Coming just before his retirement, Night Lamp represented Vance at his late-career peak. Here are three typically vivid passages picked almost at random, illustrating his talents at evoking exotic panoramas, people, rituals and objects with deft neologisms and repurposed familiar terms.
Maihac brought out his froghorn, perhaps the most bizarre item in his collection, since it comprised three dissimilar instruments in one. The horn started with a rectangular brass mouthpiece, fitted to a plench-box sprouting four valves. The valves controlled four tubes which first wound around, then entered, the central brass globe: the so-called “mixing pot.” From the side opposite the mouthpiece came a tube which flared out into a flat rectangular sound bell.... Above the mouthpiece, a second tube clipped to the nostrils became a screedle flute....
For weeks volunteers and professionals had decorated the Surcy Pavilion to represent a street in the mythical town Poowaddle. False fronts simulated buildings of unlikely architecture; balconies held lumpy pneumatic buffoons, caparisoned in the traditional Poowaddle costume: tall crooked hats with wide brims supporting burbling baluk birds and brass-footed squeakers; loose pantaloons, enormous shoes with up-curling toes....
The Swamps along the fringes of the desert and beside the river seethed with life. Balls of tangled white worms, prancing web-footed andromorphs with green gills and eyes at the end of long-jointed arms, starfish-like pentapods tip-toeing on limbs twenty feet long; creatures all maw and tail; wallowing hulks of cartilage with pink ribbed undersides.
Linguistically and visually, Vance recalls a mature version of another genius in his own domain, the children’s author Dr. Seuss. Both men delight in the garishly oddball. If Vance accentuates the darker aspects of his vision, that’s only because he’s writing novels for adults.
Two of the most favored character types in the Vance Repertory Troupe occupy center stage in Night Lamp. (The title, by the way, naming a sun on whose lone habitable planet certain crises occur, is not explicated until well past the halfway point of the novel, consistent with Vance’s gradual unveiling of his plot’s mysteries.) The first figure is that of the boy who survives against all odds—bearing a strange destiny involving revenge—and matures into a highly competent young man. The best previous example of this theme in Vance was Emphyrio; the most extensive, Kirth Gersen, is the vengeful hero of the Demon Princes quintet. Here the lad is named Jaro Fath, orphan with missing memory and odd voices ringing in his head.
The second figure is that of the fey, willful, enticing girl-woman. Frequently she is evil, just as frequently good. There’s one of each in Night Lamp: Lyssell Bynnoc and Skirlet Hutsenreiter. The former is not a full-fledged villainess, such as we saw in Vance’s Cadwal Chronicles sequence beginning with Araminta Station, more a self-centered amoralist. But the latter is as charming a love-interest as any Vance has yet conjured, a figure with affinities to Nabokov’s beloved nymphets.
With these two youngsters bearing the major weight of events, Vance spins out an elaborate tale of treachery, decadence, social climbing and the satisfaction of obtaining justice long delayed. Echoing his classic The Dragon Masters at one point, the story jumps between two major locales: the planets Thanet and Fader, the latter Night Lamp’s satellite. The action spans two decades, giving the tale—whose twists and turns it would be unfair to divulge—a rich sense of history.
Another of Vance’s prime concerns shines thorough in this book: the notion of delusional systems. In the largest sense of the label, any kind of society represents for Vance a consensual folly. But he makes a crucial distinction between those delusions that work, that are sustainable and generally beneficial, and those that are inherently primed for failure: predatory, destructive of their holders and those around them. The society on Thanet, with its stultification into “ledges of comporture,” is a working system that generally promotes harmony and order (although Jaro the rebel runs afoul of it right from childhood). However, such malignant societies as that of Ushant (where “tamsour” rules) and Fader (where “rashudo” is the ideal) prove the danger of attempting to force life into artificial molds. In the concluding chapters of the book, Vance concentrates this warning down into the portrait of a single man with a unique, prison-bred philosophy and code of conduct, who is totally unable to adjust to freedom.
