Locus, January 2013
Page 7
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At Strange Horizons in November, Leonard Richardson’s ‘‘Four Kinds of Cargo’’ evokes Galaxy Quest, telling of a multi-species crewed spaceship led by a ‘‘batshit crazy’’ Captain obsessed with video epics about ‘‘roguish smuggler captains and their multi-ethnic crews.’’ Her long-suffering XO, who knows those stories are fiction, keeps things together as they do their business along the ‘‘complicated border between the Fist of Joy and the Terran Extension.’’ This episode involves a dangerous journey to a disputed planet, to return a crewmember’s body for burial. It’s quite funny, but also quite moving.
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In December, Strange Horizons features another good story from Alter S. Reiss, who has impressed me with both the quality and the variety of his stories this past year or two. ‘‘America Thief’’ is a gangster story, with characters including Bugsy Siegel and Arnold Rothstein. The narrator is a small-time hood who is also a magician, and the son of a rabbi. He is pressured by Rothstein to investigate a local boy who seems to be turning lead into gold, a job that ends up stressing his shaky morals, his belief in truth, his feelings for his girlfriend, and his concern for his community. It’s a well-told and original story. I also liked Amal El-Mohtar’s ‘‘Wing’’, a brief, poetic piece about a girl with a mysterious book around her neck, and a few people she encounters. I can’t say what it means, only that it’s a lovely read.
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The November 15 issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies includes a very nice David D. Levine story, ‘‘Liaisons Galantes: A Scientific Romance’’. The conceit behind the story is that people who are truly in love manifest doglike creatures called ‘‘galanteries.’’ It’s set in Paris, among a group of artists. Zephine is a struggling young writer, hopelessly obsessed with the group’s charismatic leader, Darius. Then she meets another man, and they hit it off and become lovers – but to their concern, no galanteries appear. Are they really in love? And what does it mean that Zephine is suddenly inspired, and writing a promising play that attracts Darius’s interest? The resolution becomes what we expect – not tritely, but such that we are led in the right direction so that everything seems just right: a slight but quite enjoyable piece.
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Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling’s latest YA anthology is After, stories of apocalypse and dystopia (thus neatly sidestepping questions about those two related but not really identical subgenres – as the editors acknowledge in their introduction). It’s a solid collection, if perhaps never quite brilliant. The best stories include N.K. Jemisin’s ‘‘Valedictorian’’, which looks at a world split between haves and have-nots – but ambiguously, as the have-nots, it appears, have got that way by refusing knowledge. This complicates the position of the brilliant girl at the center of the story. There is also Garth Nix’s heartbreaking ‘‘You Won’t Feel a Thing’’, set in the world of his novel Shade’s Children; and Steven Gould’s ‘‘Rust With Wings’’, an early look at the metal-eating apocalypse he’s been exploring in several recent stories and a novel.
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Another anthology worth a look is Stranded, a collection of three novellas by Anne Bishop, Anthony Francis, and James Alan Gardner. My favorite was Gardner’s ‘‘A Host of Leeches’’, about a girl, apparently a victim of some mysterious plague, who is wakened in a hospital, the only survivor, among a group of war robots. The story is, perhaps unexpectedly, sprightly and comic, and not quite believable, but pretty fun.
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Bloody Fabulous is a mixed original/reprint anthology on the subject of fashion, and is entertaining throughout. The best original piece is Nick Mamatas’s ‘‘Avant-n00b’’, about a young fashion blogger who stumbles across a very strange ‘‘vintage’’ piece of clothing that turns out to have links to Vichy France.
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Finally, Gardner Dozois offers a first rate new anthology in audio form: Rip-Off!. The conceit is that each story begins with a famous first line, and goes on from there, presumably riffing on the story it’s ‘‘ripping off.’’ The best two stories open and close the book. Robert Charles Wilson’s ‘‘Fireborn’’ is based on a Carl Sandburg story. It’s pastoral in mood, about Onyx and Jasper, two ‘‘commoners’’ who encounter a fireborn ‘‘skydancer’’ – a woman who has lived multiple lives, trying to earn ‘‘transit to the Eye of the Moon.’’ The story slowly reveals the nature of the ‘‘fireborn,’’ and the ambitions of Onyx and Jasper, as Jasper is lured to become an apprentice to the skydancer.
