Locus, June 2013

by Locus Publications

  Rithmatism is a unique discipline that seems to combine mathematics, spell-casting, and childish playground scrawls. It manifests as the rare ability to bring two-dimensional forms outlined in chalk – some purely geometric, others more figurative – to 3-D life. Once animate, these resemble more complex yet tamer forms of Chalklings, obedient to humans and perhaps the only way to defeat the Wild version. Young hero Joel, who does lowly janitorial work around the academy, is a thwarted Rithmatist who knows the discipline and theory like a master, but never got the chance to show that he could do it (which must be demonstrated in a special rite of passage).

  I suspect that the author furnished the examples of Rithmatist chalk sketches throughout the book, and illustrator Ben McSweeney focused on the more elegant critters in the chapter headings. While this leads to a clash in styles, few youngsters are likely to notice or object. But the cultural background of the book’s connected island kingdoms is so very alternate, some readers might have trouble buying a past where Asia dominated Europe and deeply influenced its cuisine, yet chivalric notions serve as substitutes for our own mix of Christianity and Democracy. As for Rithmatism, rather than tracing back to ancient magics it’s more like a developing science in our own world’s last few centuries, despite the weirdness of its underlying principles.

  Part rational, part crazy as a nursery rhyme, The Rithmatist should appeal most to thoroughly open minds.

  –Faren Miller

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: RUSSELL LETSON

  Protector, C.J. Cherryh (DAW 978-0-7564-0798-8, $24.95, 375pp, hc) April 2013.

  The Human Front, Ken MacLeod (PM Press 978-1-60486-395-6, $12.00, 112pp, tp) March 2013. [Order from PM Press, PO Box 23912, Oakland CA 94623; .]

  I’m happy to observe that after 14 volumes produced over a stretch of nearly 20 years, C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series continues to provide pleasures and even surprises. This long, long sequence of novels covers a single narrative arc – not unlike Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series – and is organized in three-book sub-narratives. Protector is the middle volume of the fifth such arc, and my often-repeated advice for readers who have not followed the story-so-far is to stop reading me right now (or after the next paragraph, if you need a bit of background and preview) and go find the first volume, Foreigner (reviewed, to my continuing amazement, back in March 1994) and settle down for an extended period of happy immersion in the doings of humans and aliens trying to make sense of each other in an unspecified but doubtless fairly far future, somewhere far across the galaxy.

  Here’s the setup: A starship carrying a load of colonists gets lost in hyperspace and emerges near a habitable planet, which turns out to be already inhabited by the very tall, black-skinned, very human-looking atevi, whose steam-era technology and complex, clan-based social order seem to make sense to the newcomers. Unfortunately, there are serious differences in the deep psychological structures of the two species, and emotional/instinctive, and thus social, and thus political mismatches lead to misunderstanding, warfare, and eventually a delicately balanced peace that rests on a paradoxical arrangement: humans and atevi will remain completely isolated from each other, but cooperate via the office of a single human, a translator/diplomat/technology-transfer official, the paidhi. The series protagonist and viewpoint character (at least for the first eight volumes) is that official, Bren Cameron, who, like many Cherryh protagonists, spends large parts of his early adventures isolated and acted-upon, trying to make sense of events and motives as he is buffeted about by mysterious forces. The series traces, through a bracing combination of intrigue, diplomacy, social comedy, and occasional gunfire, the maturing of Bren’s political skills and the resulting growth of a delicate and intricate interspecies cooperation. And since the boy Cajeiri, heir to the leading family of the leading atevi political alliance, has become a viewpoint character (starting in Deliverer, 2007), we now have two windows into this gradual process of mutual understanding.

  For those familiar with the story so far: This fifth triad, begun with last year’s Intruder, continues to focus on the political maneuvering required in the aftermath of the coup, counter-coup, and mopping-up that removed and then restored to power Bren’s patron, the progressive Tabini. That impressive ruler, like an Italian Renaissance prince, is not only personally ambitious but visionary, and his policies have used human technology to revolutionize many aspects of atevi life and even to get his people into space. But Tabini has had to deal with profoundly conservative factions in his own alliance, as well as with ordinary rivals and enemies, all of which makes his rule exceedingly complicated. Even his domestic matters, such as the stability of his marriage or the education of his children, can have a serious political side.

