Locus, August 2014
Page 12
Narrator Vasilis ‘‘Billy’’ Kostopolis is the son of Greek immigrants, an aspiring writer with destructive taste in women and booze. Misadventures and bad life choices lead him from college in Youngstown OH to San Francisco, where he drinks and tries to write, carrying around a printout of his one published story, impressing no one. He drunkenly sleeps through the beginning of the end of the world: a zombie apocalypse, but one that only takes place within the borders of the continental United States. He’s awakened by soldiers bursting into his apartment demanding he recite the alphabet, and once he proves he’s not the living dead (at least, not the flesh-eating kind), a social worker fills him in: the dead have risen across the country, and chaos reigns. Local governments are doing their best to hold on, but things are dire.
Except, in San Francisco, it’s not that bad. The city famously lacks graveyards – almost all the cemeteries were relocated elsewhere long ago – and since these zombies are of the slowly shambling variety, the city’s hilly terrain keeps them from getting around too easily. The city is a character here, and Mamatas depicts it well – though I don’t think I’d sign up for The Last Weekend walking tour if one were offered.
Even with the advantages of San Francisco geography, plenty of people die in the initial uprising, and most of those who are left behind are a lot like Billy: outsiders, loners, and rugged (or ragged) individualists. Those with close families tend to die quickly, after all, spending too much time hoping Mom isn’t really a murderous monster and not enough time bashing her brains out.
Billy takes a job with the city, working as a driller: he’s given a portable power drill and a phone, and after that, he’s on call. If a survivor in the city sees a newly dead or dying person, be they family or neighbor or friend, Billy gets a call. His job is to drill a hole in the dead person’s brain before they can rise as a zombie – messy, imprecise, ugly work, which brings him into contact with the desperate, the grieving, and the deranged. This wouldn’t be a Mamatas novel without a revolutionary streak, and Billy falls in with a group of agitators and activists determined to figure out the cause of the zombie uprising, with various competing conspiracy theories, and the idea that there might be secrets locked away in the basement of City Hall. Billy can’t be called an activist himself – he just likes dangerous women and makes poor decisions when he’s drunk, which is usually – but he stumbles on revelations nonetheless.
Mamatas has always shown a deft hand at appropriating genre tropes and twisting them to his own unusual ends, from the ghosts of Northern Gothic, to the parallel worlds of Bullettime, to the manipulative hive-mind of Sensation. He’s also adept at literary mash-ups, having in the past combined the sensibilities of the Beat writers, Hunter S. Thompson, David Foster Wallace, and even Raymond Carver with supernatural elements, usually Lovecraftian. This time, his chosen literary inspiration is the misanthropic, alcoholic, autobiographical barfly writer – Charles Bukowski will leap immediately to mind, but John Fante’s novel of life in Los Angeles, Ask the Dust, is an obvious influence, too. Still, if the tagline ‘‘Like a zombie novel written by Bukowski’’ appeals to you, this book delivers everything that summation promises. If you want a story where resourceful heroes fight to save humankind in the face of the ravenous dead, and the human spirit triumphs, I hear good things about that Brad Pitt movie loosely inspired by Max Brooks’s World War Z. But if you’d prefer dark humor, a streak of philosophical hopelessness, disastrous romance, and a resigned shrug in the face of metaphysical horror, pour yourself a drink and pick up The Last Weekend instead.
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I said nice things in these pages a while back about Darin Bradley’s debut novel Noise, an ambitious book about a slow-motion apocalypse, with economic collapse triggering a breakdown of order in the United States, and young people trying to forge a new and brutal system of morality and pragmatism that would allow them to survive the aftermath. I mention that novel because his follow-up Chimpanzee is, while not a sequel in terms of plot and character, very much a sequel in terms of philosophy and worldview – the author describes Chimpanzee as the second in a ‘‘thematic cluster’’ of three books begun with Noise, to conclude with the forthcoming Totem.