This is excellent ‘‘posthuman’’ SF, in which the posthumans are just as human as the ‘‘commoners.’’ And James Patrick Kelly’s ‘‘Declaration’’ (taking off from the Declaration of Independence) is about a girl who splits time between virtuality (‘‘softtime’’) and ‘‘real’’ life (‘‘hardtime’’), along with her terribly disabled brother. Their online community becomes involved in a push for a Declaration of Independence for those who want to live their lives wholly in ‘‘softtime’’ (instead of mandatory ‘‘hardtime,’’ including interactions with other people). The story doesn’t insist on conclusions, but looks at both sides of the argument, with disingenuous as well as sincere POVs given both sides.
Recommended Stories:
‘‘Wing’’, Amal El-Mohtar (Strange Horizons 12/12)
‘‘Other Names, Other Histories’’, Dennis Ginoza (Phantom Drift Fall 2012)
‘‘Valedictorian’’, N.K. Jemisin (After)
‘‘They Shall Salt the Earth With Seeds of Glass’’, Alaya Dawn Johnson (Asimov’s 1/13)
‘‘Declaration’’, James Patrick Kelly (Rip-Off!)
‘‘Over There’’, Will McIntosh (Asimov’s, 1/13)
‘‘Hotel’’, Suzanne Palmer (Asimov’s, 1/13)
‘‘Four Kinds of Cargo’’, Leonard Richardson (Strange Horizons, 11/12)
‘‘The Memcordist’’, Lavie Tidhar (Eclipse Online 12/12)
‘‘The Family Rocket’’, James Van Pelt (Asimov’s 1/13)
‘‘Fireborn’’, Robert Charles Wilson (Rip-Off!)
–Rich Horton
Semiprofessional magazines, fiction fanzines, original collections, original anthologies, plus new stories in outside sources should be sent to Rich Horton, 653 Yeddo Ave., Webster Groves MO 63119,
Return to In This Issue listing.
LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: GARY K. WOLFE
Angelmaker, Nick Harkaway (Heinemann 978-0434020942, 12.99, 576pp, hc) February 2012. (Vintage 978-0-307-74362-6, $15.95, 484pp, tp) October 2012.
Blood Oranges, Caitlín R. Kiernan writing as Kathleen Tierney (Roc 978-0-451-46501-6, $16.00, 254pp, tp), February 2013.
Salvage and Demolition, Tim Powers (Subterranean 978-1-59606-515-4, $30.00, 160pp, hc) January 2013. [Order from Subterranean Press, PO Box 190106, Burton MI 48519;
Son of Destruction, Kit Reed (Severn House 978-0-7278-8232-5, £19.99/$28.95, 234pp, hc) October 2012 (UK)/March2013 (US).
SHORT TAKE
John Brunner, Jad Smith (University of Illinois Press 978-0-252-03733-7, $80.00/£60.00, 192pp, hc; 978-0-252-07881-1, $21.95/£15.99, 192pp, tp) January 2013.
For several years now, the various intersections of genre and mainstream fiction have grown so much more complex that by now it’s almost possible to classify the various strategies which writers have developed for dancing around the edges of genre fantastika without quite falling in. There are, most visibly, the champions: those who unapologetically celebrate the pleasures of genre even though their own work only occasionally touches upon it, such as Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, and Junot Díaz. There are the passive-aggressives like Margaret Atwood, who sometimes explain that they weren’t writing science fiction at all, unless they were, in which case they didn’t mean to. There are the vacationers who, having established a solid reputation in one genre (like mysteries), decide to take a weekend off to have a whirl at something like SF, such as P.D. James or Walter Mosley. Ther
e are the clueless scions like Philip Roth, who seemed to think he was inventing a new genre with The Plot Against America, or John Updike, who just seemed to be having a fit with Toward the End of Time. There are the stealth novelists like Carolyn See or Barbara Kingsolver, who quietly introduce SF elements into their novels without anyone much noticing (most recently in Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior). And there are the Teflon divers, who plunge fully loaded into genre waters and come up with little of it sticking to them, earning plaudits from the mainstream press while gaining only notional attention from the genre readership. These might include Richard Powers, Caleb Carr, and – case in point – Nick Harkaway.
