Locus, February 2013
Page 18
To this station comes Linh, a cousin, fleeing an uprising against the Emperor. Linh has spoken out against the Emperor for his failure to confront the rebels, and so is potentially a traitor, and is also racked with guilt for leaving her previous post under threat. Quyen is the leader of Prosper, but is not confident in her abilities, and also worried that the station’s Mind seems to be decaying. All this seems to portend disaster, amid small betrayals and slights between everyone involved. The authentically (to my eyes) non-Western background powerfully shapes an original and ambitious tale.
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Less original and less ambitious, but arguably more satisfying as pure story, is Gods of Risk by James S. A. Corey, a novella set in ‘‘Corey’s’’ (Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck’s) Expanse future. This is a YA-flavored piece, set on Mars, where David, an adolescent awaiting his career posting, has been lured into using his chemistry talents to cook drugs. He’s infatuated with Leelee, an associate of the dealer he’s working for. When she gets in trouble, amid threats of war with Earth, David clumsily tries to come to her rescue.
Nothing surprises here, and certainly to an extent the characters and situations are clichés, but it all works, and it’s great fun.
Recommended Stories:
‘‘The Telling’’, Gregory Norman Bossert (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 11/29/12)
Gods of Risk, James S.A. Corey (Hachette)
On a Red Station, Drifting, Aliette de Bodard (Immersion)
‘‘His Crowning Glory’’, Noreen Doyle (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 12/27/12)
‘‘The Weight of the Sunrise’’, Vylar Kaftan (Asimov’s 2/13)
‘‘A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel’’, Ken Liu (F&SF 1-2/13)
‘‘The Firewall and the Door’’, Sean McMullen (Analog 3/13)
‘‘The Golden Age of Story’’, Robert Reed (Asimov’s 2/13)
‘‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It, and We Feel Fine’’, Harry Turtledove (Analog 3/13)
–Rich Horton
Semiprofessional magazines, fiction fanzines, original collections, original anthologies, plus new stories in outside sources should be sent to Rich Horton, 653 Yeddo Ave., Webster Groves MO 63119,
Return to In This Issue listing.
LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: GARY K. WOLFE
The Best of All Possible Worlds, Karen Lord (Del Rey 978-0-345-53405-7, $25.00, 312pp, hc) February 2013.
Before and Afterlives, Christopher Barzak (Lethe Press 978-1-59021-369-8, $15.00, 234pp, tp) March 2013. [Order from Lethe Press, 118 Heritage Ave, Maple Shade NJ 08052;
Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance: The Parke Family Scrapbook Number IV, Paul Park (PS Publishing 978-1-848635-82-1, £11.99, 90pp, hc) January 2013. [Order from PS Publishing, Grosvenor House, 1 New Road, Hornsea, East Yorkshire HU18 1PG, England;
‘‘The best of all possible worlds’’ is one of those phrases whose original meaning has been clobbered by irony. A lot of readers will immediately think of Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss, and a few might remember James Branch Cabell’s famous quip that an optimist believes this is the best of all possible worlds while a pessimist fears that it is, but I doubt very many will immediately harken back to Leibniz trying to puzzle out what God was up to in creating evil. Karen Lord’s second novel (which actually won Lord her second Frank Collymore Award in Barbados before her first, Redemption in Indigo, was even published) seems to come down more in the direction of Voltaire, but notably without the bitter irony of Candide. Not that there aren’t plenty of grounds for bitterness: The Best of All Possible Worlds begins not long after a genocidal attack on the home planet of the Sadiri has rendered it uninhabitable, leaving the few survivors seeking to preserve their culture and bloodlines by finding the remnants of an earlier diaspora scattered over several planets. Their mission is not one of vengeance against the home planet of the perpetrators, as in Greg Bear’s Anvil of Stars; as the novel opens, the culprits have already been mysteriously quarantined from the rest of the universe. Instead, the Sadiri have set about establishing homesteads – almost all male, since few Sadiri women survived – on the frontier planet Cygnus Beta. A leading diplomat named Dllenahkh undertakes to visit various cultures on Cygnus Beta, hoping to find individuals, especially women, who share such ancestral Sadiri traits as a telepathic sensitivity and who might be willing to intermarry to help preserve the Sadiri’s genetic heritage. His guide – and the narrator of most of the chapters (those focusing on the point of view of Dllenahkh are in third person, in keeping with his reserved, somewhat secretive personality) – is a biotechnician named Grace Delarua, who is initially somewhat resentful of an assignment that will take her away from her promising research career.
