by John Grant
Cain does not stop his psychopathic career at the rape of Seraphim. Less than a year later he moves on to murder, the victim being his fairly recent bride; he fakes her death as an accidental fall from a rickety tower and is awarded millions in an out-of-court settlement by the authorities whose task it should have been to keep the tower in a proper state of repair. Not all are entirely convinced by Cain's explanation, among them his lawyer, Simon Magusson – seemingly seedy but in fact with a moral core – and most particularly a maverick homicide detective, Thomas Vanadium, who can make coins (quarters) disappear in a seemingly sleight-of-hand trick that in fact is real: he has accidentally learned the knack of flicking the coins into parallel universes. (As an aside, this offers a wry counter-explanation of the celebrated Randi-Geller dispute: what if it's not Geller who's doing conjuring tricks but Randi who's performing paranormal feats?) Vanadium hears Cain talking in his sleep, and discovers that the murderer has a subliminal fixation on the name Bartholomew – a fixation that he begins to exploit after Cain has very nearly killed him. Cain, you see, believes that he has killed Vanadium, rather than, in actuality, putting him into a months-long coma; and it is because of this false assumption that Cain's psychopathic career begins to unravel; tormented by occasional, deliberately staged glimpses of Vanadium's "ghost", by incongruously "materializing" quarters and by snatches of a meaningful song "spectrally" broadcast into his luxury apartment, he becomes obsessed with the notion that the child born of his rape must have been a boy called Bartholomew, the murder of which infant will bring him release from all the "paranormal" persecution he is suffering.
As they grow through infancy, both Bartholomew – who proves to be a child prodigy – and Angel discover they have Vanadium's ability to interact with parallel universes, only much more so; in Bartholomew's case this becomes even more pronounced after, at the age of three, he must have his eyes surgically removed to halt the spread of retinal cancer. To help him move about without accident, he can let his mind briefly camp in closely similar realities where he was never stricken by the cancer and so still possesses his sight.
Cain is the star of the show. Koontz is obviously irritated by the fallacy perpetuated in almost all serial-killer chillers that serial killers are phenomenally intelligent – all Hannibal Lecters. In real life this is total nonsense: serial killers are almost always pretty dimwitted but their psychopathy leads them to believe themselves to be more intelligent by untold orders of magnitude than the "common herd"; this false belief is what leads them to getting caught, usually through repeated acts of thundering stupidity. Koontz, going against the literary trend but more accurately reflecting reality, portrays Junior Cain as an exceptionally stupid and gullible, if at the same time cunning and certainly lucky, psychopath, and he does so through often hilarious, laugh-out-loud satire. Cain has pretensions to Culture, and is completely hoodwinked by the stances of the bad modern-art cliques of the late 1960s: no painting is acceptable to him unless it is utterly hideous, preferably stomach-churningly so, and thus he squanders much of his ill gotten gains on the dire but fashionable artworks produced by idiot poseur Sklent. In his sexual life, Cain, physically handsome but affectingly vile, is convinced of his magnificence as a lover and that he is completely irresistible to women; he is perplexed by the fact that so few of his ex-lovers ever plead with him for a reconciliation and by the way so many of the women lusting after him play the game of pretending to resist, but chooses to dismiss these facts as just quirks of happenstance. And throughout everything he is guided by the ludicrous but bestselling self-help writings of the crackpot guru Cyrus Zedd, which have titles like Act Now, Think Later and which advise that one should live always in the future, never in the present or the past. As example, Zedd's prescription for the recovery of lost memories is to stand in a cold shower for as long as it takes, tightly pressing a fistful of ice cubes to the genitalia. Cain discovers that the technique does indeed eventually help him recover a specific lost memory, and thereafter, for some reason, he becomes generally much better at not forgetting things. There are other books in Cain's library – almost all purchased from the Book of the Month Club, of which he is inordinately proud to be a member – but somehow he has never quite had the time to read more than a page or two of any of them, obviously believing that, through their very possession, he has transformed himself into Literary Man through some sort of osmotic process.
