Locus, April 2013

by Locus Publications

  I’ve made a point in this review of not totting up the number of SF vs. fantasy stories, since my main point has been that it is how these stories are shaped rather than their thematic content that makes them interesting. But for those worried about it, there is a fair amount of solid SF represented here – what some might call the good old-fashioned stuff, at least in terms of setting and theme. In addition to the McAuley, Reed, and Liu stories, Strahan has included a rather waggish tale by Adam Roberts, ‘‘What did Tessimond Tell You?’’, in which a group of potential Nobel Prize winners desert their team after talking with an obscure physicist; it reminded me of nothing so much as Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘‘White Hart’’ tales. The inhabited outer solar system, which seems to be the preferred setting of whatever is left of New Space Opera, features in Gwyneth Jones’s ‘‘Bricks, Sticks, Straw’’, with its pointed echoes of the Three Little Pigs in the face of a solar storm which has disrupted communications; and in Genevieve Valentine’s ‘‘A Bead of Jasper, Four Small Stones’’, which, like the Liu story, takes place after the death of Earth. The title of Aliette de Bodard’s ‘‘Immersion’’ refers to a kind of VR cloaking technology which would be far from original, except for the clever way de Bodard builds a plot around it, and much the same might be said of the space-colony setting of Linda Nagata’s ‘‘Nahiku West’’, which is essentially one of those ingenious murder mysteries, clearly derived from its SF elements, which we rarely see these days. None of these are exactly groundbreaking SF, but sometimes a good story can aim for celebration rather than innovation.

  SHORT TAKE

  Most SF scholars and historians, and a good many fans, are aware that the formative classics of criticism in the field include such titles as Damon Knight’s In Search of Wonder and James Blish’s The Issue at Hand volumes, which were kept in print by Advent for so long that they still regularly show up on dealers’ tables at cons. What has been harder to find are the equally formative reviews which appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly in the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, by a later generation of writer-critics, prominently including Joanna Russ and Algis Budrys. A generous selection of Russ’s reviews appeared a few years ago from Liverpool University Press in The Country You Have Never Seen, and way back in 1985 Southern Illinois University Press issued Benchmarks, collecting Budrys’s reviews from Galaxy from 1965-1971, but until now his more cantankerous reviews for F&SF (really more personal essays, since sometimes he barely gets around to mentioning the book ostensibly being reviewed) have been available only to those able to track down the original issues. They were supposed to be collected as a followup to Benchmarks, but SIU Press discontinued its line of SF criticism before that could happen. Now, thanks to the efforts of David Langford and Greg Pickersgill, at least the first seven years of these columns are available, with a second volume covering the later years promised.

  It is, as might be expected, something of a gold mine and something of a time capsule. The very first sentence of the very first review here provides a good example of the sort of provocative off-handed insight which characterized Budrys’s critical style: he describes Lovecraft as ‘‘a man endowed with proofs that he was undesirable.’’ The book is full of such quotable nuggets, as well as some reviews of by now historical importance. Reviewing The Shadow of the Torturer, he’s a bit cautious, noting that Wolfe is asking a lot of readers by expecting them to follow him through a quarter million words for an undisclosed payoff, but concluding, ‘‘I think he deserves that much trust, because I think he’ll repay it.’’ By The Claw of the Conciliator, Budrys is saying, ‘‘As a piece of literature, this work is simply overwhelming.’’ As a critic, he’s not ashamed to express awe, and part of the pleasure here is seeing his take on earlier works by M. John Harrison, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Jr., or George R.R. Martin (‘‘has the voice of a poet and a mind like a steel trap,’’ way back in 1978). Nor is he ashamed to be self-indulgent: he cheerfully reviews his own books, and his review of the first edition of The Science Fiction Encyclopedia is largely taken up with quibbles about his own entry by John Clute. What is of particular interest to readers such as myself is that Budrys was keenly interested in critical and reference books about SF and in retrospective author collections, so we get a generous sampling of his views on everything from the early writing careers of John W. Campbell, Lester del Rey, Edmond Hamilton, Cordwainer Smith, and others, to various art books to critical books by Knight, Malzberg, and the massive, five-volume Survey of Science Fiction Literature from Salem Press. Sometimes Budrys is just stunningly brilliant, and sometimes his judgments seem eccentric enough to make you blink. Who else would have suggested that Stanislaw Lem’s work was prefigured by Stanton Coblentz? (For that matter, how many of us know enough to challenge it?) The index is unfortunately a bit spotty (Clute, Lem, and Coblentz aren’t there), but the book is a significant step forward in restoring the critical history of SF, and it feels like a gift.

