by John Grant
Time Traveling with Science and the Saints can be recommended not just for your own reading but as a book you might like to give to any young adolescent of your acquaintance; it is easily readable enough and short enough even for younger children, but some of them might be seriously disturbed by the accounts of the antics of the Inquisitors and others. Whether we like it or not, our young people are bombarded at every turn by the seductions and indoctrinations of the religious, whatever their sect; I can think of no better gift to ensure that a youngster will at least be able to make up her or his own mind.
—Infinity Plus
Artifacts
by Mary Anna Evans
Poisoned Pen Press, 267 pages, hardback, 2003
Any author whose name so closely resembles the real name of George Eliot clearly has a lot to live up to ...
Faye Longchamp lives on the fringes of the law, or a little beyond them. She is a pothunter – which is to say, she digs illicitly for archaeological specimens in order to sell them on the black market. Her purpose is to keep body and soul together while, somehow, retaining possession of her ancestral home, Joyeuse, on Florida's Gulf of Mexico coast. Unlike many pothunters, she has in fact trained as an archaeologist, although circumstances forced her to drop out of her training before its end; still, Professor Magda Stockard is more than eager to hire her services for the occasional bona fide archaeological dig. At the moment Magda's team, Faye included, is engaged on a dig on a little archipelago called the Last Isles, offshore from Joyeuse; Faye is also pothunting on the side.
One night, two of the college students employed on the dig are murdered. Faye discovers, during her extramural activities, a skeleton dating from a few decades ago, and concludes the remains are those of Abigail Williford, whose disappearance, still unsolved, was a cause célèbre of its day. Unable for obvious reasons to report the matter directly to the law, she begins to research the case, while simultaneously, thanks to the chance discovery of an old journal, researching her own origins amid liaisons between slavers and slaves.
Soon it becomes evident to her that various local notables were more closely involved in Abigail's disappearance than they have ever publicly admitted. More old burials of murder victims are discovered by the members of the dig; it was in an attempt to prevent discovery of these that the two student archaeologists were shot. The murderer of Abigail and the others will clearly stop at nothing to avoid detection, yet Faye is driven to try to identify him before her own life becomes forfeit.
Artifacts is an extremely charming novel, and its central character – the mixed-ancestry Faye pluckily striving to survive despite the leviathan of the state and the schemings of a murderer – is enormously appealing. So too are some of the minor characters, notably her faithful friend Joe Wolf Mantooth, a simple-minded child-of-nature Native American. The journal extracts that pepper the text are engrossing in their depiction of the barbaric society that existed in Florida not so very long ago, when human beings depended for their very lives upon "owners" who could be either sadistic or benevolent. The depiction of Faye's emergent pride in her own ancestry, and hence in herself, is genuinely inspiring. The writing is smooth and the tale grips from beginning to end.
The only element of Artifacts that doesn't work so well is – oddly for a mystery novel! – the mystery itself, whose solution becomes reasonably obvious from about the halfway mark. Yet such is the charm of all the rest that this barely matters.
Read this book. You'll enjoy it.
—Crescent Blues
Fever 42
by Christopher Fahy
Overlook Connection Press, 332 pages, hardback, 2002
Every once in a while a novel comes along which jolts the senses so radically that it can be difficult for the reader to withdraw from the logic of the tale and return to the logic of the real world. Classic examples are Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and, perhaps paramount, Luke Rinehart's The Dice Man. And now there is Christopher Fahy's Fever 42.
Comparisons with The Dice Man are not out of order. Although there are extravagant differences between the two books, the feel of their narratives has some similarity and, more particularly, there is the same sense that the protagonist has a self-destructive bent the reader is only too willing to share. The Dice Man is the more mind-twisting of the two; Fever 42 gains its strength from being the more plausible and the more human. Where The Dice Man focused on the lunacy of permitting one's life to be governed entirely by chance, Fever 42 focuses on the lunacy born of understandable human failings.
42-year-old teacher Ted Wharton is stuck in a so-so job and marriage. He loves his wife, of course he does, even if she's exasperating and their sex life tedious. He loves his kids, of course he does, even if they're high-octane brats. And so on.
He's wrenched out of this by one of his students, class sex bomb Joy Dollinger; she aggressively seduces him, initiating a reckless affair. Though little more than a third of his age, she is far more sexually experienced than he is, and delights in educating him in the wilder and more inventive practices she knows – delights he's never even dreamed existed. They couple in seedy motels but more often in places where their exhilaration is intensified by the possibility of discovery, notably on school premises. His life becomes a maelstrom of porn videos and magazines, bizarre gadgetry ... and excitement, the excitement that's been missing from his life for too long. Wharton's is a midlife crisis par excellence.
