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If we were to take at face value Tsvetan Todorov’s famously useless definition of the fantastic as existing only during that period of hesitation before a work topples into the truly marvelous or the merely uncanny, then the simple act of identifying a work as SF or fantasy or mimetic realism would constitute a kind of spoiler (in fact, even reviewing it in Locus might). Since Kit Reed’s Son of Destruction is a rare novel that actually makes considerable use of Todorov’s hesitation, the first thing I should tell you about it is that there are things I shouldn’t tell you about it – namely, whether it ends up landing in the uncanny bin or the marvelous bin, or just teeters on that Todorovian pivot all the way through. Reed has certainly chosen a classically uncanny phenomenon as her centerpiece – spontaneous human combustion, which has provided fodder (or should I say kindling?) for writers from Dickens to Gogol to Charles Brockden Brown. She combines this with a couple of far more familiar tropes – the Pandora’s box theme, in which mysteries begin to unfold after opening a box left behind by a dead person, and the small town with an old secret that no one talks about – either of which also could resolve either way.
The box in question belongs to Lucy Carteret, who, shortly before dying, tells her son Dan that the ex-marine who brutally raised him – one of Reed’s acidly etched portraits of male catastrophe – isn’t his real dad, but refuses to say who is, or anything else about her earlier life. After her death, Dan, a mostly freelance reporter, finds in her jewelry box clues that set him on a quest for his true identity: a high school football trinket, a couple of photographs, and, oddest of all, a newspaper clipping describing three cases of spontaneous human combustion in the same Florida town over a 50-year period. This is enough to send Dan off to Fort Jude FL, the town in the clipping, which turns out to be an insular, fairly snobbish, and uninviting community where life seems to resolve around high school, church, and the local social club. At first the residents, who you halfway expect to begin stoning outsiders or sacrificing children in the corn, pretend to know nothing of the photographs or of Dan’s mom, but as we shift to the perspective of some of the residents – there are nearly a dozen points of view – we begin to learn of some unspoken catastrophe that occurred decades earlier, during the last few weeks that Lucy lived in Fort Jude, and that may be connected with one of the immolations.
Reed sets up and eventually resolves her mystery with admirable efficiency and skill, though the pace slows a bit as she develops her mosaic portrait of a community largely bound by silence – a high school bully turned middle-aged thug; a hotel owner and her teenage daughter; the Harvard-educated heir of the town’s founder, returned after a failed career at Goldman Sachs; an auto mechanic’s son, spurned as lower class by most of the residents but who earned an MIT scholarship; even the spontaneous combustion victim herself. The real strength of the novel is that precarious balancing act – until almost the end, it could still resolve itself in the direction of either John Cheever or Stephen King, but to say more would be an act of mischievous toppling. Suffice to say that the title character is not at all who you think it is, and that the resolution is both satisfying and more than a little haunting.
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SHORT TAKE
John Brunner might not be the first name that comes to mind as the likely inaugural subject for the University of Illinois Press’s ambitious project of monographs on ‘‘Modern Masters of Science Fiction’’ – likely the most extensive such project since Oxford University Press’s short-lived series some three decades ago – and Jad Smith, the author, may not be a familiar name in SF criticism. But John Brunner proves to be an excellent model for what later volumes in the series might look like – clearly and accessibly written, free of theoretical or historical hobbyhorses, and meticulously researched. Brunner seems to get rediscovered every few years, or by every new generation, but generally it’s the same trio of classics – Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, The Shockwave Rider – which get discussed, and which, with their combination of modernist narrative techniques, SF tradition, and media-savvy futurism, still exert a significant influence today (see Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, for example). But Smith shows how the roots of much of this experimentation can be found in Brunner’s earlier short fiction and even his fanzine writing, and does a more than credible job of tracing Brunner’s efforts to merge the British scientific romance tradition with the American pulp tradition (he first came to attention here in garish Ace Doubles with titles like The Atlantic Abomination), his problematical relationship with the New Wave, his near-retirement from SF, his attempts at a comeback following the disappointing commercial failure of his ambitious historical novel The Great Steamboat Race, and his tragic premature death at the 1995 Glasgow Worldcon. Along the way, Smith paints a fascinating portrait of the rapidly changing world of Anglo-American SF of the 1950s through the 1980s, and of the significant role that Brunner played as a kind of bridge between SF traditions.
–Gary K. Wolfe
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LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: FAREN MILLER
Turing & Burroughs, Rudy Rucker (Transreal 978-0-9858272-3-6, $16.00, 248pp, tp) September 2012. Cover by Rudy Rucker. [Order from Transreal Books;
The Folly of the World, Jesse Bullington (Orbit 978-0-316-19035-0, $15.99, 528pp, tp) December 2012.
Six-Gun Tarot, R.S. Belcher (Tor 978-0-7653-2932-5, $25.99, 364pp, hc) January 2013.
At the Edge of Waking, Holly Phillips (Prime 978-1-60701-356-3, $15.95, 336pp, tp) September 2012. Cover by Aurélien Police.
Turing and Burroughs, Rudy Rucker’s ‘‘Beatnik SF Novel,’’ deftly combines historic characters and wild flights of imagination, in a spin-off of our world’s history, 1954-55. Though I hadn’t quite reached grade school back then, I recognize (and dig!) its portrayal of mid-century America as a far from monolithic nation that extends beyond the suburbs where Boomers grew, to the hipster realm of Beats and the avant-garde, to the avid obsessions of young drivers besotted with their two-tone cars, gritty roadside ‘‘trailer trash’’ just managing to get by – all of it further weirded out by elements from period Sci-Fi, and the paranoid schemes of governments gearing up for the Cold War via spycraft and the latest things in weaponry.
