"Maya, are you there?"
He looked down; his boots and the lower legs of his suit were black, his gloves too. He'd have to strip his suit off if he wanted to stop the dust getting loose in his ship.
"Hello, Maya?"
He switched frequencies and tried again, but there was no response, nothing on the line but static.
He looked at the edge of the plateau, a few paces away. Could she have become disorientated in the dust storm and wandered off the edge? Was she lying down there injured and unconscious, waiting for him to find her?
He started to shuffle over, but stopped as a movement near the citadel caught his eye. A few metres from where he stood, individual particles of dust were gathering into a growing pile, bouncing and skittering together like iron filings under a magnet.
"Caesar, is that you?” The voice was faint, crackling through the static hiss in his headphones.
"Maya, where are you?"
In front of him, the dust had become a swaying column about a metre and a half high, its surface constantly shifting and churning.
"I'm right here."
He watched in horror as the column resolved into a crude human figure with a thin waist and strong shoulders.
"Don't be afraid,” it said.
Details started to appear, first fingers, then eyes and hair, and a mouth.
"Maya, is that you?"
The figure regarded him with its black eyes. Its black lips parted.
"Yes,” it said.
With every second that passed, the likeness became clearer, and more intolerable. Caesar took a step back, toward the ship. He said: “What happened to you?"
In the light of the bloated sun, the figure raised a hand to shade its eyes.
"Oh Caesar,” it said, “if you could only see the things I've seen.” It turned and looked back at the citadel. “All those octopus creatures, they're all in here with me, safe and sound."
Caesar took another step back, into the shadow of the ship's hull.
"In where?” he said. The oxygen dial in his helmet showed he had less than thirty minutes left.
"In the dust.” Maya turned to face him. “They're all stored in the dust. That's how it works. It's a memory matrix. It breaks everything down, stores it as code. It preserves everything it touches."
Caesar took another step. He was at the cargo ramp now. All he needed to do to gain entry to the ship was lower it.
"But why?” he said. “Why do that?"
The figure of Maya turned her face up to the sun's red light and closed her eyes, as if enjoying its warmth. “They've all been saved,” she said. “Just imagine it, Caesar. All those creatures, all their thoughts and dreams, they're all here. And when their sun dies, they won't have to die with it. The dust will blow outward on the solar wind, out into the universe, carrying a complete record of everything they once were."
She opened her eyes and took a step towards him, the dust rustling as she moved.
"It'll all be preserved,” she said.
Caesar reached up to touch the ramp controls. “But where did it come from?” he asked. The creatures he'd seen in his dream hadn't possessed much in the way of technology; they'd been wriggling through an abandoned city, living in the ruins of another, vanished civilisation.
Maya let her bare black shoulders drop. “I don't know,” she admitted. She took another step forwards, coming almost within reach.
"But what does it matter, Caesar?"
He pressed the control and the cargo ramp hinged down.
"It killed them all,” he said, “it smothered them."
Maya shook her head. “They were going to die anyway. They were stuck here with a dying star. What else were they going to do?"
"That's not the point."
The figure of Maya folded its arms. “The dust saved me,” she said. “I couldn't see where I was going. I missed the ship and there was a cliff. I fell and shattered my faceplate. I was suffocating, Caesar, and the dust saved me."
Caesar took a deep breath. He placed a foot on the ramp.
"I'm leaving now,” he said.
"No, you can't."
"Why? Are you going to stop me?” He waved his arm at the ruins of the fallen swamp city. “Are you going to kill me the way you killed all of them?"
Maya stumbled forward, palms turned pleadingly toward him. “No, you don't understand."
He stepped back, both feet on the ramp now, backing up into the ship.
"I'm not sure I want to,” he said.
* * * *
Once inside, he closed the ramp. He wriggled out of his suit in the cargo bay and made his way painfully up to the Star Chamber. His ankle hurt when he put his weight on it. His knees were sore. When he got there, he lowered himself into the pilot's chair. The walls were blank, the external cameras clogged with dust.
For a moment he sat listening to the breath wheezing in and out of his chest, then he flicked open a communications channel.
"I'm sorry,” he said.
There was a crackle on the line, and Maya's voice came through, faint and distorted.
"Caesar, please don't do this,” she said.
He looked down at his gnarled hands resting on the instrument panel, the reflection of his lined face in the glass between them. Now he was out of the suit, he could smell the sweat soaked into his shirt.
"You're not real,” he said. “You're just a copy. The real Maya, the one I loved, is dead."
There was a noise on the line like wind blowing across a sandy beach, and then Maya said: “No, Caesar, you don't understand."
He touched a control and the engines whined into life, spinning up.
"Caesar, please."
The Red Shark rose into the air above the plateau.
"Goodbye, Maya."
He cut the channel. Some of the dust had shaken loose and the external cameras were clearer now. He was sure the fires of hyperspace would scour whatever remained from the hull.
He let the ship hang over the colossal wreck of the citadel for a moment, remembering his final glimpse of the octopoid creature alone in the underground crypt, the last surviving member of its race.