  –Gary K. Wolfe

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: FAREN MILLER

  The Salt God’s Daughter, Ilie Ruby (Soft Skull 978-1-61902-002-3, $25.00, 338pp, hc) September 2012. [Order from Soft Skull Press, 1919 Fifth St., Berkeley CA 94710; ].

  Thunder Road, Chadwick Ginther (Raven Stone 978-0-88801-400-9, C$16.00, 390pp, tp) September 2012. [Order from Turnstone Press/Ravenstone, Artspace Building, 206-100 Arthur Street, Winnipeg MB R3B 1H3, Canada; ].

  The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker (Harper/HarperCollins 978-0-06-211083-1, $27.99, 486pp, hc) May 2013.

  SHORT TAKE

  Grail of the Summer Stars, Freda Warrington (Tor 978-0-765-31871-8, $27.99, 384pp, hc) April 2013.

  The February Locus has been out for some time – its Recommended Lists for 2012 essentially set in stone – but I’m still finding new personal favorites as books continue to trickle in from the small presses. I’ll open with two of these, each a hearty mix of old gods with a vivid sense of place, though their settings vary wildly in both temperature and tone: Southern California (much of it decades ago) for Ruby; a modern but weirdly haunted Northern Canada for Ginther.

  The Salt God’s Daughter opens with a Prologue by that daughter, Naida, in 2001. We learn about the physical quirk (webbed toes on her left foot) that leads school bullies to call her ‘‘the Frog Witch,’’ and the partial relief she gets from bouts of solo swimming in the Pacific Ocean near her home:

  There was no water that was too rough or frigid. I could swim in nighttime storms beyond the breakwaters, and had dozens of times that my mother did not know about, letting my fingers sift through the tips of the feathered sea grass near the oil rigs as barracuda darted around my legs in figure eights, and a swarm of fish swam in silvery bubbles as a sea lion crossed, the slip of its coat brushing against my arms….

  Naida feels no sense of supernatural privilege, only rage at both the bullies and the apparently human scumbag who seduced her mother and left her with a child to raise. Mother (Ruthie) now gets a bit of comfort by feeding creatures from the ocean where she never learned to swim. We see her ‘‘standing on the sand below [the porch], her nightgown billowing under the hem of a shiny blue raincoat as she doled out fish for the three sea lions that crowded around her, filling her loneliness.’’

  When Book One begins, it’s 1972, near the starting point of Ruthie’s memories of an almost feral childhood with her sister Dolly. The girls grow up half-wild as their alcoholic, obsessive mother shuttles them between the California desert and the coast. Left to their own devices for days at a time, they run barefoot, developing calluses that could ‘‘withstand the hot desert sand, or dash over a highway of broken glass, wherever we’d been dropped.’’ At rest, they ‘‘talked of Cool Whip and ice cream, of warm apple crisp and salty Fritos. We dreamed of flying.’’ Back in their wandering mom’s Ford Country Squire station wagon, they speed along ‘‘shout[ing] out the words to James Tayl
or ballads,’’ or settle down to watch ‘‘her soap opera, General Hospital,’’ on a portable TV, followed by ‘‘folk songs and Hebrew prayers’’ – unless she’s too busy drinking herself into a stupor, headed for an early death.

  Amid the specific details of wayward youth in 20th-century Southern California, there’s a quirky mix of legends, beliefs, and magics. Aside from Judaism, mother had a private religion of moon phases marked in yearly weather almanacs. Soon after a coastal Home for Girls takes in the orphaned sisters, it becomes what they call ‘‘Wild Acres,’’ more of an old folks’ home where their new neighbors offer up memories and advice, Scottish lore of selkies, and (in time) some Jewish rites of passage. As Ruthie teeters on the brink of maturity in 1988, she meets a curiously uncanny girl who leads a gang of children – ‘‘Not quite beach rats, not quite city slickers’’ – around the piers and sells stories to anyone who’ll have them. One tale, where an ocean creature ‘‘peeled off his magic skin and came onto land, becoming a man,’’ reminds her of selkies but also makes her wonder ‘‘if this was an ocean version of an urban myth … passed on by word of mouth.’’ She might have looked closer to home.

