Locus, May 2013

by Locus Publications

  Unlike the other books discussed so far, once the main characters change, everything around them bears a new weight of histories, feelings, and visions. Child sacrifice, practiced since the age of a famous Tudor queen, still threatens in a tale whose title echoes a Clash song. Social discontent also leads to more mundane protest marches, continuing into modern times.

  Cornell doesn’t evoke brash, gruff days of scrawled graffiti, oaths, and not much else. He can pull off a London vision ‘‘that transcended mere sight’’ (consisting of ‘‘Biggin Hill airport, the lit-up lines of the runway, and to the north the lights of London’’ against the clouds). Lingering ghosts of the Blitz, ‘‘a dream of vapour trails and the bursts of ack-ack guns firing,’’ create ‘‘a feeling of longing and purity and of enjoying sadness….’’ For the specific viewer, it’s a ‘‘shared thing that he didn’t share.’’ Some power in the city is producing this effect, too vivid to come from ‘‘something the drugs had done to his brain over the years.’’

  By book’s end, we’re ready for a series where, spurred by their visions, the main characters bring in current police procedures to investigate supernatural crimes. These aren’t shallow stock characters, and Cornell turns impressive skills to his first outright urban fantasy.

  •

  Finally, I move away from alternate Englands for Wolfhound Century, a first novel by Peter Higgins. It’s set in a Stalinist-seeming Russia without official Communism (though things are repressive enough), but made strange by such things as giants, an embedded archangel, and an endless, impenetrable Eastern forest – the stuff of myth.

  Our hero is a policeman, Inspector Vissarion Lom, sent to the capital city of Mirgorod in pursuit of a terrorist. One of the tools that he will use is a curious contraption in the Central Registry of the Lodka, the Gaukh Engine:

  It had been beautiful in the picture, but nothing prepared him for the reality. It was immense. An elegant nested construction of interlinked vertical wheels of steel and polished wood carried, like fairground wheels, dozens of heavy gondolas. The whole machine was in constant motion, its wheels turning and stopping and turning.

  The Engine belongs to an overall political machine ‘‘in three parts,’’ along with its ‘‘soft machine’’ of agents and informants, and a ‘‘paper machine’’ that has reached an extraordinary mass: ‘‘tons of paper; miles of paper; paper stored in the dark cavernous stacks that ramified through the basements and inner recesses of the Lodka,’’ a place where ‘‘nothing had ever been thrown away in the history of the centuries-long surveillance.’’

  To this kind of thing, reminiscent of 20th-century politics (with a touch of Surrealism), Higgins adds a forest god, a strange reserve of supernatural forces, and creatures that aren’t quite golem or witch. Scenes of collective action in the big city give way to excitement in the wild marshes at the city’s edge, and lead to some changes in our hero.

  Wolfhound Century is an excellent debut and an excellent opening. Lom never quite manages to fulfill his greatest goal, so I hope he will return to move further on his way, in a fascinating place.

  –Faren Miller

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: RUSSELL LETSON

  Zero Point, Neal Asher (Tor UK 978-0-230-75070-8, £17.99, 564pp, hc) August 2012. Cover by Jon Sullivan. (Night Shade Books 978-1-597-80470-7, $15.99, 320pp, tp) May 2013. [Order from Night Shade Books, 1661 Tennessee Street, #3H, San Francisco CA 94107; .]

  The Kassa Gambit, M.C. Planck (Tor 978-0-7653-3092-5, $24.99, 288pp, hc) January 2013. Cover by Gregory Manchess.

  Sometimes reading Neal Asher makes me feel like the kids in the UK who used to watch the Daleks and Cybermen of Doctor Who from behind the sofa: I want to turn away but I can’t take my eyes off the action. Of course, my (and our collective) turn-away threshold has altered considerably in the last half-century, and any given Asher novel contains levels of horror and carnage that would have burned out our scare circuits in 1963. But maybe I’m regressing, because Asher’s recent books about the posthuman who calls himself the Owner – The Departure and now Zero Point – have me looking for something to hide behind.

