"What if Spain wins this war? They'll close down all our universities—you won't learn anything then."
"I don't care,” she said again.
"Well.” Ibn Suleiman stopped, then seemed to force himself to go on. “You can stay with us, I suppose, with my wife and me. We've never had children—I think I told you that."
"I can?” she asked. “Really?"
"Of course. I wouldn't say it otherwise."
Would he still take her if he knew she didn't believe in his religion, or any religion? And she had another confession to make, one far more important. “I—well, I ain't what I look like. I'm a girl. My name's Catherine."
Ibn Suleiman recoiled. She saw it, and somewhere inside her she recoiled too, against herself, against trusting someone when so many lessons had taught her not to. . . .
"I should not have touched you, then,” Ibn Suleiman said, looking away from her. “Men should not touch women before prayer."
She thought of the many times their hands had brushed, reaching for something. She said nothing.
"And our Prophet, peace be upon him, taught us that women should be modest. They should ‘cast down their eyes, and guard their appetites . . .’”
"Is that what you want me to do? Cast down my eyes? How could I see to work then?"
"I don't know. You're not—you aren't like any woman I've ever met."
"What about that woman you told me about? The one you knew at the university?"
"She was brilliant, though."
"I'm brilliant too."
Ibn Suleiman laughed. “She did say that there would be more like her. That a country so busy with new inventions could not afford to ignore half the minds within it."
He fell silent. She knew his silences by now; he was thinking, working out a knotty problem.
"Well,” he said finally. “The caliph wants us to study the homunculi outside the Hall of Records, is that what you told me? Let's go have a look."
What did that mean? Did he still want to adopt her? She would not go back to England, though. She would stay here and learn what she could. She would make him see how clever she was. “Only the men of understanding are mindful,” he had said, and he understood more than anyone she had ever met.
"All right,” she said, and they walked down the hallway together.
Copyright © 2011 Lisa Goldstein
[Back to Table of Contents]
Department: ON BOOKS by Peter Heck
* * * *
* * * *
MIDNIGHT RIOT
By Ben Aaronovitch
Del Rey, $7.99 (mm)
ISBN: 078-0-345-5242506
Here's a fantasy/police procedural hybrid very much in the vein of Charles Stross's “Laundry” series or China Mieville's Kraken. On the strength of this debut novel, published in the U.K. as Rivers of London, Aaronovitch is a writer to keep an eye on.
The story begins when a London police officer guarding a murder scene, meets a ghost. Peter Gordon, a rookie constable doing street patrol while waiting to be assigned to a specialty, at first takes the ghost for a stray drunk, but soon realizes that he's talking to someone from a past era—who also happens to be a witness to the murder in the present. Even more incredible, the ghost gives him information that when Peter follows it up, leads him to an important breakthrough in the case.
As a result of his hitherto unsuspected ability to see and talk to ghosts, Peter finds himself assigned to a bureau he has never heard of—its purpose, the investigation of occult threats to the peace and safety of London. His new superior, Detective Chief Inspector Nightingale, turns out to be the last wizard in England. Peter has just been anointed his apprentice.
Peter now finds himself juggling his lessons in magic—which of course is much more demanding and takes longer to learn than he expected—with regular police work. The murder case he was investigating at the start has gotten more complicated, turning from an apparently isolated killing into what has all the earmarks of a serial murder case with occult elements. Meanwhile, Peter is trying to do his best to live the normal life of a young man in modern-day London, especially since one of his partners on the case is Leslie, an attractive young woman constable.
The occult aspect of the case involves a sort of possession; both the victims and their killers appear to be under a spell and neither aware of nor in control of their actions at the time of the murders. Worse, the possession has the thoroughly nasty effect of killing the killers, as well as their victims—their heads essentially explode. Nightingale and Peter follow up leads, bringing in conventional police where possible, but the solution to the case keeps eluding both the traditional and the special occult investigators.
There's plenty else to keep Peter busy, though. Nightingale introduces him to several water spirits—apparently there is an ongoing dispute between Father Thames, who rules the upper stretches of the river, and Mother Thames, who rules the tidal waters in the city. And Mother Thames has several daughters, one of whom seems to have taken a fancy to Peter. This of course brings in complications of its own, as Peter must learn how to negotiate with supernatural beings without falling into the many traps inherent in their nature.
Aaronovitch has a great deal of fun juxtaposing the up-to-date technology of modern police work and the stuffy old-fashioned mind set of Nightingale, who hasn't learned to use a cell phone; Peter suspects he may not even know how to use a land line. The alternating conflict and cooperation of the techie and magical worldviews creates a good bit of fun, and Aaronovitch works it nicely into the plot at several points.
Needless to say, the mystery is eventually solved. Along the way are entertaining bits of London lore, theater history, vignettes of a cop's daily routine, and clever twists on several familiar urban fantasy themes. Aaronovitch has a wry sense of humor that, to me at least, contributes to making most of his characters both likeable and convincingly realistic.
