Locus, October 2014

by Locus Publications

  A sense of place turns out to be crucial, for both the mundane and the magical. When Reve brings her kids to a town near Hawley Woods in Massachusetts, hoping to escape what seems to be a supernatural stalker with help from relatives and old friends, these children of the modern west (the twins often converse by texting) find the eastern forest strange. Reve should feel more comfortable, yet her own tragedy turns out to be linked to a series of local murders and disappearances that occurred around a century ago, events her own parents kept from her, in what they thought was an act of kindness. All too soon, she bitterly regrets that act, since the family’s survival may depend on finding resolutions to mysteries past and present.

  While the boyfriend from her teens (now the local sheriff) can show her where to ferret out reports of past events, she needs to delve much deeper into the mystery that haunts the Woods. That leads to the title volume – and the enigma of its seemingly blank pages. Reve’s quest is well worth following all the way to its conclusion.

  –Faren Miller

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: RUSSELL LETSON

  The Peripheral, William Gibson (Putnam 978-0-399-15844-5, $27.95, 485pp, hc) October 2014.

  Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison!, Harry Harrison (Tor 978-0-765333087, $25.99, 351pp, hc) November 2014.

  William Gibson’s The Peripheral offers a now-familiar blending of close-textured SF and noir/thriller modes, an evolution of the Gibson recipe that reaches back to the very beginning of his career. While Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History were minimally sciencefictional in their furniture (however much SF feeling they might have wrung out of their could-be-next-week settings), the world evoked by this new book is deliberately and progressively estranged, not only by its genre furniture (around to which we will get eventually), but by the writerly craft with which everything in the story is delivered.

  In fact, that craft was the first thing I noticed. The novel is built on a pair of alternating-viewpoint threads. Flynne Bishop is living in a down-at-the-heels semi-rural USA, perhaps a decade or two from now; and Wilf Netherton is a publicist operating in a much more technologically sophisticated and wealthy London. But their viewpoints operate in what an MFA student would recognize as very-close-third-person mode: we know what the viewpoint character does and thinks and no more. Nor is expository data delivered via any of the customary narrative dodges – explanatory injections, as-you-know-Bob conversations, unnecessary briefings – though the first page does take some mercy on us by offering some minimally-orienting information that Flynne would be aware of: that she has a military-veteran brother, Burton, on partial disability; that the munged-up 1977 Airstream trailer he occupies is a valuable, collectible antique. Similarly, a few chapters along, Wilf recalls a conversation that explains part of the strange relationship between his London and Flynne’s America.

  But for the most part, sights, sounds, events, and internal reflections are rooted in the right-now, and their contexts, backstories, associations, and significance just accumulate, un-annotated. Wilf’s second chapter, for example, opens with him viewing the camera feed from a ‘‘moby,’’ which has an ‘‘uppermost forward deck.’’ From various cues and clues, we can gather, eventually, that a moby is an airship, though it is not explicitly defined as such. Other lexical items – stub, jackpot, haptics, klept – are similarly left for their natures to become clear through operation or context, or to be worked out via etymology and allusion. (Hint: The ears of connoisseurs of older SF should prick up on ‘‘jackpot.’’)

  The world that Gibson has invented here is reasonably intricate, though not so exotic that an experienced reader cannot eventually work out the Ideas behind it and point to examples of similar Ideas from other stories. But understanding must grow gradually, built on a series of hints, observations, and actions. More than 300 pages in, a reasonably synoptic account of some of the background puts most of the pieces together, but by that time it is more a matter of confirmation than revelation. One of the pleasures of this book is the unpacking and assembly of the clues into a coherent world picture: it is a puzzle to be solved, which means that some topics, plot-points, and relationships must remain behind the Spoiler Curtain.