  As hair-raising as the nasty, omnivorous Prador or the ingeniously lethal predators of Spatterjay are, there’s something even more deeply awful about the evil at large in the world that generates the Owner, because it is utterly and recognizably human. The character was featured in three stories in Asher’s first collection, The Engineer (1998): an immensely powerful, immortal (or at least very hard to kill) star-wandering posthuman who acts as though he takes the title he has given himself quite seriously. Now Asher is detailing his origin in a 22nd-century dystopian world of overpopulation, environmental depredation, and cruelly totalitarian government. In reviewing The Departure, I characterized a typical Asher novel as starting with ‘‘vivid, graphic violence’’ and ending with ‘‘smoking ruins,’’ and that pattern holds in the sequel.

  Zero Point traces the aftermath of Alan Saul’s transformation from half-dead political prisoner to a cybernetically and physically enhanced superman who all but destroys the tyrannical old order on Earth and makes off with its prize orbital habitat/factory/weapons platform, Argus Station – he becomes its Owner. But while Saul has killed or captured the top echelon of the world-ruling Committee and wrecked much of its military infrastructure, plenty of second-string Delegates have survived, and one of them possesses the intelligence and ruthlessness needed to rebuild and even refine the Committee’s global control system. The perversely named Serene Galahad is brilliant, far-seeing, and even, in her psychotic way, idealistic: she sees that the old order was corrupt, self-indulgent, incompetent, short-sighted, and incapable of taking the steps needed to solve the planet’s problems. Her methods are quite direct. Too many useless mouths to feed? Trigger a bioengineered pseudo-plague (a secret feature of universally-implanted ID/health monitors) and seriously reduce the sub-proletarian ‘‘zero asset’’ population, then call it the Scour and blame it on Alan Saul. Committee Delegates who might be rivals for control of the world’s remaining resources? Paint them as traitors and nuke ’em, or activate the Scour via their implants. Subordinates who might know the real source of the Scour – or whose behavior is insufficiently subordinate or cold-blooded? Eliminate them, too. Use the robotic razor bird. It leaves stains on the self-cleaning office carpet, but it’s all necessary to enable the great work of renewing the Earth. The corpses literally (and I do mean literally) pile up, by the billions.

  That’s just the first few chapters of the Serene Galahad thread, which had so many scenes of graphic murder and body-disposal (mass and onesy-twosey) that I almost stopped reading. A sofa wasn’t going to provide enough protection – I wanted to hide under the bed, preferably across town. But the book has other major settings and plot-braids that deal with slightly less dire (though by no means comfy) matters. On Argus Station, now a huge, clumsy spacecraft headed Marsward, Alan Saul is tidying up and dealing with the surviving Committee Delegates aboard. On Antares Base on Mars, Varelia Delex and her colleagues have gotten rid of the Committee political boss and his goons and are setting their little colony back in order. Var’s problems parallel those on Earth and Argus Station: how to lead a polity as damaged and fragile as its physical environment, but with the additional problem of asserting her leadership without any of Saul’s superhuman physical and mental enhancements? And Var, unlike Serene, possesses a conscience, and neither paranoia nor the hard-nosed wielding of authority come naturally to her – or, at least, not comfortably. The practical and political challenges presented in all three settings are similar, and the solutions implemented by the major actors are set up to echo each other, which makes for an interesting intersection of external and internal conflicts, as the prime movers in the three settings head for inevitable collision(s). Auxiliary dramas surround Alex, a deeply-conditioned clone bodyguard stranded on Argus; and Serene’s longest-surviving factotu
m, the amoral-but-not-crazy Clay Ruger, who is despatched in pursuit of Argus Station on the newly-completed warcraft Scourge, where he (and the rest of the crew) are caught between Alan Saul’s deadly competence and Serene’s personnel-incentivizing techniques.

  The title points in two directions: to the development, on Argus Station, of a physics breakthrough with zero-point energy that will lead to interstellar travel; and, on Earth, to a demographic and thus ecological reset – a zero hour – via the Scour and other dire means. One of the series’s central notions is that technologies by themselves do not solve problems, and that in any case even solutions (in the sense of ‘‘arrangements that provide new stabilities’’) are not always Good Things. Serene’s solution to overpopulation involves unprecedented suffering and death. Zero-point physics and the new space drive can save Saul and Argus Station and lead to the stars, but just lighting out for the territories isn’t going eliminate the moral limitations that are the real root of the ‘‘primitive humanity’’ problem. And while we readers (especially those who have read the earlier stories of his later state) might trust that the Owner will eventually behave in a rational and moral (by his standards) manner, it is not at all clear to many of the ordinary people inside the novel how much humanity is left in this strange, vastened, and often lethal creature. He may not be psychotic, but he is frighteningly focused, potent, and clearly in flux. (He is also, for much of the book, in a complex mental fugue, as he recovers from an assassination attempt.)

  The major plot threads follow parallel attempts to concentrate and assert control, a design that might lead us to reflect on why we’re rooting for this monster rather than that one. The characters in leadership roles act out a range of approaches, and there are interesting points of convergence in the means they use to manipulate, bully, boss, or dominate, each one modulated or moderated by the sanity of the leader in question. Thus Var struggles with her suspicions, fears, and impatience because she is not naturally a psychopathic bully, but is rational about what’s needed to lead a survival effort.

  Then there’s Serene, who is not so much egotistical as pathologically sure of herself and her goals. She is a monster, but an interesting one, a mixture of cruelty, pragmatism, and order-mania, and her actions echo those of a range of historical monster-tyrants, from Caligula, to the Nazis, to Pol Pot, and not excluding Vlad the Impaler. But she has a degree of self-awareness and a program that is not utterly narcissistic. After an uncharacteristically frank conversation with her bodyguard (after which she does not even kill him), she reflects:

  Realistically, she had to accept that the old ideologies – on which the Committee’s and her own rule had been built – all collapsed under the weight of the reality of human nature. In the end, she was no different from the kings and emperors of old. It was very depressing, and a perfect example of the sentiment that the more things change, the more they stay the same….

  Once Earth was organized precisely as she wanted it, she felt it would be time to turn her attention to something long overdue. The nature of the human race itself needed to be changed. Primitive humanity required alteration.

  Serene is not alone in her attitude toward ‘‘primitive humanity.’’ Early on, a pre-transformation Saul is reported to have remarked that ‘‘we are a disappointing species,’’ a sentiment that is echoed by other characters, and even by some of the book’s chapter epigraphs. Disaster does not bring out the best in people, nor do generations of ill-treatment, starvation, and state terrorism make for a virtuous sub-proletariat. All classes up and down the social pyramid harbor bad actors – it’s monsters all the way down in Asher’s universe, with the few who possess some degree of conscience or humanity vulnerable to the wholly sociopathic (or psychopathic) above or beside or below them. One of the novel’s significant movements is Saul’s recovery of a humanity that is chillingly rational, but not lacking in empathy and even mercy. In a scene that echoes Serene’s with her bodyguard, one of Saul’s android/AI ‘‘proctors’’ (which is also an extension of himself) reminds him, ‘‘When it is not necessary to kill… it is not necessary to kill.’’

  The foreground to all this psychological-moral-political drama, however, is highly kinetic action-movie stuff, with industrial quantities of death-dealing up and down the scale, from space battles to hand-to-hand single combat, laid out in parallel-plotted, cross-cut, near-Saturday-matinee-cliffhanger mode. And, as with The Departure, the ending provides a resolution that is clearly not final. The Owner has yet to come into full possession of himself, and there remain potential rivals for the title.

  •

  It was odd reading M.C. Planck’s first SF novel, The Kassa Gambit, right after Zero Point. Some of the motifs resonated: the massacre of nearly an entire planetary population; a ruthless, authoritarian political organization with totalitarian ambitions; and a pair of lone-wolf protagonists. But even the scariest elements of the story lack the direness of an Asherian world, and along the way there are gear-shifts in mode and mood, so the book exits in a manner rather different from the one in which it began.