Always contrasting mankind’s petty lusts and ultimately insignificant actions, our short lifespans and limited mentalities, against the vaster background of an infinite, infinitely rich universe, Jack Vance simultaneously upholds the sanctity of human life, proposing that our best impulses and emotions are the only reliable measures and guides in a treacherous cosmos.
49
Kage Baker
In the Garden of Iden (1997)
[The Company]
WHEN KAGE BAKER died in 2010 at age 57, she had been publishing science fiction for less than a decade and a half, but her impact was swift and enduring. Her major work was the Company/Dr. Zeus, Inc. series of nine novels and a considerable number of short stories and novellas linked by the theme of time travel, covert manipulation of history and prehistory, and enforced immortality for a few.[1] Fortunately, Baker was able to wrap this significant million-word-plus storyline with The Sons of Heaven (2008), which satisfactorily and quirkily tied together the multitude of threads spun out of the fertile premise of In the Garden of Iden. That debut novel introduced her obsessed and time-harried Spanish botanist Mendoza, seized as a small girl and imprisoned in 1541 by the Inquisition, saved by a Company Facilitator, Joseph, and augmented into a deathless cyborg by dubious emissaries from the 24th century.
Baker’s clever, plausible twist on the time travel notion is that history (at any given moment) is invariant, so what is known to have happened cannot be changed by visitors from the future. However, much history is unrecorded or open to interpretation, allowing time travelers to intervene covertly. “If history states that John Jones won a million dollars in the lottery on a certain day in the past, you can’t go back there and win the lottery instead. But you can make sure that John Jones is an agent of yours, who will purchase the winning ticket on that day and dutifully invest the proceeds for you.” Centuries later, wisely husbanded by financial dealers throughout the past, your winnings will arrive in the form of funds, land, recovered lost paintings by famous artists. Even extinct creatures and plants can be preserved for the benefit of future ages, so long as you have reliable agents seeded across the ages. This scheme allows the Company access to the treasures of time even though nobody can travel forward beyond their own point of origin. (Or so it seems, until Mendoza’s puzzling “Crome radiation” starts messing with spacetime.)
Cyborged immortality, meanwhile, proves workable only when its necessary massive changes are made as early as possible. Adult bodies and brains are too set in their ways. Doomed, forgotten children of the past are located by Company agents and press-ganged into eternity. Feisty, ignorant little Mendoza is one such, even her name borrowed, condemned to death as a Jew by equally ignorant but far more culpable Inquisitors. Snatched away by 20 millennia-old Joseph, she begins her transformation and accelerated training as a specialist in rare plants for her saviors from nearly a thousand years in her future. This furtive organization, by the mid 24th century, is effectively rulers of the world. But mysteries attend Dr. Zeus, Inc., plenty of indications that its future is not the utopia its immortalized delegates might have hoped to find at the end of their long, weary journey. Indeed, no messages have been received from beyond the Silence in July 8, 2355, leading to wild speculations. Is the world doomed to end on that day, perhaps in a global conflict brought on by the Company itself?
Baker was a master of story: now emotionally moving and even heartbreaking, now zany and laugh-out-loud black-humored. Mendoza’s fate, eerily, is to fall desperately in love three times with the same man, who is different each time and always inappropriate, but compulsively desirable. It is the kind of tangled gothic romance only possible in a time travel sequence, an
d Baker works it for all it’s worth, to our enjoyment and benefit. In this opening volume, he is a 16th century English puritan, the former libertine and radical Nicholas Harpole, racked with guilt over his sexual infatuation with the lovely, mysterious Mendoza, who is only just starting to get the smallest notion of what being a cyborg implies.
In England for the marriage of Queen Mary Tudor to Prince Philip of Spain, Mendoza visits the botanical garden of Sir Walter Iden and finds there a rare medicinal treasure, Julius Caesar’s Holly. Thus, the novel’s title, with its inevitable undertones of exile from the Garden of Eden and its secret trees of both life and the knowledge of good and evil. Under Joseph’s cynical tutelage, Mendoza seduces Nicholas, but when he uncovers her inhuman nature he flees to Rochester and preaches fire and brimstone, attracting the wrath of the reinstated Catholic church. Like the famous Oxford Martyrs, he is sentenced to burning at the stake. Can white-skinned, red-haired, black-eyed Mendoza, with her enhanced powers and knowledge of futuristic technology, save her lover?