But Cain is not the only character in this long and much-woven novel to leap out of the page and permanently imprint on the mind. Celestina White is another delightful discovery. A highly talented artist, she becomes successful creating paintings of the type that Cain has learnt to detest and despise: only morons could like paintings that uplift the heart and display brilliant technique, after all. More to the point, having initially, briefly hated the baby whose birth "killed her sister" – the newborn who, while half the offspring of the loved Seraphim must also be half the offspring of the deservedly loathed (but unidentified) rapist – takes her in and sacrifices much to be an ideal mother to her. It might sound as if Celestina could read as a nauseatingly good goodie (and the portrayal of Agnes Lampion does on occasion veer this way), but in fact she emerges as a charming and extremely intelligent woman, someone one wishes one had as a best friend. While it is hard to control a grin of derision, if not outright laughter, when Cain is at centre stage, in Celestina's case it is hard to control a warm grin of affection.
As noted parenthetically, the depiction of the one-woman charity movement Agnes Lampion is less successful, and, oddly, the same can be said for the unkillable cop and retired priest Thomas Vanadium, who really should be the tale's Immutable Force of Good. Perhaps part of it is to do with the name. As will be obvious, there's quite a lot of coding going on in terms of the book's names: Cain, the black Whites, Simon Magusson, Angel, Bartholomew, and so on, and this is by no means limited to the central characters. But Vanadium – harder, of course, than steel ...? It's a highly artificial surname, and the effect is a bit hokey, damagingly so in that it colours our perceptions of the rest of Vanadium's characterization, which would be just on the verge of clichéd caricature even without the name, which pulls it (only slightly) too far in that direction. It's possible, of course, that this was a deliberate gambit on Koontz's part – to set a caricatured Force of Good against his inspiredly caricatured Force of Evil – and certainly in the rest of the novel Koontz displays a sufficiently attuned intelligence that this may very well be the case, but in this instance, at least for this reader, it is a minor irritation rather than an effective literary stratagem.
Fantasy, technofantasy, science fiction, chiller thriller or comedy of manners? From the Corner of His Eye is all of these, to a greater or lesser extent. Although it has occasional clumsinesses (almost inevitable in such a very long novel) – the final, inevitable despatch of Junior by the kids is, for example, hurriedly and rather flatly done – these are just about irrelevant in the context of the whole, which is a splendid achievement. Do not be deceived by the book's trumpeted bestseller status, or by the bizarrely misleading blurb, or by any memories you might have (no need for cold showers and ice cubes here) of early experiences with Koontz's novels: give this one a try.
—Infinity Plus
Fury
by Henry Kuttner
Gollancz, 208 pages, paperback, 2000; reissue of a book originally published in magazine form 1947 as by Lawrence O'Donnell
When I was in my teens and still at school, I was an addict of the paperback-remainder bins that were in every Woolworths, for there one could find countless sf and fantasy books at a trivial cost, mainly US remainders dumped in the UK. It was thanks to those bins that I built the nucleus of an excellent sf/fantasy library. (It was also thanks to them that I became an avid fan of Richard Powers's cover art, but that's another story.) There I discovered many US authors I'd never before heard of, one of the most notable being Henry Kuttner, whose Bypass to Otherness (1961) I still regard as one of the best s
tory collections ever published, in any genre; I re-read my copy several times, and pressed friends and relatives to read it, until finally it dropped to bits.
Among the other authors who impressed me at the time were two, Lewis Padgett and Lawrence O'Donnell, who seemed to have something of the Kuttner flair, although in my youthful critical opinion they weren't as good. It came as a considerable shock, years later, to discover that Kuttner, Padgett and O'Donnell were one and the same person.