  Thus, arrangements for celebrating the auspicious ninth birthday of his son and heir, Cajeiri, require more than hiring a magician and arranging for pony rides. Just traveling to the site of a birthday-holiday outing demands considerable logistical and security efforts, not only because this is no ordinary kid’s birthday, but because the guest list includes three human youngsters, friends of Cajeiri’s down from the orbiting space station. And they will be hosted by the crusty old conservative Lord Tatiseigi, who has never liked (not a word atevi use for interpersonal relationships in any case) or trusted humans, or ever even seen a human child. And now three of them are to be welcomed to his ancient, museum-grade estate.

  But Tatiseigi dotes on Cajeiri and is attached by bonds of atevi-style affection as well as cultural sympathy to Cajeiri’s great-grandmother, the formidable dowager Ilisidi, who has had more influence on Cajeiri than even his parents. She, in turn, is clearly building a coalition that will support not only Tabini and his party but the boy who will inherit it all. And Cajeiri is already attached to both Bren and the kids from the space station, the beginnings of a network that promises to bind the species in new ways, if it can survive the intrigues and pressures generated by large-scale atevi politics. So while there are indeed pony rides – or the much wilder atevi equivalent – there are also delicate social encounters involving naive human kids, a grumpy old ateva, and an anxious but increasingly canny young princeling.

  And there is, inevitably, intrigue that breaks out into violence, since behind the foregrounded social-political dance lurks the continuing problem of the ‘‘shadow Guild.’’ Long before the coming of humans, the atevi had arrived at their own solutions to the problems of power and violence, the latter largely through the institution of the paramilitary Assassins’ Guild, with its protocols and disciplines and theoretical monopoly on the use of deadly force. The Guild has its own independent network of communication and authority, its special way of directing man’chi, the atevi emotional complex that governs connection, loyalty, and hierarchy. The shadow Guild is a secret faction within the larger, orthodox Guild that has been influencing inter-clan relations in a generation-spanning political chess game (thematically echoed by Cajeiri’s interest in the literal game): it has been engaged in complicated, long-term movements of security personnel, arranging and realigning allied and opposing forces, manipulating and confusing man’chi, and now it threatens everything that Bren and Tabini and their allies have been building.

  Perhaps the major thread in the series is Bren’s work to bridge the deep psychological understanding gap between human and atevi. Since the instincts and intuitions on either side are so deceptively, trickily dissimilar, he has to construct his own understanding out of analysis and imagination – and constantly keep checking for errors and blind spots. This problem of dealing with the Other is all over Cherryh’s work, but it’s crucial here. In an exchange with Tabini’s consort Damiri, who is in a difficult and conflicted political and familial position, Bren’s attempted assurance offers a glimpse of how the species can cooperate across the gulf of differing instincts:

  ‘‘I serve your husband primarily; and the dowager at times, yes. But your interest is my co
ncern, because your happiness affects your husband and your son. If I can ever be of service, I say, I will serve your interests as man’chi allows.’’

  ‘‘A sentiment that humans notoriously lack.’’

  ‘‘We have compensatory sentiments. I offer them.’’

  Later, Bren reflects on how competing ambitions and connections among atevi can nevertheless lead to cooperation – even if it might be ‘‘an unruly sort of relationship, a unison of purpose very, very difficult to keep.’’ It is a problem ‘‘of a sort a human was very ill-equipped to feel his way through,’’ which means that it has to be reasoned through, with the most cautious use of such human ‘‘compensatory sentiments’’ as liking or love or loyalty to a principle. And in a parallel strand, Cajeiri is starting to form an adult atevi’s understanding of his species’ way of connecting, of how man’chi works – starting with one’s responsibility for the welfare of others, which has the virtue of connecting with the knowledge that dwells ‘‘at the bottom of his stomach.’’ And at the same time, he is preserving in that gut-level web of associations a place for Bren and his other human friends, building his own sense of ‘‘compensatory sentiment.’’

  As usual, the polite and violent sides of atevi high society interact and eventually collide when shadow Guild operations intrude on what is supposed to be a family matter, and Cajeiri’s young guests find out why their hosts need bodyguards. Cajeiri is not pleased, but his response shows what he is growing up to be.

  On his last birthday they had started a war….

  And here it was his birthday and they were going to start another war.

  It was just not fair, was the childish thought that surfaced; but there was much more at stake than fairness, now. He wanted everyone safe. He wanted the world not to have selfishness, and stupidity. And it was bound to have. But he wanted not to have it in places where it could do so much damage.

  This is the thinking of an adult, a leader, and a protector, and it (along with what his three young friends learn) points to what the coming generations might accomplish, if the renegades and intriguers and reactionaries can be dealt with – which is presumably what the third act of this part of the drama will address.

  •

  Ken MacLeod’s Sidewise Award-winning novella The Human Front first appeared as a PS Publishing singleton in 2001, and now is the centerpiece of one of Terry Bisson’s Outspoken Authors series from PM Press. There’s a ‘‘Plus …’’ on the cover and title page, indicating the inclusion of a pair of reflective essays by the author, an interview conducted by Bisson, and an extensive bibliography of MacLeod’s fiction and non-fiction. The elements of the package interact nicely.

  The MacLeod I first encountered through the Fall Revolution novels was wild and woolly and quite emphatically Out There, all exotic tech and wide-open-galaxy settings and gnarly posthuman action. And, to be sure, politics. Lots of politics. The Human Front comes from the end of that period, but has a rather different atmosphere, an almost claustrophobic variation on the UK of the post-WWII decade, with its class tensions and barriers, shabby-genteel-to-industrial-grimy economy, and straitened emotional horizons – except it’s set in the 1960s and after. But the politics are still right in the foreground. This is an alternate history in which the Cold War was short-circuited in the late 1940s and by 1963 Stalin has ended up as a guerrilla leader (a dead one, in the story’s first lines) in a grindingly permanent international conflict that pits the Allies, now the old imperialist order, against Communist revolutionaries all over the world. The frame of the story is a bildungsroman, the memoir of John Matheson, a middle-class doctor’s son and eventual Communist partisan fighter, who at an early age sees something strange at the crash-landing of an American bomber of the type that proved a military and geopolitical game-changer by dropping an A-bomb on Moscow in 1949. As exotic as the saucer-shaped aircraft is, it is nothing compared to the four-fingered, child-or midget-size pilot whose leg Dr. Matheson sets, and whose very existence, the ‘‘two men in black suits, who weren’t ministers’’ suggest very strongly to the doctor, is to remain a state secret If He Knows What’s Good For Him and his family.

  That puzzle remains hanging over the mantelpiece for a long time while young John’s political involvement in radical left causes takes him ever deeper into the asymmetrical war against the old order, culminating in an action that brings him into contact with another Allied saucer craft and its differently-but-equally unexpected pilot. Then things open out considerably, though not quite in the expansive, space-operatic manner of the Fall Revolution novels, or Learning the World, or Newton’s Wake. Instead, we get a tour through at least one more genre familiar enough that John writes that its ‘‘tedious details… need not be repeated here.’’ Then things open out yet again and we end up in somewhat more familiar MacLeodian territory.

  It’s hard to comment on the novella without unleashing a spoiler of some kind, but since the story is more than a decade old, it’s worth the risk. The story’s resolution – and the solution to the problems addressed by all the various modern political-economic-technological complexes at work in this world and others – is provided not by John Matheson and his comrades, nor by any forces in his world, but by intervention from outside – in this case, by descendants of the few survivors of the old historical-evolutionary meatgrinder, operating across multiple universes of possibility. The deployment of alternative futures, not just here but across MacLeod’s fiction, is telling – it seems to me to be a severely constrained optimism-in-principle, with no guarantee of success in practice: not ‘‘we could try X’’ so much as ‘‘we could have tried X – but we didn’t and probably won’t.’’ On the other hand, maybe somebody, somewhere or somewhen, will, and here’s how it might play out in some luckier or smarter scheme of things. There is nothing inevitable about progress. In the interview, MacLeod says, ‘‘To this day, British SF writers see evolution as a vast pitiless process that will eventually doom humanity, and US SF writers tend to see it as a chirpy homily to self-reliance.’’ Most of the results of evolution’s experiments, after all, are dead ends. (Compare Greg Egan’s view of evolution in Teranesia.)