The milieu of Chimpanzee is an American city in the midst of the ‘‘New Depression,’’ a near future of economic disaster with chronic unemployment and little in the way of hope or prospects. There hasn’t been a breakdown of governmental order like the one in Noise, though – in this case, the government is tightening its fist, using fear and violence to keep the citizenry in line. The ‘‘Homeland Renewal Project’’ looks, at first glance, like the Works Project Administration from the Great Depression, with citizens working on infrastructure projects… except those forced to work for Renewal are debtors or people who didn’t pay their parking tickets or taxes. They labor under the watchful eyes of armed guards, and their responsibilities include acting as ‘‘monitors’’ – spying on their fellow citizens in secret and reporting crimes and unpatriotic behavior, fostering an atmosphere of extreme social distrust. It’s a grim scene.
Narrator Benjamin Cade is (or was) a scholar, with advanced degrees in literature and literary theory, but when he lost his job, he couldn’t pay his student loans. As a result, he’s forced to work for Renewal… but things are even worse than that. One of the cleverest, and nastiest, extrapolations Bradley makes in this novel is the idea that one’s education can be repossessed if student loans aren’t paid off. As a result, Cade has to attend mandatory therapy, where his counselor uses drugs to gradually strip away everything Cade learned in his years of higher education: all his knowledge of literature, rhetoric, logic, semiotics, and propaganda, burying the knowledge behind potent mental blocks. Taking away his education inevitably damages some of his related memories, too, and since he met his wife Sireen in graduate school, the therapy impinges on his first memories of her, and the beginning of their relationship. (The refrain ‘‘it’s important to remember that I love my wife’’ takes on several different meanings as the book goes on.)
Cade feels his loss of status even more keenly because his wife still has her job as a math professor, and his best friend Dmitri still works at the college, too. They do their best to keep Cade’s spirits up, even as his sense of self erodes. In an attempt to fill his days and do something meaningful before his education dissipates, Cade starts teaching classes for free in the park, on rhetoric, and the manipulative qualities of language, and the slipperiness of meaning. He develops a following, with some calling him a new Socrates, a teacher for the people, and some of his students draw Cade into an underground barter and gift economy, frowned upon by the government, but rich in possibility, giving him some sense of purpose again.
The other major SFnal element here, beyond education repossession, is ‘‘chimping’’ – wearing special goggles that allow users to temporarily experience altered psychological and emotional states. Users can choose to experience paranoia, or OCD, or other disorders, and later, even experience the thought processes of other humans – couples can ‘‘chimp’’ the experiences of another couple that’s wildly in love, for example, inhabiting their mental state. A connection is gradually revealed between the technology that lets the government siphon off Cade’s memories and the process that lets users experience the memories and mindsets of others, and illicit, illegal chimping gives access to forbidden experiences and thought processes. Conspiracies swirl around Cade, with his bosses in Renewal, his students, associated revolutionaries, and even his loved ones working on their own projects, with Cade as a pawn or a linchpin in various plans, manipulated even as he struggles to hold on to his sense of self.
Bradley’s sophomore effort is just as ambitious as his debut, and his voice is more assured, his characters better delineated. Chimpanzee isn’t cheerful stuff, but there’s a revolutionary zeal, and a belief in the power of the mind to effect change in the world, that provides some light in this otherwise bleak dystopia. I’m excited to see what Totem b
rings.
–Tim Pratt
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LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: CAROLYN CUSHMAN
Dust and Light, Carol Berg
Shifting Shadows, Patricia Briggs
Girl Genius #13: Agatha Heterodyne and the Sleeping City, Phil & Kaja Foglio
Shattered, Kevin Hearne
Free Agent, J.C. Nelson
Carol Berg, Dust and Light (Roc 978-0-451-41724-4, $16.00, 445pp, tp) August 2014. Cover by Gene Mollica.
An artist-mage finds himself unexpectedly persecuted in this powerful, involving fantasy, set in a world where Pureblood mages are the privileged class. Lucian de Remini-Masson has faced trouble enough in his life, having unusual double talents, one of which had to be suppressed; then he disgraced himself at university by becoming involved with an Ordinary woman, and found himself stuck using his talent to draw identification portraits for the official Pureblood Registry; and his family was almost completely wiped out by Pureblood hating Harrowers. It soon starts to look like someone is specifically targeting him, though he has no idea why. He ends up in a lowly contract to do portraits of the dead for the coroner and begins to uncover evidence of high crimes that somehow connect to him. This is a world without police and detectives, but Lucian and his coroner-master may be about to invent the art of investigation – if they don’t end up dead first.
