Looking back at these books now, could you talk about the new edition from Golden Gryphon and how having them published in a consistent format might change the reading experience for new readers?
I can't say enough what it means to have John Picacio do the covers for these. I think that alone enhances the trilogy. Each cover is a third of a large triptych he made in a box with paintings and objects he'd found. It's an incredible work of art, in and of itself, and I think the covers are spectacular. If you line them up, you can see the entire triptych complete. It was the publisher's, Gary Turner's, idea to do them in trade paperback, which I think was the way to go. They look great, and they're not too expensive. The consistent format is welcome to my mind because it lets people know that they are in some way connected. The old covers and formats didn't hint at a relationship between the books at all. I'm hoping more readers discover them and make it to the end of the journey.
Copyright © 2009 Rick Kleffel
* * * *
The Gabble And Other Stories
Neal Asher
* * * *
* * * *
Reviewed by Tony Lee
By his own admission, Neal Asher writes ‘Schwarzenegger SF', and many core themes of Runcible tales and the Cormac sequence in Asher's on-going series of Polity novels hark back to the nostalgia of pulp-era adventure, especially space opera by influential genre-giant A.E. van Vogt. In a milieu where interstellar treks are simplified by teleportation gateways, it's not unusual that Asher's first collection (from a major publisher) would spotlight expeditions—to various strange planets inhabited by even stranger creatures—related by viewpoint characters like admin monitors and security agents, scientific researchers, investigative journalists and outlaws.
This collection of vaguely or explicitly linked short fiction offers plenty of opportunities for homicidal feats with spectacular gore due to the widespread deployment of android golems, super-cyborgs, rail-guns/pulse-rifle shootouts, and exciting conflicts involving Asher's always-inventive brand of monsters. While uncovering the secrets of extinct races, perhaps hoping to benefit from others’ failures by decoding useful survival traits in the coldly indifferent universe, seeking acclaim for expanding human knowledge, or just making a living as scavengers and traders, at least some of Asher's competent heroes and ambitious villains learn things about themselves as well. Expedient backstory elements remain generally anti-corporate, and few stories here suggest any strongly imaginative, science fictional answers to political, diplomatic or acute social problems beyond the obvious extralegal remedies with an optimistic reliance on conventional morality.
Part climbing, part hunting story ‘Softly Spoke The Gabbleduck’ is the first of three dramas concerning a bizarre creature that first appeared in Asher's novel The Line of Polity. In ‘Putrefactors', systematic abuse of human colonists with symbionts results in a generation of slave labourers under a brutal regime. AI intervention breaks a planetary tyrant's covert oppression, with rough/poetic justice ending corrupt decadence, in ‘Garp and Geronamid'. Visiting ice planet Orbus, a documentarist witnesses the resurrection of a frozen race in ‘The Sea of Death'. ‘Alien Archaeology’ explores unfriendly rivalries between profiteers Rho and Jael, both after the rewards of dealing in Atheter tech, and its unique application to a captive gabbleduck specimen.
There's a further awakening of dormant alien tech in ‘Acephalous Dreams', when the node of a hive-mind implant forces unexpected changes upon a freed convict, in an experiment so dangerous that cautious overseer Geronamid only dares unleash its intriguing potential on an uninhabited world. Although most of Asher's work is roundly cynical in tone, ‘Snow in the Desert’ is darkly romanticised tragedy with an immortal albino hunted by mercenaries after DNA samples. ‘Choudapt’ starts with viral infection in Body Snatchers’ zombification mode, tackled by heroic agent Simoz, host for a doctor mycelia, confronting overwhelming odds, together. ‘Adaptogenic’ sees genetic transformation as the key to human survival for a treasure hunter/tomb raider caught in a tidal flood. Plenty of enticing details on gabbleduck origins are revealed by a hastily organised scientific mission for an unlikely team-up in ‘The Gabble', the open-ended (Asher promises more about gabbleducks in a future book) final story here, which also features an encounter with the Dragon-spawned dracomen.