Best of all, Peter's career with the London police will continue at least one more chapter. Del Rey has acquired the sequel to this one, and announced its release a month after the first hits the streets in January 2011. It's called Moon Over Soho. Buy them both. You won't be sorry.
* * * *
FACTOTUM
By D. M. Cornish
Putnam, $19.99 (hc)
ISBN: 978-0-399-24640-1
This is the concluding chapter in the adventures of Rossamund Bookchild, a young boy raised in a foundling home and trained to fight monsters in a world strongly reminiscent of Victorian England—as it might have been painted by Jack Vance.
Rossamund has been retained as a servant by Europe, an aristocratic woman who has made monster-hunting her career. She has taken him into her service largely because he is adept at mixing the complex potions she needs to keep up her strength and to stave off the side effects of the strange modifications her body has undergone to give her the powers to combat the monsters. She has done so despite an accusation, supported by considerable evidence, that Rossamund is not a human foundling, but a sort of monster that takes on human appearance. Even his name—which everyone has assumed is a girl's name given in some mix-up at the orphanage—is revealed by an old treatise on monsters to fit his purported origin.
Europe has rescued Rossamund from a group of corrupt officials. These officials took over the fortress where lamplighters are trained after Rossamund found evidence that the new commander of the fortress was winking at the creation of revermen—monsters stitched together from human parts—by his subordinates. Because of these discoveries, Rossamund has become a target—and it is clear that if the corrupt authorities can establish his monstrous nature, they will use the information to remove him as a threat. Europe transports her new factotum to Brandenbrass, her home city, where Rossamund realizes that much of what he has learned about monsters is—as he already suspected—simply untrue.
The first revelation comes when, to escape pursuit by a gang of criminals, he takes a shortcut through the city's park—a wild place f
enced off from human intruders. There he meets a prince of monsters—one with great powers, and who wants only to live without being bothered by humans and their parochial concerns. He returns home, where he learns that his enemies have petitioned the governor of the city, and his position may be perilous in spite of Europe's protection.
Europe responds by accepting assignments that will take her into the deep countryside, where her monster-fighting skills are in demand. Accompanied by Rossamund's two old masters from the orphanage where he was raised, they travel into strange lands, and encounter several new types of monsters. Just as they are returning to the city, they are set upon by a motley crew of humans and revermen. Rossamund and Europe fight off their enemies, with the help of several monsters Rossamund has befriended. After a period of recovery, they return to Brandenbrass to take on their enemies—and bring the story to a very satisfactory conclusion.
Cornish's “Foundling's Tale” trilogy is one of the most original large-scale fantasies in years. While it is aimed at young readers, it will be more than rewarding for many adult readers. Highly recommended.
* * * *
THE WAR THAT CAME EARLY: WEST and EAST
by Harry Turtledove
Del Rey, $27.00 (hc)
ISBN: 978-0-345-49184-8
Turtledove takes another excursion into alternate World War II, this time postulating that Neville Chamberlain's Munich appeasement of Hitler fell through and the war started in 1938, a year earlier than in our real history. That might seem a fairly minor readjustment, but Turtledove's imaginative resources are up to making a whole new saga out of it.
Turtledove tells his story through multiple viewpoints, a number of characters in different theaters of the war and on all sides. With the Spanish Civil War still being fought, Russia and Germany both fighting two-front wars, and Japan fighting in both Siberia and China, he has plenty of ammunition for a complex narrative with unexpected twists on familiar-seeming material. The various characters are drawn from a wide range of ethnic and national types, from American volunteers in Spain to a Jewish family trying to survive in a small German town, to Japanese infantrymen fighting in Siberia.
This book, the second in the series and sequel to Hitler's War, begins with the war several months past its opening salvos. Unlike our own history, Hitler and Stalin have not struck a deal; so the Germans are fighting a two-front war, in France and on the Russian-Polish border. Because of this, Germany's drive westward has stalled, with British and French resistance managing to stop the blitzkrieg before it swept them away. This creates a scenario that resembles the stalemated fronts of World War I rather than the actual WWII, in spite of the more advanced armor and aircraft in which several of the characters are shown fighting.
Turtledove's approach to big alternate histories has developed a kind of rhythm that his fans will find comfortable, moving slowly and carefully as he takes in the whole historic period from a wide variety of viewpoints. At the same time, he throws in an incredible amount of action, ranging from full-scale combat to day-to-day survival in grueling circumstances, with dollops of sex, humor, and allusions to obscure bits of lore thrown in for good measure.
As usual in Turtledove's larger works, the story breaks down into discrete scenes that jump from one theater to another to give a broad-scale picture of the progress of the war. The reader is kept waiting for the next episode in the adventures of any given character, and the various strands of the story move comparatively slowly, or in separate self-contained episodes that don't entirely resolve some key plot question. In other hands this might be frustrating, but Turtledove has developed the technique to a fine art. Rather than frustrating, the rotation of scenes adds tension and anticipation, providing a satisfying pace to the story.