A few years ago, Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World presented us with one of the most inventive post-apocalyptic narratives in recent fiction, and one of the shaggiest. It garnered nominations for BSFA and Locus Awards, but other than that seemed to have created few ripples, possibly because of its endless digressions, convoluted plot, and huge cast of sometimes overbaked characters. With Angelmaker, Harkaway has reined in some of his excesses, though he still can’t resist character names like Spork, Titwhistle, and Cummerbund, and there are still flashes of the ADHD plotting that made The Gone-Away World as exhausting as it was exhilarating. Fortunately, Angelmaker is mostly exhilarating, with moments of sheer brilliance and other moments of sheer taffy. It’s another big, ridiculous, overeager, cantankerous novel, not too weighted down by its philosophical maguffin (in The Gone-Away World it was a bomb that drained meaning from the world; here it’s a device which causes people to see the truth, with possible catastrophic consequences), and set in a world which is recognizably our own, with two main timelines that actually make sense as they converge. Again, it features some likable protagonists (and one terrific one), and this time adds a supervillain whose ancestry stretches all the way back past James Bond to Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu.
The contemporary plot centers on Joe Spork, the son of a notorious mobster who is trying to make a quiet life for himself repairing antique clocks and watches in the tradition of his grandfather. When a couple of unusual clockwork mechanisms are brought to him – one, a sort of combination book and computing device from a shady former associate of his dad’s, the other a mysterious box from a 90-year-old lady named Edie Banister – he quickly finds himself drawing the attention not only of shadowy government agencies, but of a monastic band of clandestine figures who claim to be adhering to the ideals of John Ruskin, of a legendary figure called The Recorded Man, and even of a vicious serial murderer currently terrorizing England.
The secondary timeline, which takes us back to 1939, involves the earlier career of Edie Banister, who had been a formidable secret agent and associate of Joe’s grandfather, a brilliant French woman mathematician named Frankie Fossoyeur – the mind behind the various clockwork mechanisms which eventually comprise a kind of doomsday device called the Apprehension Engine (the Angelmaker of the title) – and a criminal mastermind named Shen Shen Tsien, or the Opium Khan. Invoking everything from Bletchley Park to Ada Lovelace (whose namesake is a kind of super-steampunk stealth train that also serves as an advanced computing laboratory), these sequences recall nothing so much as the cryptohistorical fantasies of Edward Whittemore, or even a kind of loony parody of the sort of convoluted backstory that Harkaway’s own dad occasionally gave his characters. What really holds the novel together, past and present, is the remarkable figure of Edie, easily Harkaway’s best character. In one of its best scenes, featuring no tech gimmickry at all, the 90-year-old Edie simply outthinks three beefy goons sent to kill her.
In fact, for all its bells and whistles, which include a plague of mechanical doomsday bees, Angelmaker’s most lasting charms are in its characters, who owe more to Wodehouse than Le Carré. As with The Gone-Away World, the novel is a bit longer than it needs to be, and Harkaway sometimes gets characters so far out on a limb that the reader has to sit still while he reels them back in (there’s a lengthy abduction-and-torture sequence that adds little but unpleasantness), but between the indomitable Edie, Joe’s all-purpose deus ex machina fixer Mercer Cradle, and Cradle’s spectacularly strong-willed daughter Polly (who becomes Joe’s lover and who is so organized she times her lovemaking with the vibrations of a passing train), it’s a quite agreeable, often hilarious, and altogether charming mess.
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The first thing you need to understand about Blood Oranges, by ‘‘Caitlín Kiernan writing as Kathleen Tierney,’’ is that there’s a good reason for that pseudonym. If you’ve been following the remarkable progression of The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl – which is certainly her masterpiece so far, and might remain so – not to mention last year’s retrospective Two Worlds and In Between – this is not the next book in that sequence. It is not Kiernan further testing the limits of her craft and art, and in fact Kiernan tells us up front that her narrator Siobhan Quinn, ‘‘is not a very good writer’’ – which is a little disingenuous, since Kiernan’s on-pitch control of Quinn’s furious, unreliable, sputtering voice is part of what makes the novel work. ‘‘I’m not a writer,’’ Quinn reminds us more than once. ‘‘If you want a point A to Z narrative, you’re sure as hell not going to get it here.’’ What this is, really, is Kiernan having some evil, exasperated fun with the whole paranormal romance juggernaut, and apparently trying to create the least romantic vampire since those created by Octavia Butler or Suzy McKee Charnas (although Quinn has little else in common with those earlier revisionist tours de force).