Obviously, it's also a recipe for disaster. The liaison cannot forever go undiscovered; neither can the graphic polaroids and videos they've made of each other in flagrante delicto more flagrant than the most flagrant delictos many of us have attempted in the privacy of our own homes. Worse: Joy declares she loves Ted forever and persuades herself he's going to ditch his family and marry her, and when he declines to do so starts manipulating him by threatening to reveal the truth to all – particularly, of course, that she was legally underage when the boffing began. Before that, at least a hundred pages before Ted, we know his life is going to be destroyed; we want him to stop his frantic career toward catastrophe, and yet at the same time we know even more so that stop is the last thing we want him to do.
Sure enough, the inevitable calamity comes to pass. But Fahy manages very beautifully – without the slightest trace of cloy – to give Ted a redemption of sorts.
Ribald, erotic, hilarious, deeply serious and tragic, often all at the same time, Fever 42 is one of those rare books that restores our faith in the mainstream novel – and, strangely, in humanity.
—Crescent Blues
Through the Wormhole
by Robert J. Favole
Flywheel, 182 pages, hardback, 2001
Young Michael Banks and his best pal Kate are visited by the apparent ghost of an old horse-riding mentor of Michael's and given what purport to be virtual-reality kits yet which are in fact time-travel devices, made and supplied by a group called CyberTimeSurfers Inc. These have not been delivered for use as toys: it is important that Michael and Kate travel back to the time of the American Revolutionary War to save the life of Michael's ancestor John Banks, a soldier under Lafayette, as otherwise John's whole lineage, Michael included, will disappear from history. After various adventures, the kids succeed in their assigned task and within the allotted timespan.
Elements of the tale are of course pretty arbitrary. Most importantly, there is no real rationale presented as to why the task has suddenly become necessary – since Michael is already alive and kicking it's evident this particular timeline ain't bust, so why does it need fixing? Similarly, there's no reason given as to why CyberTimeSurfers should care at all whether Michael and all his ancestors back to John should survive rather than any other lineage; perhaps Michael or one of his descendants is going to do something important for the human race in the future – who knows?
There is a rationale for the book, though. This is a novel aimed at young adults – youngish young adults. Michael is a (male) Black American, Kate is a female (white) Am
erican. Michael is getting flak at school from his peer group because he is crazy keen on the honky sport of equestrian eventing. Kate, whose key sport is swimming, is on the verge of capitulating to the societal myth that there are theoretical – as opposed to artificial – limits to what women can achieve, as symbolized by her habit of funking out just before important school swimming races. Both, through their adventure in the past, learn to buck the imposed stereotypes and be – and be proud to be – what they most importantly are, irrespective of colour or gender: human beings. They discover their genuine identities.
This is a very attractively published book, complete with neat little maps to keep one in touch with events on the ground during the War of Independence adventures. The copy-editing is not quite what it should have been – "But the force of the blow had knocked John to the floor with such force that Michael had been yanked off his feet and pulled down on his back on top of John" – and the writing, which occasionally veers into didacticism, is as a whole rather flat: we are told about the musket fire but do not smell it; we are told about horseback chases but do not hear the thud of hooves or share the fear of the pursued. Nevertheless, this is a jolly enough tale to while away a few hours, and of course its subtexts, its messages, are important for its designated readership.
There is a further message. John Banks was a genuine historical personage, one of the relatively few Black freemen to fight for Independence during the Revolutionary War. In this book – as presumably was the case in reality – he does so because he believes that the best hope of all Americans, Black and White, lies in self-rule for the colonies. Of course, Blacks were to discover such beliefs were illusory; a long and bloody history of the oppression of Black Americans was to follow, and it is still the dismal case that, despite all legislative measures, they do not enjoy full equality – for one among many stark evidences of this we need look no further than at the comparative rates of capital convictions and executions between the different skin-colours. Of course, there's no reason at all to believe matters would have been any better, and they might well have been even worse in the shorter term, had the revolution failed and the British remained in power. Yet the ghost of John Banks, looking back from today, would surely be wondering bitterly exactly what it was he fought for.
Any reader of this novel will wonder the same – and it is good that they should do so. For this reason alone Through the Wormhole would be recommended reading.
—Infinity Plus
Pigtopia
by Kitty Fitzgerald
Hyperion, 247 pages, hardback, 2005
Jack Plum is a man of indeterminate age who has grown up under many burdens: his father disappeared many years ago; his mother is bedridden and viciously abusive; their poverty is worsened by his mother's alcoholism; and, most of all, he is hideously disfigured, so that other people try to have as little to do with him as possible and generally regard him as a moron. Denied human companionship, he has turned instead to friendships with pigs, whose language he believes he can understand. In the cellar of his home he has secretly constructed Pigtopia, a place where his adoptive family of pigs can live and where he can go whenever his mother is asleep to play with his friends and tell them stories.
Most of the kids in the neighborhood regard Jack as nothing more than the natural target for malicious taunting and sometimes worse, but one of them seems different. Jack falls in love from a distance with young Holly Lock. His is a pure love – he has no sexual designs upon her. During chance encounters with her, she reacts with fear and revulsion at first, but slowly she begins to realize that Jack's outward ugliness does not indicate any monstrosity of soul and eventually the two become the dearest of friends. Of course, they must keep their meetings in Pigtopia and their wild midnight forest rides on pig-back completely secret, for everyone is ready to think the worst of the neighborhood freak and they're bound to assume his relationship with Holly is pedophilic.