Obviously, this is a far cry from Redemption in Indigo, or from what admirers of that novel might have been expecting. There are some resemblances to Candide in the episodic and sometimes disillusioning journey which makes up the bulk of the narrative, but what is more striking is the degree to which the novel reveals Lord’s insightful familiarity with SF concepts that date back at least to the 1960s, with novels like Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage and especially Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. As in Le Guin’s Ekumen, there are several varieties of humanity – Terrans, Sadiri, Ntshune, Zhinuvians – and a persistent belief in a wise, ancient society of guardians called the Caretakers. The somewhat formal diplomatic reserve and status-consciousness of the telepathic Sadiri even suggests an odd combination of Le Guin’s shifgrethor and ‘‘mindspeech,’’ but – thanks largely to the free-spirited, sometimes almost girlish narrative voice of Grace – the novel takes on a loose, almost playful tone. Grace is given to such expressions as ‘‘How cool is that?’’, blisses out over chocolate cake (‘‘Now, this was a drug worth taking!’’), and even compares a particularly hair-raising adventure to an Indiana Jones vid. Dllenahkh, on the other hand, sounds and acts like the unworldly, uptight professor from a dozen screwball comedies (and who survives in demeaned form in certain modern sitcoms). Given an alcoholic drink, he says, ‘‘This beverage is delicious. May I have another?’’ and when he discovers the unfamiliar custom of kissing, he remarks, ‘‘I am beginning to see the value of the practice.’’
So in the same tale, we have a sharply insightful anthropological interrogation of cultural mores and the effects of diaspora, and a pair of mismatched leads whose relationship and dialogue might have seemed familiar to Howard Hawks. I don’t think I’ve quite seen anything like this combination in SF – a light romantic comedy in the shadow of a tragic apocalypse – but it ends up working better than you think it will. Grace gains depth and complexity when one of their early journeys leads her to a painful visit with her sister, whose husband Grace had once been involved with, and with her beloved nephew, caught amid old family resentments. The various settlements she and Dllenahkh visit include one modeled on old Earth folklore, complete with a Faerie Queen; another is ruled by a creepy dictatorial figure called The Master, who runs his fortress-like redoubt like a brutal company town, effectively imposing a form of legalized slavery. The latter leads Grace to face what is perhaps her greatest ethical crisis, and even to risk her entire career as a diplomat, lending an almost heroic status to her character.
Throughout, Lord alludes to earlier SF traditions, at times imparting an almost retro flavor to the novel. Telepathy and telekinesis have been comparatively rare in SF in recent years (though as we noted last month, they seem to be thriving in horror fiction); Lord ingeniously uses them not only to explore her recurrent concern with the ethics of interpersonal relations, but also to delightful comic effect when Grace finds her dreams channeling dialogue from Casablanca while Dllenahkh and his colleagues are watching the movie in another room. We are told that the elite Sadiri pilots merge psychically with their ships, echoing Cordwainer Smith and others, and Ray Bradbury’s title ‘‘Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed’’ becomes a catchphrase shared by D
llenahkh and Grace in their developing romance. The Best of All Possible Worlds may at times be trying to do too many things at once, some of which are pretty familiar, but Lord’s own graceful prose, ingratiating characters, and palpable love of SF knit it all together in a satisfying – and adventurous – departure from expectations.