  But many other pleasures are available for pointing out and admiring. Chief among them is the noir/thriller/crime-novel side of the book. Looking back through my Gibson files, I see that I have been comparing him to the likes of Charles Willeford, Elmore Leonard, and Carl Hiaasen for a couple decades now. This book does nothing to change my mind about that, and the non-SF spirit that hovers most closely over this book is that of Elmore Leonard, whose demotic, telegraphic style of dialogue it echoes. Here is Flynne being informed by a friend about Burton’s whereabouts after he has gone out to confront something called Luke 4:5:

  ‘‘Where is he,’’ she asked.

  ‘‘Homes,’’ he said, ‘‘protective custody.’’

  ‘‘Arrested?’’

  ‘‘No. Locked up.’’

  ‘‘What did he do?’’

  ‘‘Acted out. Homes were all grinning and shit later. They liked it. Gave him a Chinese tailor-made cigarette.’’

  ‘‘He doesn’t smoke.’’

  ‘‘He can swap it for something.’’

  ‘‘Took his phone?’’

  ‘‘Homes takes everybody’s phone.’’

  This exchange is packed with glimpses of the nature of Flynne’s world that become clearer later. ‘‘Homes’’ is Homeland Security; Luke 4:5 is a band of Westboro Baptist Church-style zealots. These, along with the treatment of tobacco products and phones, the (later) mention of engine exhaust that smells of buttered popcorn or fried chicken, and a dozen other items mentioned in passing, form a mosaic that does not need an expository lump to be effective.

  To return to the linear: The storyline is strung across a series of assassinations, attempted or successful, and the efforts to understand and counter who or whatever lurks behind them. It starts when Flynne, filling in for Burton as (she believes) a beta-tester for an on-line game, becomes a virtual – and, as it turns out, the sole – witness to a real murder, in an environment that turns out not to be a game at all. On the other side of the world, Wilf, remote-monitoring an event devised by a celebrity client, is also virtually present at a violent death. When the victim in Flynne’s murder turns out to be the sister of Wilf’s client, their connection brings them to the attention of mysterious forces with opaque agendas as well as London’s potent (and nearly as opaque) law-enforcement establishment.

  The protagonists’ connection is entirely virtual, mediated by computational and communication technologies that allow Flynne to inhabit a peripheral – a mindless artificial human body that allows her full sensory access to Wilf’s London. (Wilf at first has to be content with a smartphone connection.) The two clearly inhabit very different worlds. Hers is an unnamed hardscrabble rural town somewhere in the southern US, where the mainstay of the local economy is illegal drug manufacture. (There’s a tempting similarity to the Harlan KY of the Elmore Leonard-inspired Justified.) What commerce remains is dominated by corporate chains with wonderfully tacky trade names (Hefty Mart, Coffee Jones, Pharma Jon, Fabbit), though small businesses do manage to hang on (Jimmy’s Bar, Forever Fab, the Sushi Barn). Lawful employment is available at Hefty Mart or the locally owned fabbing (3D printing) shop, and disabled war vets scrape along on VA benefits. Big brother Burton is one of the latter, physically uninjured but clearly emotionally marked by his tour as a Marine Haptic Scout. His friend Conner, now minus a couple of limbs, wasn’t so lucky.

  Wilf’s London is sleek and rich and emphatically sciencefictional, with total body modification, nanotechnology, implanted smartphones – in fact, smart everything, from cars to bars, right up to shapeshifting robots called Michikoids – and a power structure that seems to consist mainly of ‘‘klept’’ families (kleptocrats – organized-crime clans like his friend Lev’s) and the cops (in the form
of the scarily powerful Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer). This world unfolds just as gradually and indirectly through Wilf’s eyes, as well as through Flynne’s encounters with its strangenesses.

  Flynne might be a country mouse, but she’s a very smart one, and from what she sees and hears she is able to piece together an operational understanding of the machineries in which she is caught up. Nor should the street smarts and toughness of her family and friends and neighbors be underestimated, or the military experience of her brother and his fellow vets, even (or especially) the maimed Conner. That back-country ingenuity and determination combine well with the technological resources and special knowledge available from Wilf’s side (though Wilf is mostly dragged along, mystified and wishing for a drink or three), and the result is a series of dramatic, scary, creepy,violent, and finally satisfying confrontations in both settings.

  That satisfaction does not depend solely on the winding up of the plot machine (though that machine is admirably devious and its windup is ingeniously definitive) but also on how every scene, every page of the novel is filled with textures and details and observations and inventions and turns of phrase that delight. (Also, lots of those Gibsonian visual images that have become a kind of signature: ‘‘Inside, the trailer was the color of Vaseline.’’) We can enjoy the strenuous fun of decoding the world in which Gibson’s prose deposits us, though without the hazards of dodging the unwelcome attentions of assassins and criminals in high places. And like any really well-designed thrill ride or mystery tour (or sonnet or string quartet), as soon as you get off, you want to get right on for another go-round.

  •

  When Harry Harrison died two years ago, we lost another connection to our field’s history. Harrison belonged to what might be called the second wave of modern American SF writers, the cohort whose careers began after World War II and built on (or reacted to) the pulp-magazine work of the Heinleins, Asimovs, Leinsters, and Sturgeons. In a freelance working life that ran for more than six decades and covered comics, multiple genres of fiction (true-confession, men’s-adventure, SF, fantasy, mystery), nonfiction, editing, and fannish involvement, Harrison encountered just about every person of note and category of activity in the SF world. Fortunately for us, his last writing project was a memoir that covers all that territory. As its subtitle suggests, Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison!: It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time also outlines a life of unconventional choices that led to unexpected destinations, adventures comfortable and otherwise, and generally happy endings.

  I still have my paperback first editions of Deathworld and The Stainless Steel Rat down in the basement stacks, and I followed and enjoyed Harrison’s 1960s work in Analog, but then I lost track of his fiction until I picked up the Hammer and the Cross alternate-history trilogy he wrote in the 1990s with Tom Shippey (the latter bylined as ‘‘John Holm’’). This memoir filled me in on what Harry had been up to in the 25 intervening years. The bibliography at the book’s end runs to a dozen pages, documenting an impressive range of work, not just as a writer of fiction (sixty novels, seven short-story collections) but, as an editor (often with Brian Aldiss) of more than 30 anthologies; the co-founder of the journal SF Horizons, an early and short-lived journal of SF criticism; and co-editor of a volume of autobiographical essays in Hell’s Cartographers (both, again, with Aldiss). Then there was a decade of scripts for the Flash Gordon comic strip, and various nonfiction projects such as Great Balls of Fire: A History of Sex in Science Fiction Illustration.

  The Harry Harrison of this memoir is energetic, industrious, gregarious, peripatetic, and uxorious, among other adjectives, and his book is appealingly direct and breezily colloquial. The writing is somewhat uneven, not surprising, given the circumstances under which it was produced at the end of his life. But at its best, it is (like its author) engaging, colorful, and often quite funny. While it is not a full personal autobiography (there is no mention, for example, of his first marriage), it does give a comprehensive picture of the professional and private sides of the writer’s life (with occasional bits of practical advice for the aspiring pro), including his years of army service during World War II, which left him with an abiding distaste for the military.

  Harrison was an inveterate and adventurous traveler, and he and his family spent many years living outside the US. The chapters depicting those periods – in Mexico, England, Denmark, Italy, and Ireland – are vivid and engaging, full of Harrison’s enthusiastic engagement with the world beyond the typewriter or computer keyboard. Then there are the snapshots of life in and outside SF: guarding (and preferring the company of) black stockade prisoners at the end of his hitch in the army; Alfred Bester being charming and drinking too much; Leslie Charteris being charming and eating well; first Citizen of the World Garry Davis sneaking into Italy on an inflatable boat (Harry had designed his unacceptable internationalist passport); Heinlein denying that he read other writer’s SF (particularly Bill, the Galactic Hero).

