In the San Francisco node of this complex universe, which Kadrey devotes several short chapters to explaining, we begin to meet some protagonists: funny foulmouthed Spyder Lee, a blockhead Loki minus Loki nous who has survived decades of San Francisco counter-culture, partly in the company of funny foulmouthed gay Lulu Garou, who now jointly run a tattooing and piercing parlour (throughout Butcher Bird, Kadrey unveils really quite a few categories of semi-voluntary bloodletting); and the blind (but very seeing) Alizarin Katya Ryur, aka Blind Shrike, aka Butcher Bird, who saves Spyder in a back alley after a demon has attacked him, and who tells him that the demon has become visible—along with all the other denizens and artifacts of the other worlds—because the commands or releases embedded in the labyrinthine curlicues of icon and rune of the tattoos that cover his body have finally been recognized. From now on, no longer a simpleminded tattooed effigy stitched over the real, Spyder will see the world.
Back in the bar he'd just been slung out of, Spyder does now see the real Lulu for the first time. She is a shambles of evisceration. Most of her body parts have been taken by the Black Clerks who monitor interworlds transactions (the plot is thickening fast) and who had earlier solved her drug addiction problems and who were taking bits of her, bit by bit, in payment. It is more or less at this point—about forty pages into Butcher Bird—that a conversation takes place between Spyder and Butcher Bird, who have now slept together and stuff, and for a moment the novel shuts up and goes deep:
"My head is spinning” [he tells her]. “I have this magic juju sight and I've seen such demented shit in the last twenty-four hour. I wouldn't mind being blind for a while."
"It's not really magic sight, you know,” Shrike said.
"The what was it?"
"Memory,” she replied ... “Everything you're seeing now you've seen all your life only you've chosen to forget it an instant later."
Unfortunately Kadrey only allows himself to give us this preliminary hint of a central intuition about contemporary planetary Horror—that Horror is what happens to us when amnesia fails: see W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2001); for related material see Jonathan Lethem's Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology on the Subject of Memory Loss (2000)—and starts his plot ball rolling, or, rather, ricocheting: reading Butcher Bird is like being caught in a pinball machine.
Spyder and Butcher Bird are soon blackmailed into going to Hell in search of the Book of True Names which contains the Story of Everything which is desired by the evil ... etc. On the way through the gnarls and abysses of the world made visible, attacked by all sorts of monsters but simultaneously transfixed by living zeppelins and other steampunk epiphanies, they acquire some plot coupons and a few Seven Samurai type companions, one of whom turns out to be the Devil himself, but really he's kind of cute, in a faux-Bryonic Look No Limp! sort of way, and kind of really on their side. Good fathers and bad fathers attain closure through the actions of our protagonists, and this feels good. Spyder blindfolds himself to enter Hell and save Butcher Bird, but any hint of Orphic depths is forgotten, like almost everything else in the book as soon as it's mentioned, and it turns out that there's an exit clause, he doesn't have to keep the blindfold on, he and so baps and boings and kills and tergiversates and wins all or enough, and Hell falls (it turns out this is OK with Look No Limp!), and so on.
Kadrey is capable of great flights of energy, and does set-pieces at the drop of a hat, and his visual imagination is cunning and gonzo; and if he had been able to manage all these gifts within the demands a narrative crescendo (and maybe with a few more echoes of genuinely dark material welling up from the memories we blank out of the world which really exists), he could have written a classic tale, one which haunts us where we don't want to look. As it is, his sense of the world within us, the world of true sight when amnesia is ripped away, is hilariously free of consequence, pure ofshornaya zona. The most one can say about Butcher Bird is that it was fun while we lasted.
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Sides
Peter Straub
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For reasons of decorum—the book is dedicated to me—I can't unpack all I feel about Peter Straub's Sides, a volume which assembles most of the introductions and afterwards and essays he's written for twenty years or more, plus one complex metafiction; but because I'm not actually referred to in the text itself—and because none of the issues we've talked about and done panels about together over the years are directly addressed here—maybe it's possible to say a few words.