  The two essays, ‘‘Other Deviations: The Human Front Exposed’’ and ‘‘The Future Will Happen Here, Too’’, explore the genesis of the novella, the former outlining the geopolitical side (‘‘the world becomes Vietnam’’), and the latter the more personal. Perhaps perversely, it is the latter I find more compelling. Even before I read these pieces, I was struck by how strongly the geography, climate, culture, and politics of Scotland seem to have soaked into his fiction, and in ‘‘The Future’’ MacLeod acknowledges his uses of particular places, not just because he knows their textures well but because

  Scotland’s streets and mountains, lochs and rain have shaped my own mind just as geological processes have carved the landscape itself. This place I live in is still the place I visit in dreams. I owe it that forming, that weathering, that uplift.

  That lyrical note is as important to MacLeod’s voice as the speculative or dialectical or smart-assical, and it explains much of why I return to his work so enthusiastically.

  –Russell Letson

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: ADRIENNE MARTINI

  The Human Division, John Scalzi (Tor 978-0-7653-3351-3, $25.99, 368pp, hc) May 2013. Cover by John Harris.

  Martian Sands, Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing 978-1-848635-98-2, £11.99, 288pp, hc) March 2013. Cover by Pedro Marques. [Order from PS Publishing, Grosvenor House, 1 New Road, Hornsea, East Yorkshire HU18 1PG England; .]

  Dangerous Gifts, Gaie Sebold (Solaris 978-1-78108-080-1, $8.99, 448pp, pb) January 2013. Cover by Jake Murray.

  Countdown City, Ben H. Winters (Quirk Books 978-1-59474-626-0, $14.95, 320pp, tp) July 2013.

  LoveStar: A Novel, Andri Snær Magnason (Seven Stories Press 978-1-60980-426-8, $16.95, 312pp, pb) November 2012. [Order from Seven Stories Pr
ess, 140 Watts Street, New York NY 10013; .]

  John Scalzi can’t resist trying something new with the way his stories are delivered to readers. His first book, Agent to the Stars, was freely available on his blog and later put out in hard copy by Subterranean Press and in paperback by Tor. He edited one of the first audio anthologies, Metatropolis. He was a creative consultant for TV’s Stargate Universe and is writing Morning Star, a video game. His most recent experiment in narrative delivery has been the electronic serial The Human Division.

  The last New York Times bestseller-level writer I can remember trying a similar form was Stephen King in the mid-1990s with his six-installment serial The Green Mile. Every month there would be a rush at the bookstore where I worked at the time, with avid readers eager to buy the next part. Each slim paperback cost a few bucks; after the last one was released, they were collected and re-released.

  Scalzi’s 21st-century version uses the technology of our time. Each of The Human Division’s 13 episodes was released weekly in e-book form. January’s ‘‘The B-Team’’, a double-length story, cost $2.99. The rest were 99 cents each. The last, ‘‘Earth Below, Sky Above’’, hit the electronic shelves in April. This Tor hardback collects all of these episodes and tosses in a few extras, including the Tor.com-published short ‘‘After the Coup’’, and follows close upon the last episode’s publication.

  The Human Division takes place in Scalzi’s Old Man’s War world and picks up where The Last Colony left off. The Conclave has just been bested and the Colonial Union exposed to the Earth populations it has been exploiting. But this book’s focus is not on John Perry and Jane Sagan. Instead, The Human Division’s chapters/episodes skip around the universe, sometimes concerned with Harry Wilson, who we met in ‘‘After the Coup’’, and with the crew of the Clarke, who are tasked with near-impossible ambassadorial duties. Scalzi also bounces through wildcat colonies and into the heads of a few Conclave higher-ups, who are wrestling with the question of what to do about the humans. As Conclave member Halfte Sorvahl says, ‘‘And I am also aware that there’s not a species in the Conclave who doesn’t find the humans… well… vexing is likely the most polite word for it.’’