That’s governments, plural. The book opens in Manchester, England, as scientist Alan Turing narrowly escapes assassination by minions of his old employers, now that he’s no longer ‘‘the brains of the British cryptography team at Bletchley Park, cracking the Nazi Enigma code and shortening the war by several years – little thanks that he’d ever gotten for that.’’ Embittered, preoccupied with his own strange new biological experiments, then forced into hiding, Turing finds temporary refuge in Tangiers, Algeria. Here the plot really thickens.
Beat writer William (Bill) Burroughs is avoiding a genuine US murder rap via self-exile to Tangiers. Though he claimed the shooting death of his wife was just a tragic mistake, Burroughs already hated the closeted life of America’s gay males and wanted out before he had to flee. Through some chapters in the form of letters sent to friends Stateside, we see a mind quite different from chatty, very British Turing, though both men are homosexuals (and way outside the norm in other ways). Bill tells fellow ‘‘queer’’ and Beatnik poet Alan Ginsberg, ‘‘I’ve settled back into Tangier, they got everything I want…. The local worthies presented me with a key to the city – a nicely broken-in kief pipe stamped with arabesques.’’
Life seems good, in a haze of hash. But when Turing shows up under an assumed identity, and becomes a new lover equally hot on sex and mad science, things really get weird. His new advance in biomorphism still needs some tinkering – the first facial disguise, using cells from the man who died in his stead back in Britain, starts to rot in near-tropical heat. But once he gets the hang of things, this bold experimenter flings himself into the shapeshifting, limited telepathy and apparently vast potential for further human advancement of the process that he cal
ls skugging (after one mode of transformation: man into giant slug). Willy-nilly, Burroughs gets skugged as well – hard to avoid around the man who dreamed it up and first underwent the change.
Although the lovers part for a time, Burroughs staying put while Turing hares off to America in pursuit of his own wild plans, both must contend with pesky government agents drawn by rumors and some unexpected side-effects of skugging. Forced back into flight from agents greedy for his knowledge, Alan travels our country’s byways with an AWOL sailor. Along the way, he learns about its many idioms and cultures – including sci-fi, as everyone from pulp writers and directors to more serious speculators and gurus envisioned it at the midpoint of the 20th century. For most of this journey, he regards his discovery as the best way for humans to evolve. Skugging rules! Or does it?
Turing & Burroughs can be enjoyed as a mad romp, and celebration of gay sex, that brings together and transforms two characters from history in outrageous ways. Yet these men helped shape our world even without the fictional embellishments. Both were linked to ideas and hardware that would eventually spawn the Web, as well as new developments in science fiction. (Bill’s family made the calculating machine that went by their name, and one of his own most cherished notions involved something he called the Interzone.) And in the context of the book, skugging raises questions of its own, drawing so much interest from the military that its inventor starts to question his own enthusiasm. In less than 250 pages – room enough for a host of voices – Rudy Rucker has produced an SFnal tour de force.
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Initially, Jesse Bullington’s The Folly of the World seems like a beast of quite a different color. Its setting, a soggy, late-medieval Holland still recovering from the Saint Elizabeth Flood of 1421, may resemble our eastern coastlines after Sandy. But life in these semi-drowned towns and cities is a much rougher business, not long after both the flood and a civil war that continues to divide the ruling parties into fractious Hooks and Cods, while the survivors struggle to get by with no hope (or notion) of outside aid. The skies still threaten, the streets are foul and mucky, yet these folk endure – they’ve gone through this kind of thing before and won’t let it grind them down.
While some endure, others thrive, despite God’s apparent indifference to the world (as Lucifer looks on). Although such higher powers and dark forces show up now and then, most of this bulky book prefers to cast a gimlet eye on humankind in all its dreaming, folly, madness, and peculiar moments of success, like a modern counterpart of Pieter Brueghel. Phrases and proverbs that Brueghel illustrated in one famous artwork serve as headings for sections of the book, and the author likes the painter’s irreverent outlook: that of a peasant come to the big city, but hardly overwhelmed by awe.
Rather than high fantasy’s glamorized Middle Ages, Bullington prefers things down and dirty, especially the language. (The first section is aptly titled ‘‘Shitting Upon the Gallows’’.) None of his main characters shy away from expletives. There’s Jan, a handsome con man with grander schemes; Jolanda (Jo), an illiterate young girl from a family that makes dye from ocean snails, who attracts Jan’s notice with her swimming skills; and Sander, the rogue and killer who joins them. The most offbeat of the three, Sander is openly gay and seems impossible for the Law to kill – though they’ve certainly tried, and he bears the scars to prove it.
If Jo can retrieve a certain heirloom from his family’s drowned house, Jan might be able to slink his way into the nobility of the island-city Dordrecht. She does find it, after a harrowing search. But a bizarre sequence of events takes Sander there in his place, accompanied by Jo. Can they learn enough, and change enough, to pull off a mad imposture?
Like the snooping Lucifer, suspense and horror lurk around the edges of this gritty, ribald book where nothing comes easy (including its explicit accounts of gay male sex). The sense of darkness grows stronger when the corpses of mutilated children start to surface from watery graves, and a sinister prowler finally reveals his identity. But even so, not all this novel’s ