Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews

by John Grant

  Another emotional/psychological setup that has great potential for interest comes in "Approaching Perimelasma". Here a miniaturized (to minimize tidal effects) human clone is sent into a black hole to observe all the wacky consequences of the laws of physics. The contents of the clone's mind are a necessarily simplified version – to save space in the miniature brain – of the mind of a full-size human principal, downloaded into it. The clone bears considerable resentment towards the full-size version of himself, who possesses memories and mental/emotional capabilities which he himself does not. The problem here is that the reader never quite believes in that resentment, or at least that it would be experienced by this particular protagonist.

  It would be unkind and unjust to describe Landis's handling of the psychological situations in any of these three stories as clumsy – although it most certainly is in tales like "Elemental", which is a bit of an embarrassment despite having been nominated for a Hugo (Landis himself notes: "I have mixed feelings about it [the story] now"), and the title story, "Impact Parameter". Rather, it is somewhat rudimentary, as if Landis were making a very creditable stab at working out the art of characterization from first principles.

  Yet this is not the case. Although "A Walk in the Sun" dates from 1991, "Into the Blue Abyss" is a 1999 story and "Approaching Perimelasma" a 1998 story – in other words, both are relatively recent. Of the two finest stories in the collection one, "Snow" dates from 1998 and is thus again quite recent in Landis's career, but the other, "Across the Darkness", is from 1995 – and both, especially the former, derive their impetus almost entirely from their exquisite handling of characterization, emotion, atmosphere and, in the latter case, the dynamics of human relationships. Another fine piece of character work, "Dark Lady", comes from, again, 1995. So it is very evident Landis does indeed know how to do it, and can do it superbly; where for some reason he has difficulty is in matching this depth to hard sf – because none of these three is essentially a hard sf story.

  (A special mention should be made of "Snow". Less than five pages long, it is one of the finest sf stories this reviewer has read in a while. Why this brilliantly beautiful miniature hasn't been showered with every award imaginable is a matter beyond understanding.)

  To say it once again, hard sf can get by without many of the elements demanded of other genres and subgenres of fiction: the ideas are the thing, and assuming they take wing then the rest becomes merely ancillary. In that context, Impact Parameter is an excellent collection, and certainly it makes highly enjoyable reading. Landis is currently a very good writer; the impetus for much of the criticism expressed above is that the stories in this book show how exceptionally, how spectacularly good he very nearly is, how very close he comes to transcending the self-imposed limitations of hard sf.

  —Infinity Plus

  Dead Man Riding: A Nell Bray Mystery

  by Gillian Linscott

  St Martin's Minotaur, 320 pages, hardback, 2002

  In the opening year of the 20th century, six free-thinking Oxford University students and a tutor go on a reading holiday on the Cumberland farm of the great-uncle of one of them. On arrival, they discover that their host, a cantankerous eccentric who's a disturbing step or two more free-thinking than themselves, is under suspicion of murdering the son of a local worthy. Soon this seems almost trivial in light of the shifting relationships among the visitors themselves, and the discovery by at least some of them that the free love they've long theoretically advocated is in practice both more and less than they'd thought.

  Then, one early morning, our narrator, Nell Bray, encounters Great-Uncle James's prized stallion running through the dawn mists with Great-Uncle James tied into its saddle, dead. However hard the visitors try to persuade themselves that the Old Man (as they call him) might have chosen to commit suicide in the manner of his favorite Byron poem, it is obvious to Nell there must have been foul play ...

  There is a very great deal to recommend about this book. The principals – the students, the tutor, the Old Man, the Old Man's mistress, the Old Man's taciturn gypsy horseman – are all fully created, and the relationships between them are engrossing. The solution to the mystery – or, rather, to a little cluster of mysteries – is made more difficult for Nell and her friends because it depends on knowledge that well raised English people in the late-Victorian age deliberately concealed from themselves; in theory this ought to make it easier for us to spot what's going on than for Nell, and in many ways it does, yet at the same time Linscott very skillfully plays with our supposedly more sophisticated awareness to render the solution still tantalizingly obscure. A further piece of auctorial skill is that we come away from the book liking different characters than the ones we'd expected at the outset to find ourselves liking. And Nell herself is a delightful companion through it all, with her sharp perceptions and her able way of capturing personalities, atmospheres and scenes.

  And yet ... and yet the book is actually quite remarkably hard to read.

  Why?

  The answer's almost ludicrous. If ever I'm asked again by a tyro writer why I stress the importance of the humble comma, I shall hold up Dead Man Riding as a ghastly demonstration of my point (pardon the pun). Linscott's attitude towards commas appears to be that a writer should, well, stick one in every now and then. As a consequence, several hundred times while reading this not very long novel I had to pause, frustratedly, to parse a sentence or phrase in order to work out what the heck Nell was trying to tell me before I could move on. If you can be bothered with such an exercise, then you'll find this text well rewards your labors. But for many I suspect the obstacle will prove too great.

