[JAM] Stephen King, Steven Spielberg and Emma Watson.
King and Spielberg are both fascinating to me and have been massively inspirational over the course of my career. Emma Watson is, frankly, one of the most fascinating people I can think of. She’s immensely talented, absolutely beautiful and dedicated to making the world a better place. How could that not be an incredible conversation?
James A. Moore will be providing a grimdark short story featuring Inquisitor Darsken Murdro in his City of Wonders series for GdM #6, due out 1 January 2016.[GdM]
Review: The Mechanical
By Ian Tregillis
Review by malrubius
There I was, looking for a break from the usual sword-and-slashery that we all love so much, when I took to Amazon to find my next read. I had just finished reading Sebastien de Castell’s very entertaining Traitor’s Blade, my tenth medieval-style grimdark fantasy novel in row. While browsing, I remembered seeing some high praise for Ian Tregillis on one of the many good Facebook groups covering fantasy and grimdark. In checking out the description for his latest novel, The Mechanical, I saw that it also received accolades from Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal. So I decided to give it a go. Man oh man, am I glad I did, because it’s pretty fucking brilliant.
The Mechanical takes place in an alternate history in which the Dutch have created a massive, Europe-spanning empire, thanks to the ingenious alchemical work of scientist and mathematician Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695). Huygens’s fantastic discovery has enabled the Dutch to forge an army of nearly indestructible, sentient clockwork soldiers as well as a host of somewhat pricey clockwork servants to suit nearly every need. It is now 1926, and the Dutch’s utter domination of Europe has forced the French monarchy and officials to flee to Marseilles-in the-West, near the St. Lawrence River in the New World. The only thing that keeps the French from complete obliteration is their work with chemical compounds that enable them to hold off the Dutch soldiers just enough to survive. However, a recent discovery in the work of philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) might hold the key to turning the tide of the Alchemy Wars.
The story follows three main characters. Berenice Charlotte de Mornay-Périgord is spy chief (Talleyrand) of the French intelligence agency. She is charged with uncovering the heavily guarded secrets of Huygens’s alchemy that gives life and compulsion to the Dutch Clakkers, their sentient soldiers and servants. Luuk Visser is a French Catholic priest and spy working undercover as a pastor in the Dutch capital at The Hague. Visser is entrusted with passing Spinoza’s discovery to French headquarters in the New World and ultimately to Talleyrand. He hopes to use the unwitting mechanical servant Jax to carry the discovery across the ocean to Marseilles-in-the-West. Jax is a Clakker, servant to the Schoonraad banking family who are moving west to the New World. His adventure forms the central thread of the three narratives, which converge when he reaches the New World and discovers what he is carrying.
The alternate historical setup and the fantastical lives of the clockwork people form an extremely fascinating and compelling story world, and the main characters, as well as a few secondary characters, have vivid psychological lives. But it is the tense, frightening, and astoundingly imaginative action sequences that drive the story, capturing the reader’s imagination and never letting go. Tregillis takes us riding on an impossible sentient airship, throws us into a battle between a clockwork soldier and three dozen terrified humans, and tosses us around on the giant, blazing mechanical fireball that forms the central apparatus of the forge for bestowing life and geas (orders/obligations) on the Clakkers. The result is the type of mind-blowingly creative tour-de-force that makes The Mechanical stand out from the crowded field of speculative fiction novels.
As if that weren’t enough, questions of self-knowledge and, most of all, free will run throughout the story, imbuing it with thought-provoking thematic substance. Are machines capable of self-knowledge? Can freewill be taken from a presumably free human being? Where does freewill lie—in the body? the mind? the soul? What constitutes free will and can it exist in a pre-programmed being? Tregillis presents these questions and more throughout the story, occasionally touching on the philosophy of Descartes and others. Best of all, he does so without interfering with the story. Although I consider myself well read, the depth of philosophical questioning threaded through The Mechanical is decidedly over my head. Nevertheless, I found the theme extremely compelling as it is situated in the story and in the internal and external conflicts of its characters. Readers can choose to stop and contemplate or merely consider the theme with regard to how it affects and motivates the characters.