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There are ghosts of one sort or another in just about every story in Christopher Barzak’s Before and Afterlives, his first retrospective story collection (last year’s Birds and Bees was a more thematically oriented tribute to three women Surrealists which, though fine in itself, hardly gave a sense of Barzak’s range as a writer). Some of the ghosts are classic manifestations like the Jamie Marks of ‘‘Dead Boy Found’’, the kernel of Barzak’s well-received first novel One for Sorrow, and others are lost family members whose hauntings are mostly psychological – like the dead mother whose disturbed daughter trashes the house in a fit of grief and rage in ‘‘A Mad Tea Party’’ or the daughter whose disappearance prompts her distraught mother to kidnap a mermaid in ‘‘The Drowned Mermaid’’. None of these ghosts, however, are quite in the service of horror stories, and most aren’t even particularly frightening. That’s not the tradition Barzak works in; instead he treads a delicate line between the paranormal ghost romance and the more nuanced literary tradition that includes Shirley Jackson, Peter S. Beagle, and Robert Nathan, sometimes nearly falling into the sentimentality of the former but – largely on the strength of his luminous prose and acute sense of character – more often coming down solidly in the latter. His lead story, for example, ‘‘What We Know About the Lost Families of – – House’’, is a fairly traditional haunted house tale, detailing the sad histories of three families who occupy the title house over more than a century. Barzak lends an unexpected resonance to this familiar material by making two critical choices: first, he narrates in the first person plural, as though a whole community is sharing the tale, and second, he focuses largely on the sad but well-drawn character of Rose Addleson, who becomes obsessed with the house after the death of her young daughter.
Barzak writes a lot of such sad characters. Even when they aren’t dead or grieving, they suffer transformations or conditions that often serve as powerful metaphors of alienation. The beekeeper’s son, who is the title character in ‘‘The Boy Who Was Born Wrapped in Barbed Wire’’, suffers from that surreal malady, making any sort of close physical relationship virtually impossible because of the damage he can cause to others, while the son in ‘‘Vanishing Point’’ just gradually fades away, first becoming transparent and eventually immaterial. The unhappy wife in ‘‘The Other Angelas’’ faces the opposite problem, as new, identical versions of herself begin to populate her life. The eponymous character in ‘‘The Resurrection Artist’’ – a title that seems to echo Kafka – can repeatedly bring himself back from the dead, a talent which provides the basis of a lucrative career, managed by his shrewd but manipulative sister. Also harboring a strange talent while dealing with a manipulative family member is ‘‘The Ghost Hunter’s Beautiful Daughter’’, whose talent for manifesting ghosts becomes a profit-making enterprise for her father, who pretends the talent is his own and sets up all sorts of ersatz ghost-hunting paraphernalia to satisfy customers. The one pure science fiction tale here, ‘‘Caryatids’’, concerns a boy hooker on a decadent planet where nano injections can transform him temporarily into whatever his rich doctor client wants – in this case a girl.
The problem with ‘‘Caryatids’’ and a few of the other tales here is that they occasionally seem fragmentary, the working out of an idea or episode rather than a full story. The one piece original to the book, ‘‘A Beginner’s Guide to Survival Before, During, and After the Apocalypse’’ is just that – a set of instructions which gradually spirals into a more or less particularized story, but a pretty slight one. In ‘‘Plenty’’, an apparently poor old woman who once provided food to the narrator and his housemate during their starving student days in Youngstown is revealed at her death to have harbored a odd supernatural secret to her bounty, but the story’s strength derives from its acute portrayal of Youngstown OH, the ‘‘post-industrial shell of a former steel town’’ which is setting for several of the stories (and where Barzak still teaches); Barzak has always had an acute sense of the telling detail that makes such a place palpable.