  That beginning combines space operatics with mystery: who or what systematically bombed the backwater agricultural planet Kassa to rubble and then strung mines across its solar system to deal with whoever showed up later? The tramp freighter Ulysses, owned and captained by Prudence Falling, is first on the scene, followed by a vessel from the nearest major center of trade and power, Altair Prime. That ship carries the book’s other protagonist, a man with a complicated and uncomfortable set of roles. Kyle Daspar is a cop, a member of the politically powerful League, and secretly working against the League’s programs. Each is drawn into the mystery of the Kassa incident, and each wonders what’s really behind the other’s presence on the scene.

  Kyle can’t decide whether Pru is what she appears to be – captain of a tramp freighter – or a League operative sent to watch or even kill him. Pru sees Kyle as the representative of a nasty, oppressive organization. It’s a dance of unstable identities, a Cherryhesque quasi-intrigue in which characters’ internal confusions and their attempts to untangle agendas, motives, and scenarios are on view. This leads to a most unAsherian feature: a thriller-mode version of the romantic comedy pattern. Our protagonists are clearly meant for each other but are prevented by circumstances, misapprehensions, and suspicions from acting on their mutual attraction – Pride and Prejudice and Space Opera and Spies. Of course, it’s hard to meet-cute in the aftermath of a planetary massacre, and the possibility that the attractive guy/gal might be an assassin or political thug is a bit more sobering than, say, thinking she or he is your best friend’s intended. Nevertheless, that odd romantic tension runs through the story, right next to the spy-thriller and space-opera elements.

  In the second half of the book it gets even odder: I felt as though the spirit of Jack Vance was asserting itself. The setting was already fairly Vancean: a sprawling, uncentralized interstellar civilization with a variety of social, economic, and political approaches held together by trade conventions and defined by the constraints on star travel. Then there’s the plot machine, with its mysterious attack, indications of alien forces and secret organizations, and lone-wolf protagonists. So when a figure shows up wearing an elaborate (and functionless) mask, alarms went off, and the already-established elements – the tramp freighter, the stoical undercover cop, the conspiracy-mystery – lined up in a new way. (And the penny dropped on a much earlier one-word clue.) The story’s climax depends on a setting element that will drive the hard-science readership nuts, but it is part of a plot development that must remain behind the Spoiler Curtain. Suffice it to say that it’s right out of the exotic, Saturday-matinee-inspired playbook of Vance’s early-middle pulp period.

  So this is a bit of a fruit salad, a Tommy and Tuppence romp to Asher’s grim, First Blood-ish drama. I am not usually the ideal audience for such light fare (so how does he know about the Agatha Christie? asks a voice from the back of the room), and I’m not sure how I
would have taken it without the heavy meal of Zero Point preceding. But I kept turning the pages, even after I had a pretty good idea of what I was going to find on the last one.

  –Russell Letson

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  SHORT REVIEWS BY CAROLYN CUSHMAN

  Stolen Magic, Stephanie Burgis

  Wednesdays in the Tower, Jessica Day George

  Tarnished, Rhiannon Held

  Flash Point, Nancy Kress

  Antiagon Fire, L.E. Modesitt, Jr.

  Iron Kin, M.J. Scott

  Kitty Rocks the House, Carrie Vaughn

  Binding, Carol Wolf

  Stephanie Burgis, Stolen Magic (Atheneum 978-1-4169-9451-0, $17.99, 383pp, hc) April 2013. Cover by Annette Marnat.

  The Kat, Incorrible trilogy of middle-grade Regency fantasies comes to a thrilling conclusion in this adventure-filled volume, which finds our heroine Kat Stephenson finally heading to her sister’s much-delayed wedding to Frederick Carlyle. Kat’s trying to behave as properly as needed to impress her sister’s already disapproving in-laws. But society considers magic hopelessly improper, and Kat’s also secretly trying to prepare for initiation into the magical Order of the Guardians, which gets derailed by a crisis involving stolen magical items. And then there’s a murder attempt or two, giving this much the feel of an English country house mystery, with a typically quirky cast, including the groom’s manipulative mother, a very mysterious marquise, and the cousin Frederick was expected to marry, all in a coastal region full of smugglers and spies. Kat, of course, impetuously follows a false lead or two, but manages to save the day with some unexpected help, in a sudden, suprisingly eventful, yet thoroughly satisfying conclusion to the series.