Quinn is a self-styled monster hunter and admitted heroin junkie who makes the mistake of shooting up in the woods on the night of a full moon, resulting in a near-fatal attack by a werewolf she’s been stalking. Her rescuer turns out to be a powerful vampire named Mercy Brown, or the Bride of Quiet, who is seeking her own vengeance for Quinn having murdered her daughter some months earlier. Already infected by werewolvery by the earlier attack, Quinn is now bitten by Mercy and infected with vampirism as well. Quinn seeks advice from a kind of mentor or sponsor called Mean Mr. B, who needless to say has an agenda of his own, and she eventually ends up on a quest, punctuated by her occasional bouts of lycanthropy and bloodsucking, and including an impressive underground journey setpiece, emerging presumably ready for the next volume.
Along the way, Kiernan seldom misses an opportunity to needle the genre she’s wearing: ‘‘Forget all that crap you might have read about immortality and vampires who are thousands of years old;’’ ‘‘vampires sure as hell don’t sparkle… or glitter… or twinkle, no matter what that silly Mormon twit may have written;’’ ‘‘women who read the silly ParaRom pulp I mentioned earlier;’’ ‘‘pretty fairy tales spun by the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer;’’ etc. But, with Kiernan occasionally peeking out from behind the mask, there are also sly allusions to Stoker, F.W. Murnau, Stephen King, Lovecraft, even William Cowper and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s yellow wallpaper. Blood Oranges isn’t major Kiernan, but it’s a lot of fun, and it will be interesting to see if it can ironically enjoy some of the successes of the very genre it subverts.
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Part of the appeal of the ‘‘secret history’’ conceit – which has become such a trademark of Tim Powers that he practically owns it, although writers from John M. Ford to Dan Simmons have also deployed it to good effect – is that it permits us the delightful frisson of imagining that fantasy is not so much invented as discovered, a kind of subterranean gloss on the historical record that we thought we knew. Since history is almost by definition always incomplete, this gives his best work almost a feeling of reclamation, of recovering some bits of mythic time in the cracks and crevices of historical time. Powers has done this most famously with the 19th century (most recently in Hide Me Among the Graves), but he’s also toyed with the 18th-century Caribbean, with Bugsy Siegel’s Las Vegas, with the Cold War, and with southern California at pretty much any time. His new novella Salvage and Demolition revisits the San Francisco of the Beat poets, in the form of a slight but touching tim
e-travel romance. Powers has used time travel before, of course, most notably in his breakout novel The Anubis Gates, but here he offers no particular rationale for it, other than that he needs it for his story to work. That’s fine – time travel has always worked better as a narrative device than as an SF concept, and for some time it’s shown signs of migrating from SF to fantasy (Kindred, The Time Traveler’s Wife), just as psychic powers seem to have migrated from SF to horror fiction (as with a good deal of Stephen King).
But I digress. Richard Blanzac, an unassuming rare book dealer in San Francisco, receives a consignment of books from the niece of a long-forgotten Beat-era poet named Sophie Greenwald, which includes a signed first edition of Ginsberg’s Howl and a number of signed letters from Kerouac, along with a scattering of cigarette butts, an old copy of TV Guide, a paperback Ace SF Double, and an oddly un-Beatlike handwritten manuscript of what appears to be a lengthy poem. Almost immediately, he is summoned to a nursing home where a tough old lady named Betty Barlow, who claims to be Greenwald’s executor, demands that he destroy the manuscript. Before even leaving the home, he’s approached by another figure, claiming to be a special collections librarian from the University of California, who also shows a strangely keen interest in the manuscript. The story’s maguffin thus established within the first few pages, it remains to reveal the centuries-old background of the manuscript – a translation of an ancient poem with supposedly eldritch powers – but the real charm of the story involves Blanzac’s sudden and unexplained transition back to the San Francisco of 1957, where he of course meets Sophie Greenwald herself. Powers evokes this setting with both real affection and a Hammett-like grittiness, and makes clever but judicious use of the time-travel motif. And Sophie herself proves to be an entrancing creation with a few secrets of her own, as irresistible to us as she proves to be to Blanzac. If the mythic substructure involving that mysterious poem seems pretty familiar, the emerging romance of a forgotten poem in an iconic time and place has enough magic of its own. It’s an uncommon and engaging chamber piece from an author most often engaged in more symphonic forms.