In the Garden of Iden is very much the best place to start the series, but it really comes into its own with Sky Coyote. Mendoza arrives on the west coast of America in 1699, before the ruinous arrival of the Spanish. The local people, the Chumash tribe, are taken in by Joseph’s manic impersonation of the trickster god, but less persuaded by his efforts to recruit their guilds into service of the Company. Accomplished in dialect, Baker avoids the usual stilted translations, presenting the Native Americans in charming and sometimes hilarious colloquialisms crossed with Chamber of Commerce wheeler-dealer from three centuries later. Introducing Joseph, visiting Humashup township, chief Sepawit stands in “nothing but a belt and some shell-bead money”:
“Well, folks. I guess our distinguished visitor doesn’t need much of an introduction to you all—” Scattered nervous giggles at that…. “Uncle Sky Coyote, I’d like to introduce Nutku, spokesman for the Canoemakers’ Union…. And this is Sawlawlan, spokesman for the United Workers in Steatite.” Another one wearing lots of money, with big hair and a sea-otter cape. “And Kupiuc, spokesman for the Intertribal Trade Council and Second Functionary of the Humashup Lodge. And this is Kaxiwalic, one of our most successful independent entrepreneurs.”
There’s not a breath of condescension or mockery in this. Baker shows us worlds ancient and recent as if we live in them, and for all their startling familiarity they remain hauntingly strange. This is wonderful storytelling, cut tragically short by Baker’s early death.
[1] A useful, detailed account of the Dr. Zeus, Inc. project and its many operatives and conspiracies is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Zeus_Inc. but this should not be consulted before reading the novels.
50
Joe Haldeman
Forever Peace (1997)
JOE HALDEMAN, 2010’s SFWA Grand Master, is sf’s consummate story-teller, his tales always illuminated by a moral consciousness. Far from turning them dull or preachy, this is what makes his fiction memorable, decade after decade. Half a lifetime ago, Haldeman recast the Vietnam conflict in his memorable Hugo, Nebula and Locus award-winner, The Forever War (1975). His elite, technically-savvy troops battled an alien foe across light-years and centuries. Poignantly, each engagement cut them off from Earth by hundreds of years, as relativistic velocities flung them into their own ever-more incomprehensible future. At the end of the thousand year war, it all turned out to have been a mistake. And new humanity, now a standardized group-mind named Man, has more in common with the clone-like alien Taurans.
Where can damaged veterans go in a universe like that? Haldeman returned in Forever Free (1999), a quarter century later in both reality and narrative time-line, to probe the consequences of the peace. William Mandella and his love Marygay Potter accepted Man’s offer of a world sardonically named Middle Finger (“up yours” or, even more frankly, MF). Here, unreconstructed relics of the war huddle from a universe repellent in its inhuman benevolence. MF proved to be the sort of welcome-home Vietnam veterans enjoyed—cold and hard. Technology, surprisingly, is not greatly advanced after a millennium. William and Marygay, and their adolescent son and daughter, now aquaculture fisherfolk, live in ice-bound rural Paxton (“peace town”), chafing under Man’s benign supervision. If Forever War was a caustic reply to Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, Forever Free seemed ready to follow his Methuselah’s Children: a stolen starship, a run for the edge of the galaxy, freedom boldly purchased. But Haldeman had larger fish to fry.
Might a wily, squabbling group of aging veterans defeat the omnipresent custody of their evolutionary superiors? Or was Man’s non-telepathic group mind a blind end? If Mandella and his conspirators managed to flee relativistically into the remote future, what could they possibly seek that will not be worse than their current anguished alienation? Might they find an answer to the horrors of the Forever War itself, and all of human history’s suffering? The plot maneuvers of Forever Free are abrupt and startling. One conceptual breakthrough after another tears open our understanding of this universe, until finally Haldeman deploys a kind of Gnostic explanation for the world’s pain. Gnosticism is a faith with few adherents these days, perhaps because it is not very satisfying—and its claims are just as dubious in fiction (except, perhaps, in Philip K. Dick’s). The gratuitous cruelty that climaxes Forever Free, and its equally gratuitous redemption, lurches from comic-book excess to world-weary acceptance. The augmented fighting suits of this quasi-trilogy morphed into a stifling enclosure of the spirit.