He rubbed his face with both hands. He said: “Nothing lasts."
Then he tipped the ship over until it stood on its tail in the harsh light of the dying sun, and threw the throttle wide open, leaping like an arrow into the empty sky.
Copyright © 2009 Gareth L. Powell
[Back to Table of Contents]
BOOK ZONE—Interview with Jeffrey Ford, Various Book Reviews
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THE PHYSIOGNOMY, MEMORANDA, THE BEYOND—Jeffrey Ford
It's always easier in retrospect, to see the whole picture. It's been just a little more than ten years since the publication of The Well-Built City trilogy by Jeffrey Ford, and having put the pieces together we begin to understand just what was taken apart in the first place. The Physiognomy, followed by Memoranda and The Beyond, appeared in varying formats that made their connection unclear. By the time The Physiognomy won the World Fantasy Award, it was mostly available as a peculiarly sized mass-market paperback with a cover so anonymous it could have been any kind of book. Memoranda came next as a trade paperback original, and shortly afterwards The Beyond as a hardcover original. By the time readers had all three to hand, most were looking at three different books in three different formats that weren't anything like what we expected. In fact, The Well-Built City trilogy was then—and is now—pretty much at a complete disconnect from the worlds of both genre and literary fiction. It's original and unique, qualities that will help it stand the test of time, and it needs to be presented carefully, so that readers can wrap their brains around the outstanding writing and conceptualisation.
To this end, we can thank Golden Gryphon, who recently released the three novels in affordable trade paperbacks with cover art by John Picacio that helps make it clear just what we have with these books: not a trilogy
so much as a triptych, an intricate creation that slots together in prose in much the same way the covers of the books fit together to form a larger image. Now we can put the pieces together.
The Well-Built City trilogy is not a standard starts-in-the-small-town-finishes-at-Mount-Gloom fantasy series, but it should still be read in order. In the first novel, The Physiognomy, we meet Cley, the Physiognomist, and it's a rude awakening. We are clearly not in our world, but we are just as clearly in a world where cruelty and injustice of the sort we get every day are dished out with vigour by Cley. The writing is sparse and witty, unusually direct for a work of genre fiction, and the perspective is skewed. It's a daring act of high-wire creativity, channelling anger and invention in equal parts.
Memoranda was not what we expected next. Instead of the further adventures, we got a new vision of Cley—of cruelty, of ourselves, and what it is possible for us to do in the name of what we believe to be true. Ford's sense of invention is unbound and freed from the mind of Cley, and he manages to take us deeper into a mirror that explores the power of memory and self in an adventure that seethes with anger.
The final book in the series, The Beyond, takes us one step back from the original perspective. The story is told by Misrix, who imagines himself into Cley's world, because Misrix has been accused of killing Cley. Readers get more of the Kafkaesque prose and story line that made the previous two books so wonderful. Cley encounters daemons, flesh eating trees and other creatures that manage to be both symbolic and fully realised living beings. It's a really unique talent that Ford has, and he uses it well. The book's pace is fast, and it's filled with imaginative landscapes and visions.
At first, it was understandably difficult to put together the pieces of Ford's unique creation. There had never been anything remotely like it—and there still isn't, not really. But now, in these new editions, we can put together the big picture with an ease that was simply not possible before. Golden Gryphon and John Picacio slot in with Ford in the same way that Ford slots the books together. We're a puzzle; they're a solution. We may not like the picture we see, but the beauty of the assembly is undeniable.
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Jeffrey Ford interviewed
Describe the literary landscape extant when you began to conceive of and write The Physiognomy. What books—if any—were on your mind when you began to create the world of Physiognomist Cley?
We're going back more than a decade and a half for this, so things are somewhat vague. I got the idea for the books about five years or so before I wrote them. I'm not sure what the literary landscape was in general at that moment, but previously to that, when I was in graduate school, seriously working on fiction writing, the fantastic in literature was really business as usual. I'd studied with John Gardner, and he was certainly not averse to the influences of fantasy and science fiction, although, for some reason that was the rap on him. His works were highly imaginative—Grendel, The King's Indian, In the Suicide Mountains, etc. Also, the works that were big when I'd had time to do a lot of reading, before we had kids, were all imbued with the fantastic to some degree—Calvino, Borges, Pynchon, Barth, Barthelme, Marquez, etc. I was interested in a kind of ‘fabulation', but I wanted to get a less allegorical feel to it. I was trying to effect a darker, more descriptive fiction that grew organically around central ideas. I suppose I was leaning more toward what I liked about solidly genre science fiction and fantasy. I'd been writing both ‘mainstream’ stories for ‘literary magazines’ and ‘straight up’ genre stories for small press fantasy and horror magazines, always moving closer to the point where I'd eventually combine these two efforts. Once that blend came into my writing, I started to develop my own style. Mix all this liberally with my interest in Kafka and the Brothers Grimm, and the films of the Brothers Quay and certain work by ‘underground’ comics artists like Kim Deitch, and out of that ball of confusion came The Physiognomy, Memoranda and The Beyond.