Or, rather, two and the same person. For all three names (and others besides) were used largely for collaborations between Kuttner himself and his wife, Catherine L. Moore. Fury was one such collaboration, and is perhaps their most famous effort. To the teenager that I once was, however, it was actually a disappointment: I expected from the title some magisterial tale, as hot or as cold as fire, and instead found a novel that was really more about political machination than anything else. Coming back to it decades later has been an interesting experience.
The tale is this: Mankind has destroyed Earth in an atomic blaze. Centuries later, the survivors live in great domed colonies (Keeps) at the bottom of the oceans of Venus, confined there because wild animals and plants make the planet's land surface unremittingly hostile. Human society is stagnant through lack of the need to struggle, and it is clear to a few that the species is on its slow way out. Matters are not helped by the presence of a ruling caste of Immortals (not in fact immortal but rendered exceptionally long-lived as a heritable consequence of the atomic wars on Earth), who, with a perspective of centuries, have a habit of perpetual procrastination.
To one of these Immortals, Blaze Harker, is born a son, Sam. The mother dies in the birthing, and in grief Blaze has the baby hideously mutilated and cast adrift among the (mortal) plebs, where he grows up unknowing of his heritage. He becomes a petty and then a major criminal, with a strong psychopathic bent. He also, purely for commercial reasons, becomes fired with the idea that humanity should claim and colonize the land surface. This project Sam powers by large-scale deception and subterfuge, until finally it is brought to fruition as the first stepping stone towards humanity's destiny among the stars.
Fury is, essentially, the biography of Sam Harker.
The most striking thing about this half-century-old novel is how modern it seems: shift the scene to a hostile planet other than Venus, remove one or two incongruous gender asides (Sam realizes he is repelled by one woman because she displays the aggressive self-confidence that really ought to be the province of men alone), and add a heap of cusswords plus a couple of detailed gratuitous sex scenes, and this could easily be a novel written in the 1980s or any time afterwards, right up until the present day. The politics are simplified, but that's true in (almost) all political novels. The human relationships are depicted in a generally adult fashion that contrasts starkly with the adolescence permeating most pulp novels of the 1940s and indeed for some decades afterwards. And the Kuttner/Moore combo succeeds in a trick that is remarkably sophisticated in both intention and attainment for fiction of that era: although the murderous, wholly self-interested Sam is as dislikable a figure as many a fictional villain, we somehow end up identifying with him, rooting for him.
The teenage me was wrong in his disappointment. This is a fine novel.
There are carps to be carped about this edition, however. First, it seems odd in a self-styled collectors' edition to maintain the lie that this was a solo effort by Kuttner; why not bill the authorship properly, and give Moore her share of the credit? The information that it was a collaborative work is tucked away on the back flap, but really it should be on the front cover. Second, the frequent typographical errors retained from the original Gollancz printing are a profound irritation, as are some crazily positioned line-spaces.
Some of them practically mid-sentence. If this is to be a collectors' edition, then such blemishes should have been erased. There is no cosy glow of nostalgia on encountering yet another blasted typo; instead there is the profound feeling that one's being short-changed – which of course is exactly the case, because the reason the corrections weren't made can only be because it would have cost money. Not very much money, to be sure; so it's kind of contemptuous to the readership that nothing has been done.
Still, the cover price is relatively modest, and if you've never read Fury it represents an excellent investment. If you merely need a copy for your shelves, you might perhaps be better searching the dealers for a second-hand copy of a different edition.
—Infinity Plus
Impact Parameter, and Other Quantum Realities
by Geoffrey A. Landis
Golden Gryphon, 340 pages, hardback, 2001
Geoffrey Landis is a working physicist (with NASA) and, according to the back flap of this book (I confess I haven't gone a-counting), the author of "over sixty published short stories and novelettes" plus one novel, Mars Crossing. Since his stories have been appearing since at least the mid-1980s and the novel was published as recently as 2000, it is evident that he's a member of one of that rare (although not excessively so) breed of sf writers distinguished in the short form but for some reason unwilling to do much with the long form. A collection of his short stories is therefore of particular interest, its publication an event worthy of some excitement.
