned. And the main conundrum is a nuanced commentary on what sacrifices are acceptable when navigating the chasm between freedom and security.

  –Adrienne Martini

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: TIM PRATT

  The Last Weekend, Nick Mamatas (PS Publishing 978-1848637214, 20.00, 216pp, hc) February 2014. Cover by Pedro Marques. [Order from PS Publishing, Grosvenor House, 1 New Road, Hornsea, East Yorkshire HU18 1PG, England; .]

  Chimpanzee, Darin Bradley (Underland Press 978-1630230005, $18.95, 208pp, tp) September 2014.

  When I encounter a zombie novel these days, I tend to shamble in the other direction as fast as possible. It’s not that I don’t like the mindless undead, whether they’re fast, slow, viral, or supernatural – they’ve just become too common in recent years, so ubiquitous in games, cinema, comics, and literature that they form an undifferentiated horde, often of mediocre or worse quality. The right author can tempt me away from my no-more-zombies stance, though – Daryl Gregory did it a few years ago with Raising Stony Mayhall, and now Nick Mamatas has done it with The Last Weekend.