Locus, June 2013

by Locus Publications

  This time we meet Marcus, now something of a hacker celebrity, at Burning Man, which he is attending with his girlfriend Ange, and which is described in such vivid reportorial detail that it occupies nearly a fifth of the novel. He also meets up again with his old nemesis and former DHS operative Masha, who hands him a thumb drive filled with volatile secret information and asks him to release it should she disappear – which she promptly does, escorted off into the desert by the same coolly brutal henchmen who are Doctorow’s preferred agents of corporate and government malfeasance, and who had made Marcus’s life miserable in the earlier novel. But Marcus also accidentally meets Mitch Kapor, who shows up in a brief cameo (along with John Perry Barlow, Wil Wheaton, and John Gilmore) and later recommends him for a job as webmaster for the campaign of an idealistic independent Senate candidate named Joe Noss. The job proves a godsend not only for Marcus, but for his parents, who have lost their jobs in an economic collapse in California only a few shades darker than the real one (and who are considerably more sympathetic here than in Little Brother), but it also creates a dilemma: Marcus has promised Masha to leak the thousands of compromising documents on the thumb drive, but he’s also promised Noss’s campaign director to avoid any sort of publicity associated with his former notoriety. While he’s still poring over the documents – many of which involve a shadowy security agency called Zyz and which range from the government’s ‘‘lawful interception’’ policy to a conspiratorial plot to bankrupt millions through the manipulation of student loans – another anonymous group has already begun the leaks, sending taunting e-mails to Marcus trying to enlist him in their plans. Before long, Marcus finds himself once again up against Carrie Johnstone from Little Brother, at once the most nefarious and most persuasive villain Doctorow has ever created, and finds himself in the middle of a massive public demonstration that becomes a contest, brilliantly described, between government and guerrilla technology.

  Even though Homeland lacks the massive terrorist attack that set the dystopian plot moving in Little Brother, it’s actually more convincing and chilling for that very reason, and by the time the various conspiracies and counter-conspiracies get going (it takes a long time to get out of Burning Man), the tale offers as many pursuit-capture-escape thrills as the earlier novel, and, if anything, makes a stronger case for the sort of activism that Doctorow wants to generate in his younger readers, even though few of them are likely as well equipped with tech-savvy as Marcus (but then, I suppose most of Encyclopedia Brown’s readers never knew as much stuff as he did, either). What’s more unsettling is how close we’ve already come to the sort of dystopia Doctorow warns us about; as Aaron Swartz claims in his afterword, ‘‘This stuff is real.’’ It’s a little like reading a James Bond novel and discovering that you can Google SPECTRE and learn that it’s not only real, but that it owns your retirement plan. Doctorow may be inventing a new microgenre here – the samizdat YA novel – and while he might be its only exponent so far, it’s worth paying serious attention to, and not only for young readers.

  –Gary K. Wolfe

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: FAREN MILLER

  The Story Until Now, Kit Reed (Wesleyan 978-0-8195-7349-0, $35.00, 444pp, hc) March 2013. Cover by Joseph Reed. [Order from Wesleyan University Press, Middletown CT 06459; .]

  Space Is Just a Starry Night, Tanith Lee (Aqueduct 978-1-61976-031-8, $18.00, 256pp, tp) July 2013. [Order from Aqueduct Press, PO Box 95787, Seattle WA 98145-2787; .]

  Wisp of a Thing, Alex Bledsoe (Tor 978-0-7653-3413-8, $25.99, 352pp, hc) June 2013.

  Cold Copper, Devon Monk (Roc 978-0-451-41860-9, 386pp, tp) July 2013.

  The Rithmatist, Brandon Sanderson (Tor Teen 978-0-7653-2032-2, $17.99, 370pp, hc) May 2013. Cover by Ralph McSweeney.

  Two new collections, both by women who have been producing noteworthy novels and short fiction for many decades, show just how much can be achieved by a strong imagination that refuses to recognize the artificial boundaries of subject, tone, or genre. Kit Reed’s The Story Until Now, aptly subtitled ‘‘A Great Big Book of Stories’’, takes its 35 works from a long career that shows no sign of stopping – and goes all the way back to 1958, for the superb debut that ends this nonchronological gathering. Tanith Lee may have been in grade school back then, but the 14 selections in her own Space Is Just a Starry Night move between decades with equal impunity: eighties, aughts, nineties, one piece from 1979, and a couple of originals.