Yet the intrusions of the world cannot be kept at bay forever ...
Pigtopia is a love story, and in its way a very beautiful one. The characters of Jack and Holly are wonderfully created, and it's impossible not to be drawn into their world: one cares. The cover blurb ostentatiously drops the name of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but that does Pigtopia something of an injustice: this is a different and overall a better book. If there's a comparison to be made, it might be with Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory, although this again could be misleading: there's Grand Guignol in Pigtopia all right, but it's less prevalent and it's presented in a far gentler context than in Banks's novel – almost as if Banks had tried his hand at writing To Kill a Mockingbird.
That weird juxtaposition of comparisons points toward what is, at least for this reader, Pigtopia's only real demerit: even the diluted Grand Guignol seems irritatingly out of place. The love story, and its inevitable disastrous conclusion, would be more powerful and more moving without it. Quasi-paradoxically, the episodes of gruesome drama actually slow the narrative down – quite the reverse of what Fitzgerald presumably intended.
That's a relatively small quibble, though. The love story of Jack and Holly offers a gateway through which we can better understand the nature of our own humanity, and it engrosses in so doing.
—Crescent Blues
Galactic Rapture
by Tom Flynn
Prometheus, 500 pages, paperback, 2000
The reason why there are so many technological civilizations in the Galaxy, and why they're all human, is this:
Long, long ago an enigmatic supercivilization called the Harvesters went through the Galaxy. They came across the planet Earth, which happened to have proto-human beings at the top of the evolutionary chain. For purposes of their own the Harvesters took a sampling of proto-humans, food animals, plants, etc., from the Earth and used them to seed every other plausibly inhabitable planet in the Galaxy. The Harvesters then disappeared, presumably travelling on to repeat a similar act in the next galaxy along the line; however, a relic of their quondam presence might be the occasional, unpredictable appearance out of some alternate dimension of one of the Tuezi, vast and invulnerable death machines which, upon their popping into our reality, immediately proceed to devastate the nearest planetary system.
On all of the planets they seeded the Harvesters, for inscrutable reasons, programmed a minor sensory deficit into the population – the inability to see certain tricks of the light, for example. All except one: Earth. The humans from Earth have the complete range of senses. Another point of oddity about Earth humans is that some of them are white; the standard colour of the members of the Galactic Confetory is black.
Earth has been only recently discovered by the Confetory, and in the normal way, despite its unique status as the homeworld for all humanity, would have been placed under Enclave – that is, quarantined off from any outside interference because as yet far too socially backward. However, the complete sensory complement of the savages from Earth makes them ideally qualified to be Spectators – undercover operators who, loaded with bio-implants and transmitters galore, can move incognito among the barbarians of Enclave planets, broadcasting the full range of their experiences of sex, blood, torment, misery and mayhem for the titillation of the trillions of subscribers, Galaxy-wide, to the entertainment medium known as the senso.
Interdependent with the senso is Earth's other major export: religion. None of the other cultures in the Galaxy has been so foolish or illogical as to invent gods and god-worship, and the novelty of the notion has spread like a sort of senso-driven wildfire throughout the Confetory.
Top dog today – this is the middle of the 24th century – among the organized Earth religions is the Universal Catholic Church, with its headquarters on the planet appropriately named Vatican. Various revisions have been made to dogma over the years. At the trivial level, pederasty has been proclaimed not to be a breach of celibacy, and priests are encouraged to practice it. (Interestingly, this book was written through the decade o
f the 1990s, according to the author's note, and thus before the current cluster of pederasty scandals that's rocking the Catholic Church globally.) Even more significant is the doctrine of Serial Incarnation, which has it that Christ was not incarnated by God on just a unique occasion but has been or will be made incarnate once on each populated world in the Galaxy.
Mathematician Fram Galbior is a Galaxy-wide hero because some while ago he was able to calculate the exact time and position of each new appearance of a Tuezi; these otherwise indestructible death machines have a fleetingly short moment of vulnerability just as they first appear, so their threat can be nullified by having armed warships waiting in space for them when they arrive and blasting them as soon as they do. Now Galbior has performed a new set of calculations which apparently predict the next planet upon which Christ will incarnate and the approximate time (within a few decades) of that incarnation: the next emergence of Christ will be on Jaremi Four, and may in fact have already happened.
This is somewhat horrifying news for all concerned. Jaremi Four was a backward planet to begin with – even more primitive than Earth – but a Tuezi attack some decades ago has shot it back a good distance towards the Stone Age. Life is nasty, brutal and short there as countless local chieftains war upon each other, perpetrating the most revolting barbarities upon all around them. Even before the Tuezi attack, Jaremi Four had been one of the quarantined Enclave worlds; since the devastation there can be no question of the Enclave status being lifted – not for many generations yet.