Vividly described combat scenes are a given. Yet Asher's greatest authorial strengths also include a keen sense of ‘otherness', albeit one locked into braving the knife-sharp contrasts between honesty and injustice, troubled with boldly perceptive or surrealistic estrangements from wholly comforting normality, that's close as a heartbeat or distant as the farthest star.
* * * *
Agent to the Stars
John Scalzi
* * * *
* * * *
Reviewed by Juliet McKenna
Fans of Scalzi's ‘Old Man's War’ books will naturally pick this up in a bookshop. Reading the foreword, they may consider putting it back. Written in 1997, Scalzi had a modest success web-publishing this story but it still looks like a ‘trunk novel', those apprentice pieces every writer stores away. Later success frequently sees publishers rush these into print. Too often, the original reasons for rejection remain valid.
Hopefully, the equivocating reader will turn to the first page of the story. This swiftly reassures me the talent I've admired in the ‘Old Man's War’ books is at work. The prose is clean and direct, the pace swift and involving. There's that instinct for telling, quirky detail and a confiding, engaging first-person voice.
What's not immediately obvious is this is SF. We meet Thomas Stein, a mid-level Hollywood agent, representing actors from no-hopers through has-beens and divas to rising talents like Michelle Beck. He's currently securing her $14 million for a post-apocalypse action flick, aided by his invaluable, astute PA, Miranda. Michelle isn't entirely pleased. Her heart's set on playing a fortyish survivor of the Warsaw ghetto and concentration camps who becomes an American civil rights activist. Tom must convince her that's a step too far for a 25-year-old Californian blonde who thinks Treblinka is a shop on Melrose.
When the action-flick deal is done, Tom is summoned to see Carl Lupo, agency head and major Hollywood player. Understandably, Carl wants to discuss science fiction. As the conversation turns to the way aliens making first contact are so often hostile, Tom's happy to go with the flow. Evil aliens make better films. Good aliens means Batteries Not Included. But no, Carl isn't involved in some new studio SF project. He wants Tom to farm out his lesser actors, to commit himself to a secret client with major image issues needing delicate handling. Tom's instinct is to say no and go get drunk as his career implodes. Naturally, he says yes.
Unsurprisingly, the new client is an alien. The Yherajk, two thousand gelatinous beings, recently arrived in a hollow-asteroid spaceship. They've been observing our earth through film and TV and noted that bias towards aliens. They need a more subtle strategy than landing on the White House lawn. Not least, as Joshua, their representative accepts, because they look like snot and smell like dead fish. Can Tom possibly convince the public these new arrivals are friendly? When he's horribly disconcerted to learn they can exude tendrils fine enough to penetrate a human's brain, and their definition of selfhood is as alien as their appearance?
I won't give away the ending, though it won't surprise you. What will keep you guessing is Tom's journey. You'll be wrong-footed more than once. When you think you've understood one of the characters, from airhead Michelle Beck to sleazy tabloid journalist Jim Van Doren, and Carl Lupo himself, you'll learn something that demands you rethink your opinions. The sub-plot woven around that holocaust survivor film reinforces the subtext; that making assumptions, especially about those perceived as ‘other’ is foolhardy at best, disastrous at worst. Thus, while this is a very funny, essentially light-hearted novel, it remains true to the best traditions of serious speculative fiction. Not least that success must come at a cost. Be prepared for some real lump in the
throat moments amid the chuckles.
I've no idea why this wasn't conventionally published in 1997. Whatever. The time is right for it now. Entourage, Studio 60 and 30 Rock have made the backstage world of film and TV familiar. In-jokes will also delight true fans. Most welcome, in these dismal days, it's a feel-good book. Buy a copy for yourself and another to give as a gift.