  Though neither author adds specific comments, my fellow Locus reviewer Gary Wolfe provides an excellent introduction to Reed, placing her self-proclaimed ‘‘transgenred’’ fiction outside the usual distinctions between literary, mainstream, and SF/F/H, and pointing to a remarkable ‘‘eclecticism… of themes and preoccupations,’’ along with character types and viewpoints, which nonetheless seems rooted in the primal relationships of family life (or their gaping absence, and the search for substitutes and surrogates in many forms).

  The book is roughly organized by life stages, starting with a medley of youth and early childhood at odds with agonized/clueless parents. These medleys are more loose groupings than clear sequences, though some elements could link one work to the next in a compare-and-contrast fashion. You can see this in the first seven stories (whose dates of origin I’ll give here just to indicate the diversity). After the drastic failures of teen, father, and mother to communicate or comprehend from their separate viewpoints in the moving, if essentially mainstream, opener ‘‘Denny’’ (2008), comes the outrageous SFnal monster in ‘‘Attack of the Giant Baby’’ (1976), where a lab scientist dad inadvertently sets the eponymous mutant horror rampaging through NYC, while its ghastly growth spurts continue. Harried parents may regard both forms of offspring as equally monstrous. The boy raised in the wild in ‘‘What Wolves Know’’ (2007) has a very different sense of the animal from the kid who draws strength and daring from a robotic beast in ‘‘Automatic Tiger’’ (the latter, from 1964, perfectly suited to the split creature on the book’s cover, right down to its intimations of doom), yet both protagonists reach a stage beyond childhood where they look past the human while they try to find themselves. An excess of self-confidence affects the smug young visitors to a new institution in ‘‘Wherein We Enter the Museum’’ (2011) and most of the urban teens in the strangely porous penal colony of ‘‘High Rise High’’ (2005) – places that both seem primed to explode, in one way or another. Back in the realm of solitary youth, ‘‘Piggy’’ (1962) moves from a brief classical allusion – think Pegasus, as stud – to a bizarre, pinkish modern hybrid that evolves from boyhood pet to something like a ghostwriter/muse. Though things can’t end well, for a time the rider manages to soar on a combination of delusion and inspiration, recycling the words and notions of our long literary past.

  The ultimate in individual disasters takes an irreverent turnaround in ‘‘Sisohpromatem’’ (check out the title backwards). But groups fare no better. When people try to cope with disease, unrest, and other potential preludes to apocalypse – or turn them to their own advantage – their households, small communities, and encampments can’t stand the test of time, or hold up under too much scrutiny. Fanatical hypochondria goes beyond joke to nightmare in ‘‘Precautions’’, while a more bizarre mania underlies the perpetual quest for an image of perfect harmony in ‘‘Family Bed’’. An attempted revolution of 20th-century women in ‘‘Songs of War’’ goes down in a turbulent sea of clashing egos and contrasting needs. You’ll laugh and cry, and wince at every razor-sharp insight.

  Further along, Reed casts such a clear eye on the depredations of old age that it would be downright unkind to end here, where even wry smiles can be hard to come by. But two more groupings, something like a postscript, provide conclusive evidence of Reed’s extraordinary range.

  An offbeat take on the future dominates the SF in several stories, and the humor works just as well as it moves
back into something more like myth, darkening and growing sharper in the multiple viewpoints of this year’s ‘‘The Legend of Troop 13’’, a brilliant satire on the aging male’s lurid – entirely wrong – ideas about sexually primed Lost Girls. Not every nubile female can have it her own way. Though the prose is just as powerful in Reed’s first published story ‘‘The Wait’’ (the last one here), this tale of a girl, her oblivious mother, and a small town’s unnerving customs won’t let you close the book and blithely go on about your business; long after you’ve finished, it lingers. Some writers take half a lifetime to learn what Kit Reed seems to have grasped right from the start.