The best of the Ohio stories, though, is also the best story in the collection. ‘‘Map of Seventeen’’ concerns a New York artist who returns to his hometown with his strange new boyfriend, the subject of many of his paintings, but whose real strangeness only gradually becomes apparent to the artist’s younger sister, trapped in her rural backwater, who narrates in a wonderfully brittle and vulnerable voice. This is perhaps the best example of one of Barzak’s most brilliant writerly instincts: choosing exactly the right point of view, and not always the most obvious one. ‘‘Born on the Edge of an Adjective’’, the other more or less science fictional tale, concerns a musician who moves to San Francisco to start a new life, apparently ending up with an alien girlfriend, but the power of the story lies in the narrative voice and point of view of the lover he left behind in Youngstown. ‘‘Smoke City’’, the only real gesture to steampunk here, is narrated by a wife who lives partly in our world and partly in the soot-filled industrial nightmare of the title, whose dark Satanic mills seem determined to outdo Blake and Dickens for sheer grimness, and which also implicitly critique the romanticization of much neo-Victorian fantasy. But at times, Barzak can fall prey to his own romantic sentiments. The concluding story, ‘‘The Language of Moths’’, concerns an entomologist who drags his family – including his autistic daughter – along to the Allegheny Mountains in search of a rare moth. Again, the point of view is brilliantly chosen – the resentful older brother, who makes his own self-discoveries in the remote village – but what is otherwise one of the strongest tales here is somewhat compromised by an intense romanticization of autism as a kind of window into magic. Barzak, who can write vividly about loss, transformation, and alienation using his own strikingly original metaphors, hardly needs to glamorize disability. In general, though, Before and Afterlives is a fine introduction to the short fiction of an author who, in a fairly short career, has established himself as one of the most distinctive voices and lyrically effective prose stylists in recent fantasy.
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Unreliable narrators are creatures that authors love to concoct and critics love to unmask, but as Paul Park reminds us in Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance: The Parke Family Scrapbook Number IV, ‘‘the mere act of writing something down, of organizing something in a line of words, involves a clear betrayal of the truth…. Both memory and history consist not of stories but of single images, words, phrases, or motifs repeated to absurdity.’’ In other words, we’re all inherently unreliable narrators, and narrative itself is a distorted, conciliatory way of imposing sense on experience. Park has been fascinated by this arbitrariness literally for decades; his 2002 collection If Lions Could Speak and Other Stories includes stories which, like Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance, are narrated by a writer named Paul Park, leaving us to wonder where the line between memoir and fiction can be drawn, or indeed if there’s any point in trying to find it at all. At the time, I described these stories as ‘‘fabulated memoirs,’’ and the term seems even more appropriate for the present novella, which generated quite a bit of sometimes befuddled discussion, as well as a Nebula nomination, when it appeared in an earlier form in F&SF in 2010. Now Park has taken the conceit a step further, not only incorporating apparently authentic family history, the paintings of his sister Jessy (illustrations are integral to this version of the story), and his mother’s books about Jessy’s real-life autism, but also inviting John Crowley and Elizabeth Hand (both of whom are mentioned in the narrative as friends of ‘‘Paul Park’’) to join the game. Crowley’s ‘‘introduction’’ and Hand’s ‘‘afterword’’ are set in the same diminished, vaguely post-apocalyptic future as the cor
e narrative, describing the disappearance of their friend Park, whose manuscript was entrusted to ‘‘Crowley’’ and later discovered by ‘‘Hand.’’
So at one core level, Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance (the title refers to a painting by Park’s grandfather, which also becomes a clue in uniting the various narratives) is clearly SF, with its references to pandemics, Army convoys on public highways, abandoned neighborhoods, lost technology, and border guards between states, checking for vaccinations. What is more problematic, and possibly frustrating for many readers, is connecting the various dots between all this and Park’s family history, which includes convincing if sometimes stilted period-style accounts of the Civil War Battle of the Crater, an apparent UFO sighting detailed in a 1797 sermon, and a 1919 court-martial in which the testimony includes an account of ‘‘a great metal airship’’ descending from the clouds with ‘‘a metal stair’’ unrolling beneath it. At one point the narrator Park, himself nearly overwhelmed by the welter of documents, speculates that members of his family – many born with a caul, helping lend a supernatural overtone to the narrative – saw themselves as ‘‘a small number of unworthy people, obliged to protect their world or their community from an awful power.’’ The nature of that ‘‘awful power’’ is both an indeterminate if recognizable SF/fantasy trope, and a playful take on the nature of storytelling – how much of the scenario is the narrator’s imposition of structure on random events, as opposed to a persuasive pattern of causation? Even if paranoid fantasies turn out to be true, Park seems to be saying (or at least one of him seems to be saying), they’re still paranoid fantasies.