  —Crescent Blues

  i-o

  by Simon Logan

  Prime, 110 pages, paperback, 2002

  This is a strange and original book, likely to appeal very strongly indeed to some and completely repel others. According to its form and its cover copy it's a collection of short stories, but the stories are so much of a piece – even though not overtly linked – that it's hard to see the text as other than a series of windows out onto a uniquely bleak, definitively mechanistic worldview.

  The typical narrator here is a brutally cyborgized individual – presumably originally human but just as plausibly originally machine, or perhaps always a mixture, perhaps even without a physical machine component but nevertheless so dehumanized that fleshliness is irrelevant – forced by unnamed, unknown, unknowable masters to persist in a self-destructively banal, repetitive task that, at least from the narrator's limited knowledge, is no more than an exercise in terminal futility. The passions these creatures display amid devastated landscapes of emotional barbarity are at one and the same time derived from human ones and quite divorced from them.

  Here are a couple of brief extracts that seem to me to epitomize the book and that may explain, by example, more clearly the ethos of the whole:

  The machine was perfect, as it always had been, the production line endless and unflawed. It built the builders, an endless stream of mass-produced gods, their own creators, their own destroyers. [from "partofit"]

  and

  In a few hours she will be screaming and clawing once more at her pneumatic prison but for now she is as peaceful as depression itself. The great steel rods that breathe for her slide in rhythmical patterns all around the massive contraption, hissing at me and spewing hot greasy steam at odd angles. Rusted cogs turn in aged circles, grinding against one another, sparking. Differently coloured fluids pulse through thin copper veins.

  I kiss the glass before her lips and whisper a prayer of solitude to her as she stirs ever so slightly on her ice-white pillows. [from "iron lung"]

  This is a short book, which is a good thing; the intensity of Logan's vision is such that it's hard to take more than a short book's worth of it. By its end you may find yourself revelling in revulsion, laughing with hatred, as if somehow your emotional reactions had been unplugged from their appropriate areas of the brain and then the plugs
replaced in all the wrong sockets. It's a matter for individual readers whether they'll enjoy such a mentally dislocating experience. In the end this particular reader couldn't decide one way or the other, but was left filled with admiration for Logan's ambition in achieving this effect.

  Aside from those deliberate irritations that Logan deploys as instruments in his grating, rasping, tearing orchestra of the dehumanized imagination, there's one irritation that this book could have done without: the text is appallingly proofread. Perhaps the only proofing was done by a computer spellcheck ... which would have a certain thematic appropriateness but is inexcusable nonetheless.

  You won't forget the ambience of this book in a hurry, although the details of the different events and scenarios within it soon become blurred one with another. You may wish you had; and you may decide to avoid i-o rather than risk such an outcome. What fantasy should really be all about is taking such risks.

  —Infinity Plus

  Fantastic Tales

  by Jack London, foreword by Philip José Farmer, edited by Dale L. Walker

  University of Nebraska Press, 223 pages + x, paperback, 1998

  This is a direct photographic reprint, complete with irritating minor typographical errors, of a 1975 publication originally called Curious Fragments: Jack London's Tales of Fantasy Fiction; the only change, apart from on the copyright and title pages, is that the running heads have been deleted from all the left-hand pages so that the old title no longer appears there. I make a point of all this because whoever was responsible for preparing this book for press has omitted to alter the original title where it appears in Walker's interesting Introduction; this reader at least was baffled by a couple of the sentences therein until he checked in a Jack London bibliography and realized what had happened. There is also confusion here as to whether this reprint is published by the University of Nebraska Press (title page) or Bison Books (spine and copyright page). So, while one welcomes the reissue of the collection, the welcome is qualified.

  Although not well published, the collection is an interesting one – interesting rather than entirely enjoyable, in fact, because in the case of some of the stories there is good reason why they are rarely if ever reprinted. Moreover, London was no great master of the short-story form: almost without exception, the best pieces in the collection are not so much stories as what we could describe as fictional histories – straightforward narratives, sans characters, sans dialogue, and essentially sans plot.

  The prime examples of this form are "The Enemy of All the World" (1908) and "Goliah" (1908). The two narratives are rather similar, in that each is concerned with a mysterious genius who initiates large-scale mayhem through the application of his secret technological discovery; in the former case the perpetrator is adjudged evil, in the latter a benefactor (he smashes eggs to make the omelette called World Peace And Human Happiness), so the near-juxtaposition of the two tales, printed almost next to each other in this book, leads one to ruminate on what precisely is the difference between good and evil – a debate that was presumably running through London's mind as well, since the two stories were published in the same year. "The Enemy of All the World" gains an additional fascination because of the passage of time: there is an extensive discussion of the physical and mental abuse to which the central psychopath was subjected during childhood, and his psychopathy – his mental illness – is plainly attributed by the author to this. London's irony is that his narrator seemingly approves of the mass murderer's execution in the electric chair while at the same time recounting all the evils done to him by others that have made him mentally ill in the first place; this double standard, whereby it is somehow ethical to kill the mentally sick for the crimes they have committed through their sickness yet evil of them to have been made sick and thereby committed crimes, is merely presented by London rather than overtly commented upon. It is a double standard that still plagues modern US society.