  •

  Whether Tanith Lee’s short fiction takes the form of SF, fantasy, or (more often) a mix of both, unearthly realms and worlds can overwhelm the normal while all the senses go into overdrive, and someone somewhere loses every last inhibition. But her work can’t be reduced to a Decadent European version of the Dark Carnival, with spaceships. Dangers linger; if you call them sins, they can date right back to Genesis, which crops up here in several quirky forms – including one of the book’s two originals, ‘‘With a Flaming Sword’’.

  In a Nightfair on a pleasure planet, ‘‘The Beautiful Biting Machine’’ explores the familiar links between vampirism and sex, rips them apart behind the scenes, and finds new sources for the malign – all in a night’s work. ‘‘Moonwolf’’ interweaves the legends of the Other and Were beings with space travel, a lunar colony and automata, as dreams of spectral silver cities just might prove to be true (for certain dreamers). An ugly child of elegantly gorgeous parents in ‘‘Felixity’’ must endure a marriage where she’s essentially held hostage, until she manages to turn what should be escapist fantasy into a tool that sets off drastic changes.

  The distinctions between good, evil, and [super]natural phenomena blur to the point of disaster in futures ranging from an Earth engaged in reclaiming frozen survivors from its distant past (‘‘The Thaw’’) to a more advanced civilization where luxury liners cruise the cosmos (‘‘You Are My Sunshine’’). To paranoids, the starry skies may seem to threaten, but danger can have sources much closer to home. When creatures in the shape of beautiful young men plunge earthward into some lonely women’s lives (approximately in our profane present day for ‘‘Black Fire’’, in a ragged future England for ‘‘Written in Water’’), it’s the newcomers who should be afraid.

  Even in a civilization spanning multiple galaxies, romance can still go as wrong as the stuff of old tragedy (‘‘Tonight I Can Sleep Quietly’’). The ironic spirit of classic parables seems to haunt the Future-Urban Myth (provided by Lee’s husband John Kaiine) of ‘‘Stalking the Leopard’’, where a bored rich girl in a city that’s a picturesque kaleidoscope of ‘‘seven burning colors’’ finds her emotions wakened by a puzzle – but who will get the last laugh? Color – or the lack of it – signals doom for the ordinary people of planet Earth in ‘‘Dead Yellow’’, a masterfully condensed apocalypse just three pages long.

  Elements that techies might regard as intangibles play prominent roles in Lee’s futures, where scientific advances don’t necessarily mean progress. A new ability to play with time is twisted into something more like torture, bedeviling the minds and memories of exiled prisoners of ‘‘By Crystal Light Beneath One Star’’, despite their ‘‘charming quarters,’’ filled with amenities such as ‘‘the foolproof medicine, the books and games, the gentle caring of the machines.’’ And long after some planet-wide disaster, technology provides temporary, shifting resurrections for surviving minds that outnumber the surviving bodies in ‘‘A Day in the Skin’’ (subtitled ‘‘or, the century we were out of them’’), until one visionary breaks the unnatural cycle.

  Finally, original novelette ‘‘Within the Ghost’’ poses a bold series of questions which extend the concept of afterlife to an immense scale of space, time, and achievement:

  Once worlds have ended, and the curtains of space closed upon them, where does their genius go? Their great music and art, their architecture, literature, and thought, their beauty – all held till then in vessels of physical form, or the records of machines, or simply in the memory of humankind. Is everything obliterated, merely rinsed away and lost?

  While Lee concludes, ‘‘Nothing is ever lost,’’ what follows is no ponderous epic attempt to justify that belief. Instead, we get an intimate tale of deep space, featuring a man, a woman, and one other being with a personality of its own: the ‘‘solitary lifeboat jettisoned from a sinking liner’’ where they interact (all three of them), and move toward what could be – for some – a new beginning.

  •

  Much like modern fantasy, country music has assembled a huge vocabulary of sources, moods, and unexpected hybrid forms. The legends and traditions of leathery old folksongs warp toward Goth, banjos and fiddles rev up for punkish riots, and the electric guitar that once ruled rock has found a new home in Nashville. Wisp of a Thing, a novel by Alex Bledsoe with a semi-famous musician as its protagonist and a quest for the forgotten lyrics of one song bringing him an isolated part of Appalachia, manages to combine the rogue spirits of the new country and fantasy. Though I seem to have missed The Hum and the Shiver, Bledsoe’s previous book about Cloud County TN, I’m glad this indirect sequel came my way.