  On New Year’s Eve, 1987, she and Dolly (who calls herself ‘‘the blasphemous sister,’’ and flits from man to man) meet the scruffy Scottish sailor Graham, in a setting right for the times: ‘‘In the flicker of the disco ball, his lips were pewter, his skin a placid dove gray. Shifting his weight, he seemed the slightest bit nervous, which I appreciated.’’ It’s the more withdrawn Ruthie who falls for him, even if this occasional seer has already glimpsed how their affair will likely end.

  Finally we’re back with Naida, result of that liaison, reporting on a childhood where a casual acceptance of wonders (like breathing underwater) comes up against the scoffing of adults, yields to uncertainty, but never fully vanishes. In their own ways, both Ruthie and her own messed-up mother lived in a numinous world of gods, monsters and raw emotions, where birdsong or the pulse of ocean waves works subtle magics, and even something as common as flowering bougainvillea vines can evoke passion – love and lust alike.

  While some fantasies of overlapping realities only seem to come alive once they’ve left Earth for other realms, The Salt God’s Daughter (Ilie Ruby’s second novel, after The Language of Trees) turns a highly observant eye on our own world and finds the magic here, close enough to trip over at any random moment.

  •

  In the Prologue of his 2012 debut Thunder Road, first of a trilogy, Chadwick Ginther brings an elemental figure from old Norse folklore blazing into this world. Wham! The Patch – far-northern Canadian oil sands being dug up by ragtag, well-paid crews of men – explodes and burns. Stunned but already starting to mourn lost co-workers and friends, Ted Callan sees something emerge from the fires:

  It was too big to be real. Shaped like a man, but the height of a building, it stepped out of the inferno grinning like the devil himself. Ted dropped his phone as the creature tore a length of metal from the ground and held it aloft, brandishing it like a club. The challenge the creature bellowed at the sky somehow cut through Ted’s deafness, reaching some primal part of him…. He wanted to scream, but no human cry could scare away what towered over the wreckage.

  Smaller, hunched entities follow it out, then retreat into the flames. ‘‘Rattling its rough sabre in the air, the giant opened its mouth to roar the deep belly-laugh of a Bond villain’’ – and looks Ted right in the eye.

  Already feeling rootless after a tough divorce, the 40-something Ted proceeds to quit his job at the Patch with no idea where to go next. Just moving along the highway in a truck with the remnants of his possessions, he picks up Tilda, a much younger female hitchhiker who turns out to come from ‘‘a long tradition of single moms. You know, the whole maiden, mother crone thing.’’ After giving some further background info, she reads his fortune (more ambiguous than most), then lapses into silence, smoking his cigarettes.

  Tilda’s no longer with him when he pulls into a crummy motor inn on the outskirts of Alberta and heads for bed, only to be accosted by some short, beardy guys in army jackets, first seen at a nearby bar. And then things get seriously strange. One of them binds him in a chain that sends out bolts of electricity, declaring (in a gravelly, accented voice) ‘‘This chain was made of a cat’s footfalls and the roots of a mountain; from the breath of fish and the beards of women. You cannot break Gleipnir.’’ They shave Ted’s entire body, then start cutting him till he blacks out. A cleaning lady’s screams wake him the next morning, feeling like he had ‘‘the mother of all hangovers’’ until he sees all the blood, and what it covers: dozens of arcane symbols, tattoos that have been carved not inked. He soon discovers the tattoos have granted him the powers of the gods.

  He’ll have to fight his way to freedom, first from a pair of bouncers and then the cops, before he can get back on the road and try to figure out what’s been done to him. Searching the Internet provides some info about Norse gods and folklore, but other voices clamor in his head (accompanied by ravens’ cries). Useful answers only come when someone else from last night’s bar suddenly manifests in his truck. Smiler, Trickster, adept in any shape and form, he’s known to the Norse as Loki, to the natives here as the devious Raven God. Unlike the fire giant, or the dwarves who transformed an unwilling Ted with their knives, this snide wise-guy thoroughly knows his way around humans and modern times. At one point, his voice takes on ‘‘a croaky, Muppet-like quality’’ to channel Yoda – perfectly aware that young Ted had hated Star Wars, though his brother bought into it completely.

  The action moves north again, as if magnetically pulled back toward that giant with its plans to end the world in a new Ragnarok. Along the way, Ted starts talking about another media memory: Thor comic books. Loki remarks, ‘‘I enjoy seeing them portray a drunken, stupid lout as a bucket-wearing, baby-faced blond paragon of virtue. Always good for a laugh, how much they got wrong.’’ Ted brushes this aside to proclaim, ‘‘I didn’t ask for this power, and I don’t want it. But if I’m the one riding the crazy train, maybe I should use them to do some good?’’ Further sarcasm from the Smiler provokes another outburst: ‘‘I’m not talking about running around in my underpants and red pirate boots. I’m talking about doing something real. Joining the cops or the fire department. Fuck, I could end droughts, bring water to deserts.’’ Outsize ambition almost seems to make sense in territory where street signs in even the smallest towns proclaim their links to old gods like Thor and Odin.

  Loki’s skepticism isn’t the only thing that keeps this tale from becoming just another fast-paced, macho wish-fulfillment fantasy. Women also play a role. Up north, Ted manages to track down Tilda, meet her family (who seem to be two previous generations of self-sufficient gals, down-to-earth despite roots that may reach back as far as Loki’s), and get deflected onto a more devious type of quest that must precede any clash with wolves and giants.

  Thunder Road offers some resolutions, but nothing final. If Ted is ever going to relax back into normal life, giving up superpowers and the pressing tasks that come with them, it won’t happen till the end of Volume Three.

  One final note on this book and The Salt God’s Daughter: despite obvious differences in setting, mythic background and tone, both expose ancient powers to human concerns like the need for oil (whether it’s Pacific derricks or mining far northern sands), and both give major roles to women in the full cycle from maiden and mother to crone, touched with some kind of magic – even if Naida’s booze-swilling, superstitious grandma doesn’t fit standard definitions of a hag. In both, reality jostles with the supernatural, and sometimes the arcane can seem remarkably at ease on a changed planet. Without a trace of antagonistic empires, vast armies, or the schemes of eldritch sorcery, Ruby and Ginther write fantasy that resonates the deepest when it strikes close to home.

  •

  A more complex mixture of characters, voices and cultures come together in the jumble of ethnic neighborho
ods of late-19th-/early-20th-century New York City in Helene Wecker’s first novel, The Golem and the Jinni. Immigrants and exiles from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and many other regions have set up private enclaves that might lie just a few streets apart, yet feel like different worlds, each with its own baggage of religion, myth, ritual, language, and memories. The sprawling cities in tales of Arabian Nights aren’t half as polyglot or wildly varied as this place where Polish rabbis, Syrian Christian smiths, and many others – believers and apostates – cling to their own territories, while a few restless types set out into the unknown.

  Neither of the title figures originated here, neither is human (appearances can be deceptive), and both arrive essentially by accident. Aside from that, they don’t have much in common, and they won’t even meet until at least a third of the way into the book. Unlike a more typical, deliberately focused romance where awkward early encounters soon blossom into love – tragic, absurd, or simply passionate – this work is free to wander. And Wecker pulls it off in grand style, wherever she chooses to go.

  Chava the golem was created back in Poland, from clay and Kabbalistic magics, as the paid companion for an unpleasant man who wants to try his luck in the New World but knows himself well enough to realize he’ll never find a willing female partner. After he dies en route, she’s left to her own devices – far more humanoid, intelligent, and curious about the world than most golems, yet scarcely prepared for what lies ahead. Only a combination of strength and sheer stubbornness even gets her ashore. Here’s how she first appears to a random witness: ‘‘She was soaking wet. She wore a man’s woolen jacket and a brown dress that clung immodestly to her body…. Most astonishing was the thick, brackish mud that covered her skirt and shoes.’’ When he asks if she’s been swimming, she gives him a strange smile and answers, ‘‘No… I walked.’’