  I do not think that this is quite the finished book that Harrison had in mind – in the Acknowledgments, his daughter Moira recounts how her father worked against escalating frailty to type, hand write, and finally dictate it. And, following Harrison’s official curtain line (which is also the book’s subtitle), editor David Hartwell has appended a section of seven free-standing essays that were originally intended to be integrated into the main text. In them, Harrison expands on his relationship with and admiration of John W. Campbell, the place of Esperanto in his life, a trip to the old Soviet Russia (good food, bad food, much vodka), and background on the West of Eden, Stainless Steel Rat, and Hammer and the Cross sequences. I particularly enjoyed (if that is the right verb) the essay on how Make Room! Make Room! was turned from a serious novel about overpopulation into Soylent Green, a movie that completely missed the point. But Harrison also observes that, as bad a translation of his novel as the movie is, it still ‘‘works as a film,’’ thanks to the skills of the director, the technical crew, and the acting chops of Edward G. Robinson. (Charlton Heston, not so much. And Harry got screwed on the money end of the deal, too.)

  Put this book on the shelf of works of SF writerly recollection and history, next to Fred Pohl’s The Way the Future Was, Damon Knight’s The Futurians, Daniel Keyes’ Algernon, Charlie, and I, Jack Vance’s This is Me, Jack Vance!, L. Sprague de Camp’s Time and Chance, and, of course, Hell’s Cartographers. (Asimov’s autobiographical volumes need a reinforced shelf all to themselves.) I have had the good fortune to meet many of the writers of Harrison’s generation, including several who knew him well, but I never got to meet the man himself. This memoir makes me I wish I had – though maybe, thanks to his dedication to the written (and published-for-pay) word, maybe I have.

  –Russell Letson

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: ADRIENNE MARTINI

  Lock In, John Scalzi (Tor 978-0-76537586-5, $24.99, 336pp, hc) August 2014.

  Kaleidoscope, Alisa Krasnostein & Julia Rios, eds. (Twelfth Planet Press 978-1-922101-11-2, $17.00, 450pp, pb) August 2014. Cover by Amanda Rainey.

  The Revolutions, Felix Gilman. (Tor 978-0-7653-3717-7, $26.99, 416pp, hc) April 2014. Cover by W. Staehle.

  All Those Vanished Engines, Paul Park. (Tor 978-0-7653-7540-7, $25.99, 272 pg, hc) July 2014.

  Lock In isn’t the zippy, quippy Scalzi you know from Agent to the Stars, The Android’s Dream, or Fuzzy Nation. Nor is it the more recent Scalzi, the one who can’t resist thumbing his nose at expectations in Redshirts and The Human Division, but who might have lost some of the substance while distracted by the style. Lock In is the work of a writer who hasn’t lost any of his swagger, yet has grown a little bit smarter about when to show-off just how clever he is.

  While Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome, a novella offered as an e-book before Lock In’s release, sets up the universe of the novel, reading it isn’t at all required in order to get up to speed. Short version: a global pandemic has
left a not insignificant percentage of people locked in their own bodies. Victims still have sensory experience of the world but can’t respond to it in any way. Years after the crisis started, technology now allows a locked-in person to remain in a life support device while his or her brain experiences the world in a ‘‘threep,’’ which is a human-like robot.

  There’s friction between Haden humans and healthy humans, of course. That’s where the story is. We meet Chris Shane, a Haden using a threep, on his first day at work with the FBI. There’s been a murder and what follows is both a who-and a how-dunnit. Like any good procedural, there’s lots of witty banter between Shane and his female (and non-Haden) partner Leslie Vann. The pace is snappy and the outcome satisfying. Taken just on those merits, it’s solid work.

  What makes Lock In even better is how much deeper Scalzi’s characters are here. Shane doesn’t exist simply to generate laughs. Vann’s sarcasm isn’t simply a channel for the author to show his chops; instead, it’s symptom of Vann’s damage, which sounds like a bad pun but isn’t intended to be one. This is a more reflective Scalzi, who is working with ideas about what makes us human and gives those ideas space to breathe, rather than showing off how he’s already figured it all out.