You’re probably thinking I’ve already gushed over The Mechanical enough for one review, but I would be remiss if I did not mention Tregillis’s beautifully literary use of language throughout the novel. His descriptions of settings, action, and character, combined with his astute implementation of theme, qualify this novel (in the mind of this over-educated, literature-geek reviewer) as a work of contemporary literature of the kind rarely found in genre fiction. Early in the novel he describes the execution of a cadre of French spies: ‘Next up the stairs—and wheezing like a bullet-riddled accordion—came Minister General Hendriks…’ When Pastor Visser accidentally spills some poison, ‘The deadly crystals pattered like sleet into the hidden ambry. They tinkled across the finely feathered gold inlay etched into the pyx, dusted the filigree of the tabernacle, skittered along the shallow curve of the paten, and settled like dandruff upon the yellowing linen corporal.’ The imagery Tregillis creates through his precise and deeply considered language draws the reader into the very fabric of the story world.
That’s all fine, right? But where’s the fighting? The blood? The morally grimdark? Do not worry: It is here. The alternative world of 1926 is dark and brutal, crude and decadent. Of the main characters, only the Clakker, ironically, is human enough to be mostly good. The others, including Talleyrand and the undercover pastor, are fraught with moral dilemmas, causing them to make some difficult, murderous, and occasionally terrible decisions. Nevertheless, you will find yourself rooting for them, and then wondering if you should be. As if that’s not entertaining enough, imagine someone trying to tie a tourniquet on a slippery, blood-gushing stump of a shoulder from which the arm has just been severed. How about having a piece of shrapnel stuck so far into your eyeball that it scrapes your skull every time you blink? Torture? Hangings? Filthy quid pro quo sex? Explosions? Yes, The Mechanical is delightfully twisted and wicked fun.
By now you’ve probably figured out that I frigging loved The Mechanical, and I can hardly wait for the next volume of The Alchemy Wars. For me, The Mechanical is not only a refreshing diversion from the medieval-style fantasy novels I have been enjoying lately, but it is also beautifully captured piece of grimdark sensibility that I think all fans of good, dark writing will enjoy, be they fans of science fiction, steampunk, alternate history, contemporary literature, new weird, or, yes, grimdark fantasy. Read it.[GdM]
Boomer Hunter
Sean Patrick Hazlett
Jimmy Alvarez was one tough mother. After reliving the firefight over and over in my head, I could only come to that conclusion. Shivering and covered in blood and dust, I hid under the bodies of my crew in some godforsaken ditch near an almond grove in California’s Central Valley while I prayed for twilight to fade into night.
‘Bobby,’ Rory Haines sputtered as he choked on his own blood, ‘Tell Missy I love ‘er and make sure she gets my bounty after you bag the ol’ bastard.’
I nodded to make Rory feel better. But there’s no way I was gonna share that bounty with a dead man’s family. There weren’t many boomers left, and the ones who were were either nasty ol’ coots with a knack for survival or cats with more dough than Zuckerberg. Either way, you had to make each bounty count.
I preferred the ol’ coots myself. Most of ‘em were poor. And being poor made ‘em easier targets. The rich ones could af
ford tons of security.
I could smell Alvarez coming, a hint of cigar smoke drifting on the biting wind. What the man had done with railroad ties, rebar, and bear traps was inspired, if not horrifying.
Rory was wheezing again. I tapped his knee with my rifle to shut him up. But my gesture was about as useful as tits at a big dick convention.
Alvarez’s footsteps quickened. ‘Shut the hell up,’ I murmured with a kick to Rory’s bloody thigh that a shit-encrusted shaft of rusty rebar had run clean through. Rory would have tetanus for sure, but it didn’t matter. He’d be dead by morning.
Word had it that Alvarez was almost eighty. How that sombitch could move so fast was a goddamn miracle—and a nightmare for me and my crew.
The cigar smell was getting stronger, but the footsteps had stopped. I shut my mouth and played dead. If Rory wouldn’t quit his whining, then he was on his own.
Watching from beneath three lukewarm bodies, I saw the underside of a black combat boot kick dirt from the lip of the ditch. Rory squealed.