  The longest piece in this book, "The Scarlet Plague" (1912), is almost certainly the best known. Once again it is largely a fictional history, but this time it has a frame, being ostensibly told by an oldster of the future, decades after the eponymous plague has wiped out all but a handful of humankind, to the children of what has reverted to a Stone Age society. The frame adds considerable power to what might otherwise seem a rather unaffecting narrative despite its recounting of deaths by the million.

  London, as will be evident, was not afraid to write of large-scale carnage. Indeed, this is an astonishingly bloodthirsty collection, four of its fifteen pieces being concerned with vast loss of human life and violent death being central to most of the others. One of the mass-slaughter fictions, "The Unparalleled Invasion" (1910), is a truly nauseating piece of work, saturated with the astonishing (for a self-professed socialist) racism that appears elsewhere in London's work and yet which goes, surprisingly, unmentioned in Walker's commentary: in this future history the Chinese, guilty of being yellow, slant-eyed and inscrutable and of talking funny, are becoming increasingly important in the world through a peaceful territorial expansion driven by rising population; the other races therefore hem China about with military force, so that none may escape, and use bacteriological warfare to annihilate her entire population. One seeks desperately for the slightest redeeming trace of irony amid the general narrative jubilation over this successful act of racially inspired genocide, but nowhere is it to be found.

  In Walker's introduction to "A Thousand Deaths" (1899) we find a clue to such enormities of attitude. London received $40 from The Black Cat for this poorly constructed tale (at the heart of its plot is an unbelievable and utterly unnecessary coincidence) of a scientist who discovers how to reanimate the dead. This fee saved the young writer's bacon: Overland Monthly had been paying him a miserly $5 to $7.50 for significant Klondike tales, and as a result he was broke. Initially we wonder, in this context, why London didn't overnight decide to become a pulp writer of sensationalist fictions; on second thought, however, we realize this is essentially what to a great extent he already was – and remained. His natural market was indeed more The Black Cat than Overland Monthly. Despite his socialism, despite his visionary streak, despite his occasional brilliant mastery of prose (not much, to be honest, evident in this collection), he had at heart the sensibilities of a pulp writer – and unlike, for example, Raymond Chandler he was rarely really able to transcend them. Hence the ability to couch sensationalist events successfully in fictional histories but not in genuine short stories; it is perhaps significant here that by far the most successful short story in this collection, "War" (1911), is in no sense a fantastication (indeed, it's puzzling why it was included at all).

  This collection could do with either more or less accompanying critical apparatus: there is not enough for the scholar and mildly annoyingly too much for the casual reader. One item from Walker's commentary causes a grin of disbelief at its partisanship: because the date 1984 is mentioned in passing in "The Scarlet Plague" and in a footnote to The Iron Heel (1907), is it not possible that George Orwell, who in 1945 wrote an introduction to a collection of London's tales, selected this date for his great satire? But, such reservations aside, Walker is to be congratulated for having done a reasonable job. For London at his best, however, one should really turn to the novels.

  —unknown venue

  Silence and Shadows

  by James Long

  Bantam, 407 pages, paperback, 2002; reissue of a book originally published in 2001

  Once upon a time archaeologist Patrick Kane was renowned punk rocker Paddy Kane – a rock star with a secret, in fact, because the industry moguls were convinced he would lose his sexy image if it were to be publicly known he had a wife and infant son. As fame went increasingly to his head – not to mention the booze, and the groupies, and the drugs – so he listened more to the bean-counters' lies, until eventually, at the height of an internationally televised charity concert, he sang a hate-song targeted at his wife. Almost immediately afterwards he re
alized both what he'd done and what he'd become, and resolved to abandon the rock-star life. That was when the news reached him that his wife had, in the aftermath of watching the concert on tv, either carelessly, through anguish, or deliberately driven her car to the bottom of a river, killing both herself and their son.

  Ever since then, Kane has been on the run from his guilt and his grief. Resurrecting the archaeology he studied at university, he has got himself a job with a seedy commercial archaeological outfit, and to his surprise he has been put in charge of a dig in rural Oxfordshire.

  That dig, to uncover a Roman mosaic floor, is sabotaged by an unscrupulous land developer, but a mysterious local, Joe, who can sing but not speak, guides Kane to an immediately adjacent site – that of a rare Saxon-period barrow. Through a mixture of song and archaeology, slowly the story is pieced together of the occupant of that barrow, a woman who died defending the villagers from murderous attackers. While excited by the results of the dig, Kane is disconcerted by the passing resemblance Joe's sister Bobby, herself mourning a dead lover, has to his dead wife Rachel. But his obsession is less with her than with the seventh-century woman who was known in the vicinity as the German Queen and whose story, like her bones and funerary artefacts, is emerging from the grave.

  Silence and Shadows is not really either fantasy or science fiction – although archaeology is of course a science, that aspect is not stressed – and yet one can hardly imagine that any devotee of the fantastic genres could do anything other than adore this book. That distinctive fantasy frisson runs right through it, so that we have the feeling of being constantly close to the line that divides reality from the Other – rather as in many of the nonfantasies of Peter Dickinson.