* * * *
The Engine's Child
Holly Phillips
* * * *
* * * *
Reviewed by Mike Cobley
How specific can you be when writing something for others to read? Prose narrative offers a huge range of technique from the lyrically allusory to the driest functional style. Now, across that spectrum you can choose a degree of specificity about how you treat any particular aspect of your prose—inner character, outer character interaction, description, plot linearity, dramatic turning points, milieu, etc. Of course, I say ‘choose’ in the full knowledge that many (most?) writers write instinctively and many things are written that aren't what you would call chosen.
Holly Phillips comes across as a strongly instinctual writer, with an intense, highly lyrical grasp of the language, sometimes with a lateral, emotional element that reminds me quite strongly of Samuel Delany. In The Engine's Child her main character is Moth, a young woman who is a novice at the scholarium, part of the Bastion which, along with the Bay, make up the Shadras. The Shadras is the densely-populated city on the only island on the world of the book, while the farmlands of the island are called the Hadaras. The milieu of the book has a strong Indian/Thai flavour, and the depicted society are the descendants of those who came to this world after fleeing their home world, which had been ruined by some widespread catastrophe. To various parts and places of this society Phillips assigns a variety of names and implied connotations that seem opaque as many go unclarified. There is a glossary at the back, but it feels too short and lacking in explanation.
Which seems odd to me. There is a point near the start, on page 16, where Phillips gives a sketchy summary of the city's layout and its relationship with the countryside; at this point clarity and scale would help a reader to grasp the boundaries of this strange place but instead it comes across as vague and undefined. Sure, I realise that for some readers this isn't a problem, but it is for me. Just saying.
A similar vagueness arises during scenes of fast-paced drama and violent clashes. At the end of the first chapter, Moth encounters a manifest, literally a mechanical-seeming manifestation of the mysterious gods of the ocean world. But Phillips doesn't describe it, she alludes to it, almost impressionistically, so that we're left with the feeling that Moth has seen something crucial but we haven't. Same in the next chapter when Moth goes down the Tidal, a wide slum spread along the shore before the city, to where a secret gathering of the Mundabi (a select group who worship the gods of the ocean world) have met in a chamber containing the Engine. The Engine also seems to be a manifestation of these old gods and so this scene is our first sight of it, but again rather than description we get vague impressions.
Yet the details of inner and outer character are carefully and poetically delineated, with the nuances of emotion explored, motives picked over, dialogue freighted with clear meaning. Now, I know that some writers feel that their readers don't need to be handheld through the narrative, and that there should be considerable latitude allowed for readers to employ their own interpretation. Also, there are other writers who work hard to try and obscure the meaning and the answers from themselves out of fear that the story may come out as too obvious to be worthwhile. I don't know if Holly Phillips would fall into either of these categories, but that's no bad thing. She is a very lyrical writer, sometimes to the point of flying off on updrafts of intense imagery, and many readers find this kind of prose highly enjoyable. I've certainly found The Engine's Child to be an unclichéd, highly individualistic work executed with a flair and love of the language that makes for a memorable read. It just doesn't quite satisfy the clarity junky in me!
* * * *
* * * *
Christopher Priest has been writing fiction for more than 40 years. Best known as the author of The Prestige, he has built a wide and fervent audience for his complex and unsettling explorations of illusion, memory and deception. Andy Hedgecock selects some high points in Priest's career and reviews three new publications from GrimGrin Studio (christopher-priest.co.uk).
I have a shelf of ‘one-handed reading material'. I'm not confessing to a predilection for Nexus paperbacks: this is the stuff I read in the early 1980s, straphanging my way from Uxbridge to Amersham amid a salmon pink forest of carefully folded copies of the Financial Times. The book I remember most vividly in its Metropolitan Line context is Christopher Priest's The Affirmation.
There's a moment early in The Affirmation so utterly jaw dropping I can remember exactly where I read it first (rattling into Moor Park station). I won't spoil the effect for those who haven't encountered this strange and rewarding book, but it involves a massive shift in the reader's frame of reference and beliefs about the narrator. It's a delicately executed but momentous perceptual shift that only the most accomplished writers can pull off.