Straub can be too muscular for the books he introduces—'Are You Loathsome Tonight?’ rather burns poor Poppy Z. Brite to the ground—and he can over-praise on occasion, slightly shoutingly. But his advocacy of tales like Graham Joyce's Leningrad Nights, or Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives, or Lawrence Block's Scudder novels, or his close friend Stephen King's On Writing, or H.G. Wells's Island of Doctor Moreau, are genuinely magisterial, stunning demonstrations of applied intelligence: a rare and thrilling body English of the committal of high intelligence to a task.
Other pieces: ‘The Fantasy of Everyday Life’ is an address given a few years ago at the International Conference for the Arts of the Fantastic in Florida; sounded fine, reads better, like the confession of a writer who—as he says of Charles Dickens—is “so organized so as to require the process of putting words on paper for the sake of survival.” ‘Mom’ is about a range of family matters, but climaxes on her Alzheimer's; as the son of a father who himself died of Alzheimer's, I could not lift my eyes from these pages as they opened to some of the amnesias I had wrapped around myself. I know I could not have written a similar piece. Enough to read it.
Sides ends with a hundred page section called ‘A Proud and Lonely Voice from the Back of the Room: The Collected Observations of Putney Tyson Ridge, PhD'. These ‘observations'—written by an imaginary critic Straub has created as a kind of doppelganger—are couched as a series of derogatory comments on each of Straub's books, in chronological order both of their composition and (significantly) and of their composition by Ridge (or PTR). At first glance, it is an hilarious joke, an extremely clever play on Charles Kinbote's ultimately deadly infatuation and consumption of John Shade in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962). Straub has exactly captured Kinbote's tone in his rendering of PTR's uncontrollable jealousy, his envious condescensions, his delusional sense that he has shaped Straub's career and given him his best ideas, his constant and interminable stays in the various homes the Straubs have occupied over the years, his utter obliviousness as to the effect he has on others, his stale and furtive sexuality. All this is, of course, fiction: but it is also, of course, something else. PTR is loathsome, but sometimes he calls the shot. Sometimes he gets Straub where it must have hurt Straub to get himself that way. (Which is of course a defence. [Which is of course a confession that a defence is needed.])
It is also a commentary on critics, even a dedicated one.
Copyright © 2007 John Clute
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[Back to Table of Contents]
CHARLES STROSS—Talks About His Work to Kevin Stone
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REVIEW by Kevin Stone
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Atrocity Archive
Charles Stross
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One of the key traits of an enduring author is the skill to easily interchange writing styles, and to not limit themselves to one voice for their whole career. Gene Wolfe is one of the masters at this, able to seamlessly adapt to any style depending on what he feels is the natural angle to tell his wonderful stories. While being compared to Wolfe is a tough challenge for any author, in just a handful of novels Charles Stross has proven that his literary prowess is up there with the best. In Singularity Sky, Stross produced epic sf on a sweeping scale; in Glasshouse, he recorded a masterful analysis of social behaviour; and in the Laundry novels he has used two contrasting styles of the spy thriller to kick-start a new series—one
which will immediately appeal to fans of Lovecraftian horror and conspiracy fiction.
The Laundry novels are amongst Stross's earlier works, only now seeing UK publication—the first being The Atrocity Archives. In The Atrocity Archives, every conspiracy theory you may have heard is likely to be a reality, all secretly covered up a by the governmental IT department that gives its name to the series. Tucked away behind the usual political wranglings within the department is computing genius and demonologist Bob Howard, who has been recruited as an unwilling field operative and sent off to fight for Queen and country against an energy consuming Elder God and its army of extra-dimensional Nazis, who have exploited a mathematical anomaly to enter our reality.
As superbly outlandish as all this seems, the actual beauty of the book comes from the science fiction elements. The Laundry is defended and supported through a variety of technologies and arcane mathematical equations—including the implementation of magical wards in computer firewalls and basilisk weapons made from the hands of corpses. Vivid and exotic locations with carefully constructed characters serve to enhance (and often ground) this surreal combination of old school thriller and genuinely creepy horror.