Alvarez carefully slid into the trench, cradling a scope-mounted AR-15 in his stubby arms. I couldn’t believe it. The man was five-foot nothing and couldn’t have weighed more than a buck fifty.
Either way, he was on Rory like orange on a pumpkin. Ol’ bastard took one look at Rory’s leg and double-tapped him in the head. Then, all nonchalant-like, Alvarez took two deep drags on his cigar.
Then he came closer. He poked and jabbed at Carl and Juan and Ashish. I held my breath. He rolled Carl’s bloody body off the pile and double-tapped him in the brain bucket, probably just to be sure. I quivered. He did the same to Ashish. Juan’s corpse was next.
I could barely breathe. If I didn’t do nothing, he’d shoot me too. It was a real grade-A goatfuck. Rolling the dice, I ignored every survival instinct I had, jumped to my feet, raised my arms, and begged, ‘Please, don’t shoot.’
Alvarez wore olive drab fatigues along with an ol’-school Viet Nam boonie cap. His face was taut but wrinkled, weather worn but not beaten. He jabbed his rifle in my chest and chuckled. ‘You’re mine, son.’
I smiled like some dope stupid enough to think there was any chance of walking away from this.
The whole thing was ridiculous. Me, who came here to kill him, and Alvarez, who’d just snuffed out four of my men like it was nothing. And here we were, smiling at each other like two jerkoffs. I gave him my best aw-shucks face. He laughed and lowered his rifle. Just when I thought things were cool, he coldcocked me, and I was out like bellbottoms and eight-tracks.
* * *
When the Chinese called their treasury bonds, interest rates went ballistic, and Uncle Sam needed a quick fix to service its ballooning interest. Hiking up the death tax was the easy part, but the goddamn boomers wouldn't die fast enough. So the feds passed the Septuagenarian Protection Act of 2020 to accelerate the process.
Regardless of the details, that law changed my life. It’s what transformed me from an unemployed dirtbag into a highly bankable merc. You see, there’s not a single living politician who had the guts to send the police to round up these defiant ol’ fogies, so governments hired private military contractors on the down low. What the feds did to the ol’ coots after was their business, not mine. But the job paid well, so I didn’t complain.
In the early days, business was good. Not many people were willing to chase down ol’ folks, so the supply of hunters was low, but the demand for boomers was high. And back then, hunting boomers was like shooting fish in a barrel. The commies from the city with their anti-gun slogans were the easiest to round up, as were wealthy law-abiding urban conservatives who’d blindly trusted the system that made ‘em rich. I made a killing back then, and I didn’t even have to kill anyone to do it.
When other working class kids saw dopes like me making a fortune, they all started getting into the biz. Then the law got looser than a ten-buck barracks whore, and it wasn’t long before it became legal to put the ol’ farts down. Before I knew it, mercs had depopulated most of America’s urban centres of their Septs, and we all had to go deeper into the country to make any dough.
That, my friend, is when the biz really started separating the men from the boys. The gun nuts in the sticks weren’t so easy to collect because they had the means and the training to fight back.
The Nam vets was the worst. Most of ‘em was smart ‘nuff to unass the city and head to the hills before the feds passed the new law. And these vets really starting racking up the body count, especially among the amateurs. So much so that the pencil pushers in Washington soon required merc outfits to pass through reams of red tape for certification. Hell, that one move alone did more to consolidate the industry than rising body counts did. But as they say, ‘That's all history now.’
* * *
I woke up in a crouch next to a shiny white toilet bowl. My wrists were handcuffed to a radiator. It was hot as hell, my head ached, and I had a big lump on my forehead. My stomach grumbled and I was parched. I had no idea how long I’d been out.
It was a miracle Alvarez hadn’t killed me, but I ain’t one to kick a gift horse in the balls.
When I looked up, Alvarez was standing in front of the sink, dressed like a pervert in tighty-whiteys and a spotless white wife-beater. He was shaving with a straight razor. Real ol’ school. Dog tags dangled from his neck like a good luck charm. His skin was rough as rawhide.