The Affirmation (1981) concerns a man failing to cope with unemployment, bereavement and the cataclysmic collapse of a relationship. He retreats to a remote cottage to make sense of his life by writing an autobiography. After renaming people and places—to kick over the real-life traces of his story—he becomes disenchanted with the memoir and begins to create a fantasy location, the Dream Archipelago, taking his narrator (himself) on a sea voyage to an island where memory is traded for the secret of immortality.
In its handling of psychological disintegration The Affirmation merits comparison with Poe at his best, and it scales empyrean heights in its adroit analysis of the boundaries of identity, the truthfulness of memory and the complex interrelationship of narrative and reality.
In the gap between The Affirmation and Priest's next full length novel, I was able to catch up with his back catalogue. Indoctrinaire (1970)—a tale of post-war ecological disaster and psychoactive pollutants—is written with the sharp focus strangeness that was to become the author's signature, but offers no hint of the thematic development of his later work.
The controversial Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972) was inspired by a question on the cover of New Worlds, ‘What is the exact nature of the catastrophe?’ Ominous and tragic, it concerns the arrival in Britain of vast numbers of African refugees. Priest's unflinchingly forensic reflection on race and asylum came when extreme nationalist organisations had a real foothold in British politics and redtop newspapers encouraged racist panic over the arrival of expelled Ugandan Asians. Some liberal reviewers saw the book as an insightful and humane reflection on fear and its impact on human behaviour; others dismissed it as a racist allegory. Priest's intention was to highlight the real nature of the catastrophe—brutality as a response to calamity. It is a powerful analysis of the fragile nature of compassion and civilisation, but the resurgence of the far right in Britain and the crass discussion of race in the tabloids mean this discomfiting book still provokes ambivalent reactions.
Inverted World (1974) is Priest's most ‘traditional’ sf novel but its themes prefigure those of his later slipstream novels. The central motif is a city which lays and disassembles track as it travels across a despoiled landscape, but its focus is the provisional nature of reality.
With A Dream of Wessex (1977) Priest returned to his recurring theme of perception as construction: it is 1983 and Britain is a dystopia destabilised by terrorism, social disintegration and economic collapse. If that makes the book sound like a prophecy of the ‘real’ 1983, there are more baroque elements to the setting—for example, an Islamic America and a Wessex separated from the mainland by man-made geological catastrophe and a collective dreaming project (virtual reality avant la lettre) designed to generate solutions to the socio-economic ills of the ‘real’ Britain. This was P
riest's breakthrough book—an intricately inventive thought experiment and a powerful social satire.
Critical expectations of The Glamour (1984) were huge because Priest had been named one of the ‘Best of Young British Novelists of 1983’ along with Amis, Rushdie and Tremain: he was the only writer on the list to be marketed as a genre author. He ploughed familiar furrows to great effect: The Glamour blends the stock sf motif of invisibility with a dash of psychological horror and creates a haunting metafiction about memory and enchantment. Priest also scripted an interesting Radio 4 adaptation of the book.
The Prestige, winner of the 1995 World Fantasy Award and Priest's best known novel, is a multi-layered tale of competing 19th Century illusionists and their historical legacy. It is a magical cabinet of epistolary and diary forms, fragmented perspectives, spectacular deception and metaphysical speculation. Form is perfectly in concert with subject matter, as Priest explores profound issues of identity, reality and artifice.
The Extremes (1998) examines the impulses underlying spree killings. A harrowing and provocative reflection on the insidious lure of violence, it also reflects on the impact of internet technologies and virtual reality on the human psyche and the way we make and interpret our world.
Priest's most recent novel, The Separation (2002), is an alternate history of World War II concerning twin brothers—a conscientious objector and bomber captain respectively. He exhibits a continuing fascination with doubles and the fluidity of identity, as well as a forensic eye for complex issues of morality. And he takes perceptual relativity to a whole new level, pulling the rug from under the notions of history and belief.
Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #220 Page 15