Following on from the main novel is a short piece set in Milton Keynes, where Bob has to protect the identity of his secret department from forces desperate to bring it to its knees by way of concrete cows and traffic cameras. While tame in comparison to its earth-devouring precursor, it delivers a healthy injection of black humour.
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REVIEW by Kevin Stone
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The Jennifer Morgue
Charles Stross
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If Atrocity Archives is old school, then The Jennifer Morgue brings the series forward into the vein of more traditional thrillers—another testament to Stross's extensive research into the genre and the diversity of his writing repertoire. The Jennifer Morgue thrusts reluctant hero Bob into a disturbing plot by a powerful billionaire to exploit the secrets of Deep Ones and Cthonians. This time Bob's help doesn't just come from his own Government—this global threat drags The Black Chamber (the Laundry's American counterpart) into the equation, with Bob becoming psychically linked with one of its operatives.
The Jennifer Morgue is fast moving, much more action-orientated than The Atrocity Archives—and whilst the technologies inherent in the Laundry series are still present, they appear as 007-esque gadgets that bail Bob out in his hour(s) of need. Not only is this another gripping spy novel set in a gorgeous locale, Stross also gives the reader the chance to sleuth the conspiracy as it unfolds, leaving a variety of strands to untangle throughout, until he eventually brings them together piece by piece.
It's clear that Stross is a big fan of the classic super-sleuth tale in all its forms, and has used founding styles to construct the Laundry series, whilst maintaining all of the wit and intelligent ideas which have established him as one of the leading players in contemporary sf.
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INTERVIEW by Kevin Stone
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You have some of the most inventive ideas in modern sf. How do you manage to pack so many ideas into one novel?
The problem with ideas is that they are actually easy—I have more ideas than I have space to write them down. What normally happens is that I keep an open mind; not too open, but enough to read voraciously all over the place. Subscriptions to New Scientist and Scientific American help. I keep banging concepts together until I come up with something new; you can usually create new ideas by looking at something familiar and turning it inside out.
'The Atrocity Archives’ focuses much more heavily on the science and technology behind the metaphysical than ‘The Jennifer Morgue'. What were your reasons for changing?
The Atrocity Archives was aimed at Len Deighton, and for The Jennifer Morgue I decided I wanted to go for the Bond canon. Now, I would make a case that Deighton is the ultimate spy-nerd: his early books were very heavy on the nuts and bolts when compared to the traditional mainstream of British spy thrillers. Fleming is a sharply contrasting figure; a much lighter and more adventurous writer. Also, he tends not to question the establishment. Bond is there, he works for the relevant agency, and while the gadgets and exotic locations are visible in the foreground, there's little depth—little interrogation of why he's sent on the specific missions he goes on, or of the departmental politics behind them. In The Jennifer Morgue I was trying explicitly to recreate a Bond experience, and it seemed to me that slowing down to look at the gnarly underbelly of the Laundry was absolutely incompatible with the Bond style.
Was it difficult to switch from the darker and more atmospheric style of ‘The Atrocity Archives’ to the faster, sexier style of ‘The Jennifer Morgue'?
It was a bit of a wild ride, but by that time I already had a pretty good grip on Bob's personality—and the rest of the material just revolves around him. To some extent it's pure sitcom: we have a well-defined sandal-wearing Slashdot-reading computer geek who's fallen into spy land and can't get out, and who is being pursued by monsters from another dimension. Changing the scenery isn't hard; the hard bit is remembering to distinguish between key elements of the fictional universe (which might show up in other stories) and those which are part of the current set design.
Would you say that the Laundry series works as a tribute to these writers, as well as Lovecraft?
Yes, to a large extent. If I was to do a pitch for where I see the series going, there is an overall story arc, but they will also be a series of books which are individually homogenous to different authors of thrillers. I've done Len Deighton and I've done Ian Fleming—and I should leave you guessing who's next—but I have already figured out my targets for the next two books
At what age did you first discover Lovecraft?
Probably my twenties—although I'd read a lot things influenced by him without knowing what it was. Lovecraft is a very interesting writer because of what he put his finger on. We talk a lot in sf about the ‘sense of wonder'; Lovecraftian horror is its converse. It's the sense of horror or the insignificance of humanity when confronted with beings of a larger scale. I think we can characterise him as one of the most influential sf writers of his period, and not given enough press on that basis.
It felt like you'd toned the humour down for ‘Glasshouse'. Does this mark a change?
I think Glasshouse has a lot of dry wit and referential stuff in it, but it wasn't written as a humorous novel—it was written more as a novel of suspense and as an exploration of some rather unpleasant experiments in applied psychology, like the Stanford Prison Study by Philip Zimbardo and The Milgram Experiment on obedience to authority. With a lot of the other stuff, it's funny because the real world is funny. There's really strange things happening all around us all of the time, and I think that if sf doesn't really reflect this, if it's sort of po-faced and humourless, then in some ways it's less believable than if there's strange stuff going on. Some of my work is intended to be humorous; the Laundry novels are humorous horror if you like—black humour laughing in the face of horror. I think that it would be reasonable to say that my next sf novel after Glasshouse (Halting States, Orbit, 2008) is relatively serious.
Can you give us any details about that?
Halting States is a near future crime novel about a crime that doesn't yet exist in the hothouse of massively multiplayer virtual worlds. It's set about a dozen years in the future, and things have got very strange indeed. If you imagine what the dot-com boom would have looked like to someone teleported in from the mid 1980s, we're going somewhere even stranger—and fairly soon. The nearest book out there to it would be Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. Basically, a crime has been committed inside a role-playing game. A bank has been robbed using a dragon for fire support, and the police are called in because real money is at stake. In particular, the company which has been robbed is a second tier company whose job is stabilising the economy of vir
tual worlds—so when their bank is robbed, the implications are rather dire.
Copyright © 2007 Kevin Stone
[Back to Table of Contents]
BOOKZONE—More of the Latest Books Reviewed
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The Dreaming Void
Peter F. Hamilton
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Peter F. Hamilton is best when he's working on a galactic canvas; give him a universe, and he'll fill it up with complicated, technically advanced cultures, unusual aliens and labyrinthine conflicts. But what really shines in a Hamilton novel are the planetary extraction scenes. It's his strong suit to put his characters in peril and then run them through a menacing maze of angry, heavily-armed locals on their way up and out. Hamilton's set-pieces are always a highlight in his novels, and The Dreaming Void is no exception. He plays to his strong suit in this latest novel, the first in an inevitable trilogy set in the Commonwealth Universe of Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained, some 1500 years after the events in those novels. You'll get your planetary extraction scenes, and they'll be every bit as exciting as you could hope—but there's more going on than just action in The Dreaming Void. Hamilton effectively ups the ante of his usual space opera, complicating matters most entertainingly by introducing some no-longer new ideas and playing them to his strong suit.
The future in The Dreaming Void is really rather rosy. The Commonwealth is strong, and peace generally reigns throughout. A selection of aliens and humans, having defeated the Starflyer, have created a working model galactic society that is quite cleverly complicated by a variety of Singularities, both alien and human. In the years since the Starflyer War, much of humanity has taken itself beyond the realm of the physical, in what Hamilton calls ‘the inward migration'. But these post-humans are not so united as one might infer from the term ‘singularity'; they're much more of a multiplicity, a gaggle of squabbling factions vying for power and trying to enact a variety of agendas. Hamilton's spin on the singularity is really interesting and quite entertaining. He's not trying to re-invent the wheel, but instead giving it a style-up and polish job that is a blast to read. He creates a variety of fascinating conflicts and agendas, with characters of varying morals and abilities to carry out those conflicts. It's a great way for this writer to expand his palette and yet stay true to his galaxy-spanning strengths. Humanity may ascend, but we never seem to grow up. On the surface, however, the Commonwealth is relatively stable and secure.
Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #212 Page 17