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Patricia Briggs, Shifting Shadows (Ace 978-0-425-26500-0, $26.95, 450pp, hc) September 2014. Cover by Daniel Dos Santos.
Fans of Briggs’s urban fantasy series set in the world of Mercy Thompson won’t want to miss this collection of ten stories and a couple of novel ‘‘outtakes.’’ Four new stories combine with six others previously published, including ‘‘Alpha and Omega’’, the novella that launched the eponymous spin-off featuring werewolves Charles and Anna. Of the new stories, the standout for fans will be novella ‘‘Silver’’, a dark medieval fairy tale which tells how Bran and Samuel became werewolves, and how Samuel met the fae Ariana – a romance that continues in the novel Silver Borne. ‘‘Roses in Winter’’ is a touching tale of the aged and rather morbid werewolf, who finds himself unexpectedly interested in a girl child, the youngest person ever to be turned were. ‘‘Redemption’’ is a funny story about the rough-edged British werewolf Ben, whose behavior at work draws unwanted attention for all the wrong reasons. Finally, ‘‘Hollow’’ is an entertaining ghost story with a bit of romance, in which Mercy Thompson tries to find out why a wealthy recluse is being haunted. Briggs adds chatty notes on how the stories came to be written, and their place in the series. All together, it’s a highly entertaining read, and though most likely to interest fans of the series, most of the stories standalone enough to be of interest to urban fantasy fans in general.
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Phil & Kaja Foglio, Girl Genius #13: Agatha Heterodyne and the Sleeping City (Airship Entertainment 978-1-89-0856-59-5, $25.00, 159pp, tp) June 2014. Cover by Phil Foglio & Cheyenne Wright.
The steampunk adventures of Agatha Heterodyne continue in this 13th graphic novel in the series, which finds Agatha not only out of the castle and recognized as the Heterodyne heir, but out of Mechanicsburg itself. However, she quickly finds herself stuck in a fortress belonging to the troublesome Sturmvoraus family, and the bulk of this book involves her efforts to escape. Meanwhile, something has left the Heterodynes’ stronghold of Mechanicsburg doing a good imitation of Sleeping Beauty’s castle, only the sleeping beauty isn’t Agatha. On the fringes, Agatha’s would-be boyfriend Gilgamesh Wulfenbach is going crazy trying to find her – literally crazy. As noted in previous volumes, the page-by-page pacing is great, with a joke or dramatic development on every page, or maybe both, with plenty of punch provided by Phil’s distinctive if somewhat cartoonish art (not to everyone’s taste, admittedly) and Cheyenne Wright’s delightfully dramatic coloring. Unfortunately, the overall pacing is snail slow (snails being a popular Mechanicsburg dish). It’s taking forever for Agatha to secure her position, but its a great ride for those who can savor the little jokes along the way.
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Kevin Hearne, Shattered (Del Rey 978-0-345-54848-1, $26.00, 328pp, hc) June 2014. Cover by Gene Mollica.
Druid Atticus O’Sullivan faces a new – or rather, very old – challenge in this seventh novel in the Iron Druid Chronicles. There’s no way to discuss this without spoilers for earlier novels in the series: when the series started, Atticus was the only Druid on Earth, until he trained his apprentice Granuaile, finally a full Druid herself. Now Atticus has found his old Archdruid, frozen in time for thousands of years and totally unprepared for the modern world. So Atticus is now the teacher to the crusty old master who made his own training hell, a new development that makes this more of a standalone than some volumes in the series. That doesn’t mean a lack of action – the Norse gods Hel and Loki continue to plot the end of the world, someone’s seriously out to get Atticus, and Granuaile’s archaeologist father has uncovered something supernatural – and very, very dangerous. And of course there are the hounds to keep things down to earth with their focus on sausage…. As usual, it’s good fun, full of action and banter, with all sorts of gods from different pantheons dropping in to offer assistance or a little advice, and new supernatural creatures – even a group of yeti lending a hand as things get wild.
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J.C. Nelson, Free Agent (Ace 978-0-425-27267-1, $7.99, 294pp, pb) August 2014. Cover by Tony Mauro.
Magic mirrors are a dominant feature in this entertaining urban fantasy novel, the first in a series set in a universe where our normal world is a crossroad for many worlds, and magic has a way of leaking through. Marissa Lock’s services were ‘‘sold’’ when she was a teen to the Fairy Godfather Grimm in exchange for a miracle for her dying sister. Now Marissa works as one of Grimm’s agents, helping make wishes come true. Things go wrong when she tries to set up a princess and prince for their happily ever after, and what starts as a simple magical muddle just keeps getting worse until a war between the Fae and humanity looks inevitable. Grimm’s crew may specialize in wishes, but they end up acting more like secret agents, and Jess has a hard-boiled attitude that helps keep things exciting even as the accumulation of fairytale elements approaches the amusingly absurd. It’s a fun premise for a new series, and a very promising first novel.
–Carolyn Cushman
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MAGAZINES RECEIVED: JUNE
Adventure Tales–John Betancourt, ed. No. 7, Summer 2014, $12.50, irregular but one or two times a year, 130pp, 17.5 x 25.5 cm. Pulp magazine with reprinted short stories and poetry from Fritz Leiber, Jr., Robert E. Howard, Nelson S. Bond, Rafael Sabatini, and others. This issue features Mack Reynolds and includes six of his stories and two essays. Cover by Alexander Leydenfrost. Subscriptions: $35.00 (US mailing addresses only) for four issues to Wildside Press, LLC, 9710 Traville Gateway Dr., #234, Rockville MD 20850; website:
Analog Science Fiction and Fact–Trevor Quachri, ed. Vol. 134, No. 9, September 2014, $4.99, 10 times a year, 112pp, 15 x 22 cm. Novella by Edward M. Lerner; novelettes by Mark Niemann-Ross and James C. Glass; short stories by Jacob A. Boyd, Lavie Tidhar, Naomi Kritzer, and Alec Austin & Marissa Lingen; a science fact by Richard A. Lovett; etc. Cover by Tomislav Tikulin.
The Cascadia Subduction Zone–Lew Gilchrist, et al., eds. Vol. 4, No. 3, July 2014, $5.00 print/$3.00 pdf, quarterly, 24pp, 20½ x 28 cm. Literary magazine with essays, poetry, and reviews. In this issue, Mark Rich looks at the life and poetry of Terry A. Garey, there are poems by Terry A. Garey, a spotlight on artist Mark Rich, and reviews. Cover by Mark Rich. Subscription: $16.00 print/$10.00 pdf for four issues to Aqueduct Press, PO Box 95787, Seattle WA 98145-2787 (WA state residents add 9.5% sales tax); website:
Galaxy’s Edge–Mike Resnick, ed. No. 9, July 2014, $6.99 for print or $3.99 for a digital download from Amazon.com or B&N.com/$3.99 for a digital download or free online dir
ectly from
Science Fiction Studies–Arthur B. Evans, et al., eds. Vol. 41 No. 2, Whole #123, July 2014, $25.00, three times a year, 223pp, 15 x 23 cm. Academic journal. This issue leads off with transcripts of the three speeches on SF media scholarship which were given at the 2013 SFS Symposium in Riverside CA by Mark Bould, Vivian Sobchack, and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay; followed by Amy J. Ransom’s look at Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s Le Dernier Homme [The Last Man] as the first use of the ‘‘last man’’ trope in SF and its subsequent influence; Justin Prystash’s consideration of how notions of feminism influenced and shaped evolutionary theory and far-future world-building in Victorian speculative fiction; Adam Glaz’s use of Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice and linguistic theory to argue against the possibility of a non-sentient entity, like Rorschach from Peter Watts’s Blindsight, being able to fake linguistic communication; James J. Pulizzi’s examination of Joseph McElroy’s experimental novel Plus, in which McElroy tries to imagine post-human communication where the brain communicates without the middleman of the body and its entire sensory array; and Jacob Emery’s consideration of randomness, determinism, and individualism, both in Western fiction and in the clone fiction of Vladimir Sorokin. Subscription: $30.00 digital/$40.00 print + digital per year for US individuals (add $15.00 outside North America for print; see their website for institutional rates), or free with a membership in the Science Fiction Research Association, to SF-TH Inc., c/o Arthur B. Evans, EC 203, De Pauw University, Greencastle IN 46135-0037.