Turtledove has the knack for creating reasonably sympathetic characters—even those whose roles in the story most readers would find repellent. Thus we have a Stuka pilot, a Panzer driver, Soviet bomber pilots, and Japanese infantrymen sharing the stage with those we are more likely to see as “friendly” figures—an American woman stranded in Berlin, a Marine stationed in China, or the daughter of a Jewish family experiencing the initial stages of Nazi persecution. The subtlety in this approach is that he can gradually show characters changing—or being changed by circumstances.
The series of which this book is the second installment has an unknown number of volumes yet to come. But readers who pick it up at this point—and the first volume should still be easy to find—can be sure of a good number of entertaining twists to come.
* * * *
First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth
by Marc Kaufman
Simon & Schuster, $26.00 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0900-7.
Kaufman, a science writer for the Washington Post, brings together information on a surprising range of researchers and theorists in the newly respectable field of astrobiology: the study of life as we don't know it.
The idea that life could exist on other worlds goes back at least as far as Giordano Bruno, the Italian priest burned for heresy in 1600, in part for arguing that God had created life on many worlds. That idea can be inferred from the scriptures of a number of other religions, including Judaism and Islam, and was considered by some of the Greek philosophers; it was only with the intellectual ascendancy of Aristotle in European thought that it became anathema.
Now, scientists in a dozen fields are finding evidence that we may well have company in the universe—if not little green men or tentacled monsters seeking to carry off Earth's women, certainly something we might recognize as living and maybe even as intelligent. And in part because SF has contributed a good deal to making the idea respectable—well, maybe not that respectable—it is now taken seriously by mainstream science.
But, as Carl Sagan argued, the discovery of life beyond Earth would be so ground-shaking that claims of having found it require irrefutable proof. Kaufman documents some of the groundwork being laid that may, within reasonable time frames, help clinch that case.
He begins by looking at extremophiles—living creatures in environments that should be hostile to life. Bacteria have been found in South African gold mines, three miles below the surface, living in the very rocks. Life thrives in acid waters, in boiling water near volcanic outlets on the ocean floor, even in the arsenic-laden waters of Lake Mono, as recently reported. Life exists high in the stratosphere, where levels of radiation would kill most surface-dwelling organisms. It survives quite nicely in the Antarctic, where temperatures are well below freezing and conditions can be unimaginably dry. Can Mars be any more hostile?
In fact, the current evidence on Martian conditions suggests that our planetary neighbor may well have been quite a benign environment in the past. Meteorites of undeniably Martian origin have been examined, and several show what seems to be biological material. Unfortunately, the possibility of contamination after their arrival on Earth cannot be definitively eliminated.
But an even more intriguing possibility is that Martian life has already been detected. In one controversial experiment conducted by the Viking Mars lander in 1975, nutrients added to a soil sample appeared to spark the release of carbon dioxide, which on Earth would be interpreted as biological activity. A consensus arose, however, that the release could be accounted for without the presence of life, and there has been no follow up. This was an understandable consequence given the difficulty of conducting research on the Martian surface. There remains a core of scientists convinced that the consensus is mistaken, and one day the question will get a better answer.
That controversy underscores the question of whether something that looks like life is in fact living (or was once living). Kaufman reviews and updates some of the research into the borderlands between life and nonlife, including the famous Miller-Urey experiment that created amino acids by shooting electrical sparks into what was at the time (1952) thought to be a good replica of Earth's primitive atmosphere. While the or
iginal experiment apparently has been shown to be flawed, some follow-up work has had equally intriguing results. Life in a test tube may be closer than most of us realize.
Critical to the possibility of extraterrestrial life is the location of environments where it could thrive. While a few in our own solar system (Mars, the Jovian moons) appear to hold promise, the bigger question is whether other stars harbor Earth-like planets that could support life. Preliminary data from the Kepler space telescope appears to give an overwhelmingly affirmative answer; still, some scientists continue to argue that life beyond Earth is likely to be rare, and intelligent life even rarer.
The search for evidence of intelligent life continues nonetheless. Classical SETI, using radio telescopes, has plenty of skeptics, but Kaufman points out that we have been conducting SETI experiments for about fifty years, a laughably short time in the cosmic scale. Our tools for the search are orders of magnitude better than when the Greenbank and Arecibo radio telescopes were state of the art. Here, as in other chapters, Kaufman talks to the scientists who are doing the current research and gives an up-to-date picture of what they're finding and thinking about.
One point where Kaufman or some of his trusted sources go off track, is in his endorsement of the idea that the parameters of physics show a kind of “fine tuning” without which life would be impossible. He repeats the observation that the universe we know would be impossible if, for example, the ratio of the weights of the proton and neutron were slightly different. Perhaps things could have been different, or perhaps the universe we know is the only one that could exist; many apparently improbable phenomena turn out, with better information, to be utterly unremarkable. But short of some knowledge of how the cosmological constants are set, the question seems more appropriate for a sophomore bull session than for serious cosmological investigation.
On the whole, a fine summary of the current state of research into extraterrestrial life. Recommended.
Copyright © 2011 Peter Heck
[Back to Table of Contents]
Asimov's SF, August 2011 Page 20