Could you talk about any non-fiction reading you did on memory, personality, or psychology that influenced The Well-Built City trilogy?
The thing that got me started thinking about the whole enterprise was my discovery of a two volume facsimile edition of the work of Johann Lavater, the great 18th century Physiognomist. I found one volume of this work covered with dust on an otherwise empty bottom shelf in the stacks of the Temple University library. I hunted down the other volume and then pored over them for a few hours. That day I had the basic idea for all three books by the time I left the library. I didn't start writing the books for about another five years, but during that stretch I did more research on physiognomy by reading Stephen J. Gould's The Mismeasure of Man and another facsimile edition of the Fowler Brothers work (19th century American Phrenologists) that I found in a garage sale. For the memory stuff in Memoranda, I'd read the works of Frances Yates—The Art of Memory and Girodano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Great books about memory palaces, ancient mnemonic techniques, and how memory and imagination enhance each other.
Did you write any sort of character or world notebooks before or during the writing of the books in The Well-Built City trilogy?
I don't generally do notes or notebooks but just start writing and go from there. I used to do more drawing, and I'd done some drawings of different scenes in the stories as they presented themselves to my imagination. And there was a story I wrote that was kind of a prototype piece of fiction that contained aspects of all the three novels called ‘The Delicate', which appeared in the magazine Space and Time.
The world of the Well-Built City is distinctly different from any that has come before or has come after. How did you go about creating the world in your own mind? And having done so, how difficult was it to have that world as perceived by Cley?
The fact that it was perceived by Cley made the job easier. There's something about a first person narrator in a strange world that allows the reader a sense of comfort of discovery and an easing into the fictional landscape. Cley took certain things for granted about his world, and I hoped the reader would as well. He spoke of things in the world of the Well-Built City as if they were part and parcel of the everyday even though to our world they seemed strange, and the reader could go along with him and feel in the know, like having a native guide you around a foreign city. I'm always able to drop into these first person characters and become them in my writing, and through their personas I make discoveries about their worlds I might not be able to if I were trying to encompass or create—as if brick laying—a world from the third person.
The prose in the books that comprise The Well-Built City trilogy has a particularly scrubbed feel to it. Why did you choose this style?
I'm not sure I understand ‘scrubbed’ but I was trying to use a kind of faux 19th century voice and wanted it to embrace the scientific invention in the world that was more 20th century. I'd always loved Jules Verne, not so much for his writing style but for his vision, which to me in the 20th century seemed a conflation of the anachronistic and the futuristic. I guess this is what's at the heart of what's called Steampunk, a term I was unaware of at the time. My feeling is that the writing gets better as the books progress. The beginning fifty pages of The Physiognomy had been worked over so many times by me, I think it's a lot more tense than the rest of the trilogy. Maybe that's what you mean? As I loosened up and the story took me over, I think the writing got both looser and more concise, if that makes any sense. My florid excesses still got the better of me at times.
There's a level of casual cruelty in these novels that's still shocking. How and why did you go about creating this disturbing vision?
All I can say is that the character of Cley originally presented himself to me that way—as a real asshole. I was thinking of certain people in government, overcome by their own sense of importance and power. Some reviewers and readers wanted Cley to remain this way throughout the books, but for me that was too boring. No change in the protagonist, and you haven't got much of a story. The jou
rney of the trilogy turned out to be about him growing as a person, coming to value other people and coming to understand his own humanity. None of this was planned out, but that's where he led me. Also, there's a very dark, sort of ironic, sense of humor that runs through the entire trilogy that I'm aware is there, was aware of in the writing, but can't explain it or say where it came from.
Did you know you were going to write a trilogy before you started the first book? If so, could you talk about creating the arc of the trilogy? If not, what spurred you to write the two sequels to The Physiognomy?
I conceived of it in three books because I wanted to show Cley's story from three different perspectives. Perspective and perception seemed to hook up for me when considering the idea of Physiognomy. Why three? I don't know, but I felt that two wouldn't have been enough to get the reading I wanted and four would have been ridiculous. There's something about 3. The first book is from Cley's perspective, the second has Cley immersed in the perspective of the other, and the third shows Cley in third person, at a bit of a distance, lost in the Beyond. There are a lot of threads that weave these books together, but I think you could probably read them as separate novels as well. Working on a trilogy, at the time, was fun and seemed wonderfully complex, but I don't think I'd want to write more than one. There are other kinds of storytelling structures that interest me now.
The Well-Built City trilogy seems far more timeless than most fantasy and, indeed, most literary fiction. Can you comment on any intentional techniques you employed to scrub this work of references that would date it?
I don't remember anything intentional, but the story presented itself to me so vividly that the world of it seemed pretty real. I saw it clearly. The story was looking out for itself in that regard. I think partially that ‘timelessness’ you mention comes out of my interest at the time in ‘fabulation'. That's an interesting aspect of that type of fiction. In the classical form the Fable also has a definite message to convey, though. I always found that aspect of the form a drag. I wanted to separate out the sense of timelessness and leave the necessity of a definitive message behind.
Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #220 Page 14