A far more satisfying thematic sequel to The Forever War already existed, the subject of this entry—Forever Peace. Set in a different near-future (Haldeman’s prefatory note calls it “a kind of sequel, though, examining some of that novel’s problems from an angle that didn’t exist twenty years ago”), this 1997 Hugo, Nebula and Campbell Memorial award-winner proposed a cure for war and hatred in the tradition of humanistic sf, notably Theodore Sturgeon’s: just the sort of empathic group mind that Mandella and his veteran friends found so creepy. It was if Haldeman restlessly tried out all the variants on salvation, determined to keep us entertained as he did so. Perhaps he is telling us that suffering is simply built-in to the cosmos, laced through it, unavoidable except at the cost of extinguishing the burning spark of individual awareness.
Certainly the guilty pain of inflicting misery and death on a helpless foe nearly drives Harvard PhD physicist and part-time draftee warrior Sergeant Julian Class to suicide. In a convincing extrapolation of the remote-controlled UAVs now piloted to fatal destinations in Afghanistan by specialists in the US mainland, the wealthy nano-rich, warm fusion-powered Alliance in 2043 fight the Ngumi or “pedros,” Third World guerillas, using “soldierboys,” lethal robots run long-distance via jacked-in VR immersion.
Haldeman is not writing for the squeamish:
I shouted “Drop it!” but she ignored me, and the second shot disintegrated her head and shoulders. I fired again, reflexively, blowing apart the M-31 and the hand that was aiming it, and turning her chest into a bright red cavity. Behind me, Amelia made a choking sound and ran to the bathroom to vomit.
The proverbial link between sex and violence is explicit—“her lower body was in a relaxed, casually seductive pose”—and jacking in is great for sex even when you’re not killing someone: “when we were jacked it was something way beyond anything either of us had ever experienced. It was as if life were a big complex puzzle, and we suddenly had a piece dropped in that nobody else could see.”
Adapting the cyberpunk convention, Haldeman suggests a more optimistic spin: being mentally wired together in a sort of hive mind for several weeks disables a hunter/killer platoon’s capacity to kill. Ultimately, this process will lead to the emergence of Homo sapiens pacificans, whose capacity to work together in mutual sympathy will ensure the subspecies’ replacement of our current squabbling humankind.
In this partitioned world, even more extremely divided between haves and have-nots, an apocalyptic cult, the Enders, wishes to ha
sten the death not only of all humans but of the entire universe. Only in this way can a corrupt, fallen world be saved. Making this proposition all too realistic is the Jupiter Project, a sort of mega-Large Hadron Collider. Julian Class and his lover Amelia Harding learn of this experiment that within weeks will trigger a new Big Bang, destroying the cosmos. Their frantic analysis of this ultimate existential threat is rejected by the leading Astrophysical Journal, blocked by Enders in key places and their leaders, the Hammer of God. This is undoubtedly extreme and melodramatic—it’s hard to imagine how even a nano-enabled society could dismantle and repurpose a moon of Jupiter within the next few decades—but serves the purpose admirably of pumping up the stakes in Haldeman’s quest for a solution to human aggressiveness.
Forever Peace provides a rousing counterbalance to the bleak view of humanity’s future in both Forever War and Forever Free.
51
Elizabeth Hand
Glimmering (1997)
ASTUTE CRITIC, unashamed craftsmanly novelizer of films, artist supreme in her own non-shared universes, Elizabeth Hand has emerged since her debut novel Winterlong as one of the finest voices of her generation, a cohort of writers who all debuted more or less in the middle 1980s. Unlabeled and uncategorized so far by historians of the genre—other than those who formed the cyberpunk and humanist camps—this generation has emerged over the span of this survey to be the defining voices of the field, taking up the reins in large part from any still-working survivors of earlier ages, and driving the team of speculative horses in a noticeably different direction.
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Page 18