He tilted his head in my direction like a cocky drill instructor. Like I was the dumbest piece of crap he’d ever seen. ‘So you finally returned to the world of the living, ginger,’ he said, referring to my red hair. ‘You’re probably wondering why you’re not taking a dirt nap, aren’t you?’
I nodded.
He smiled and then pointed at my right arm where my eagle, globe and anchor tattoo had claimed all the real estate. ‘Why are you here trying to kill a fellow Marine, Devil Dog?’ he asked, his stone-cold brown eyes boring into mine.
Like a moron, I grinned and said the first thing that came to mind. ‘Trying to make a buck, same as you.’
‘Bullshit,’ he said. ‘I got nothing against shooting boomers. Hell, if I were your age, I’d be shooting ‘em too. And I’m one of ‘em. They fucked everything up. Those hippy pricks spat at me and called me a baby killer after I risked my life for our country. All the while, those pinkos fled to Canada to avoid doing their duty. But a fellow Marine. You should know better, boy.’
I had no idea what Alvarez was gonna do next, but it couldn’t be any worse than this. He had a way ‘bout him. A way that made me feel real low, like I’d strangled a puppy.
‘What’re you gonna do with me?’ I asked.
He ran his fingers over his high-and-tight. ‘Catch and release, Marine. Catch and release. I got no business killing a fellow Marine.’
I shot him a confused look. ‘How you know I ain’t gonna come back and try again?’
‘Semper Fi,’ he said. ‘You just needed some corrective training. Now that I've done that, I know you ain’t coming back. ‘Course, you’ll be surrendering you and your friends’ firearms in exchange for my generosity.’
* * *
That night the ol’ man actually cooked me a porterhouse in his small kitchen and gave me as many beers as I wanted. I took him up on both offers. ‘Course, I only had one Budweiser. I needed to stay sharp. You never know, the ol’ fart could always change his mind.
I guess being with someone he thought was a fellow Marine made Alvarez feel safe, even if I had tried to smoke him a few hours earlier. Or maybe he was lonely being holed up out here for so long. Probably just wanted some company.
It wasn’t long before Alvarez pulled out the whiskey and started telling me about his time in Kai San. Halfway through the bottle, the man was still lucid as a lark. But the more he drank, the more belligerent he became. He pushed me for stories about Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever it was I told him I’d served, but I refused. Told him some bull that I didn’t want to ta
lk about it. He nodded as if he’d understood. Like we shared a secret only combat vets could know.
He was madder than hell that I only had one beer. In my defence, I told him I was Mormon and had had the first beer to be polite. He stared at me a good thirty seconds before he smiled and accepted my excuse. But I was worried he didn’t believe me. And if he didn’t believe me, I was done for.
As Alvarez was pouring the last drop of his bottle of Jack Daniels into his glass, the windows shattered. The steady thump thump thump of a machine gun violated our quiet evening.
I tackled the ol’ man, shielding him with my body. But Alvarez didn’t seem to care for my attempt to save him. He pushed me off and rolled onto his stomach. Bullets whistled over our heads like burping bees. Alvarez low-crawled from the kitchen to his den until he was underneath a pool table.
He quickly reached up and grabbed a cue stick from the table, then dropped to his belly. He low-crawled to a spot where five rifles hung on the wall. Keeping a low profile on the floor, he worked the cue stick into the trigger guard of an AR-15. The rifle fell from the gun rack and into his hands.
He slithered over shards of glass and took up a fighting position near the broken window. He aimed his rifle and waited. The steady thump thump thump of the machine gun began anew. Alvarez shifted his rifle, steadied it, then fired. The machine gun fire ceased. Alvarez rolled away from his firing position and established another one three feet away. Then he waited.
Huddled on the ground, I waved my hand at Alvarez. He turned his head at the motion. I pointed at the wall of rifles. Then I pointed outside. He stared at me for several seconds as if considering my offer, then nodded.
I low-crawled toward the wall and grabbed the cue stick. I worked a twenty-two off the wall and established a fighting position next to Alvarez.
Grimdark Magazine Issue #5 ePub Page 4