Golden Gryphon have done him proud with Impact Parameter. This is an exceptionally nicely produced book, with a good, albeit somewhat atypical, Bob Eggleton cover, with attractive typography (that is unfortunately not quite matched by the standard of proofreading). It is a very handsome piece of publishing.
And what of the stories themselves?
Although he is reasonably versatile, Landis has the reputation of being primarily a hard sf writer, and the sixteen stories in this volume reflect that. In fact, it's probably a good idea to list the stories, since some are quite well known:
"A Walk in the Sun" (1991)
"Impact Parameter" (1992)
"Elemental" (1984)
"Ecopoiesis" (1997)
"Across the Darkness" (1995)
"Ouroboros" (1997)
"Into the Blue Abyss" (1999)
"Snow" (1998)
"Rorvik's War" (1995)
"Approaching Perimelasma" (1998)
"What We Really Do Here at NASA" (1994)
"Dark Lady" (1995)
"Outsider's Chance" (1998)
"Beneath the Stars of Winter" (1993)
"The Singular Habits of Wasps" (1994)
"Winter Fire" (1997)
(There are also a Foreword by Joe Haldeman, who is as always entertaining, generous and informative, and a very enjoyable Afterword by Landis himself giving some background info on the genesis of each story.)
That might seem like a uniformly impressive line-up of stories, kicking off proceedings with a Hugo-winning short to boot. But in fact the standard varies quite widely, not just conceptually but also in terms of credibility and of the stylistic ease of telling. "Elemental", for example, is a piece of (relative) juvenilia that might better have been excluded from this volume, and the same could be said of "What We Really Do Here at NASA", which is less a story than a squib that probably seems immensely funny to the author. That leaves us with fourteen stories that are worthy of serious consideration.
Almost all of the fourteen would normally be classified as hard sf. This is a subgenre that traditionally (rightly or wrongly) concerns itself less with character and subjectivity than with the scientific and/or technological ideas that drive the plot. That statement should not be misinterpreted: many hard sf stories include excellent character work and are deeply enriched by philosophical and/or emotional subtexts, or whatever, while many soft sf stories lack such graces. The point is that a hard sf story can get by without them.
And on occasion Landis is satisfied with this situation. In the hands of, say, Christopher Priest a story like "Rorvik's War" – in which technological illusion persuades a man he is fighting in a horrific mechanized war – would be a deeply moody, reflective and
affecting piece. In Landis's hands there is no real characterization at all: he is much more concerned with the pyrotechnics of the tale. It still stands up as a good tale: as just noted, hard sf can get by without the refinements.
In other pieces Landis is obviously much dissatisfied with the notion that hard sf must abjure the responsibilities of most other forms of fiction, and one can see him struggling to do something about it. Here he has greater and lesser success, depending on the story. In "A Walk in the Sun" (a woman is stranded on the Moon for a few weeks; reliant on her solar cells to survive, she walks right around the Moon so as to keep constantly in sunlight) the protagonist is heckled onward by visions of her dead sister; one applauds the effort to give the character depth, while at the same time shiftily feeling that this is somewhat Creative Writing 101.
A much more interesting emotional/psychological setup is presented in "Into the Blue Abyss". In this story, which is somewhat reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke's "A Meeting with Medusa" but arguably a lot better, two astronauts are sent plunging into the "seas" of Uranus. When they discover primordial life, it becomes in the strong political interest of one of the venturers to kill the other, the narrator, so that this finding will never be reported. The narrator's constant awareness of this is well handled. In fact all that happens is that the other explorer decides not to kill her and probably never had any intention of doing so, so that all the emotional build-up leads to no crisis: there is no onstage struggle of conscience on the part of the politically motivated explorer, no resolution of the interesting emotional situation but instead just a dissipation. Or was the threat entirely in the narrators' mind? The rejection of melodrama in favour of realism seems fine by me.