  Early in Chapter One, Peggy Goins (‘‘a stylish Southern woman of a certain age’’) sees the feral girl who gives this book its title rooting through her big green Dumpster. There’s nothing magically attractive about the intruder:

  She wore a tattered old orange sundress, and nothing else. Dirt smeared her exposed skin, and candy wrappers from the garbage stuck to one thigh. Breath shot from her nostrils in rapid little puffs, but otherwise she showed no sign that the chill affected her. She growled softly, like an animal, then dashed into the trees.

  When Peggy gripes about the encounter to Rockhouse Hicks, the tobacco-chewing oldster planted in his rocking chair on a porch two blocks down, he cautions patience (in ‘‘a drawl so slow it seemed to suspend time’’): ‘‘When the last leaf falls from the Widow’s Tree this year, she’ll be done for good…. [B]efore next spring, nobody’ll even remember her. She’ll just be a wisp of a thing.’’ But, like the Widow’s Tree itself, this creature has deep roots in the history and legends of Needsville TN, with its uncanny clan of locals (even the tamer ones in the trailer parks), and a sense of oncoming disaster that has nothing to do with the new Millennium.

  After gaining some recognition on a TV reality contest that now disgusts him, musician Rob Quillen comes to this odd place. Recently widowed, he’s driven by desperate grief – fueled by both dreams and websearch. The web points him towards Needsville’s Tufa clan, with their mysterious ethnic background and special gift for music. Could they spin the spell/song that might put his shattered soul back on the road toward health? He knows the task requires some kind of magic – but this small Appalachian town is a long, long way from Camelot. A Tufa ‘‘sin-eater,’’ shambling out of the darkness of a country graveyard, sounds more like an inbred hick when he tells Rob that a green briar’s caught him: ‘‘They grow over Yankee graves. Wild Roses grow from the Johnny Rebs.’’

  Can an unlikely alliance save both Rob’s soul and the vanishing essence of a girl under a curse, while the clock ticks toward midnight? Bledsoe’s skill at hybrid mystery/fantasy in the ‘‘Eddie LaCrosse’’ series translates well into this complex setting. Bleak as folksongs that crossed the seas from England and spawned offspring here, wild as certain legendary Folk, cracked and funny as the South’s grand old eccentrics, Wisp of a Thing turns out to be a thoroughly compelling tale.

  •

  American history, and the very nature of the place, experience drastic revision in two other new fantasies: Cold Copper by Devon Monk (third in her ‘‘Age of Steam’’ series), and The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson (his first venture into YA, though with a background striking enough to demand further exploration).

  Batte
red but mostly unbowed after his adventures in Dead Iron and Tin Swift, bounty hunter Cedar Hunt – victim of a Pawnee curse that turned him into a lycanthrope, while trapping the brother who shares his journeys in a the body of a wolf – still roams through a land where witches battle with monsters known as the Strange, while the masters of the latest steam tech strive to link both coasts with a railway line. Monk’s continuing cast of characters reflect the same genre mix, most notably in its women, who include an active Wiccan with a host of spells and a tomboyish type obsessed with the workings of any and all machines.

  Struggling through the snow like ragged pioneers, Cedar and his motley band of associates come to the rapidly expanding frontier town Des Moines IA while pursuing rumors about the Holder, a thing which might become a doomsday device (part tech, part magic) if it fell into the wrong hands, fully assembled. But Des Moines turns out to be the scene of a mayor’s grand ambition – with dangerous generators already hidden deep beneath its streets – and a spate of kidnappings where children vanish, abducted by the Strange for unknown purposes (though it’s hard to imagine anyone surviving in such custody for very long).

  Dreams of greatness may drive one of Cold Copper’s villains to mess with the arcane substance of the title for his own foul purposes, but only the most privileged and enigmatic of the Strange can pursue such a scheme indefinitely. This book gets to the heart of more than one mystery, but leaves its mortals still under threat of annihilation.

  •

  Our continent doesn’t exist at all in Brandon Sanderson’s The Rithmatist, where he reduces it to a collection of islands and archipelagoes. Nonetheless, something like a Midwest, known as Nebrask territory, is under siege by Wild Chalklings (beings even stranger than the Strange), and young people from an academy there have started disappearing, with only ominous bloodstains to mark their passing.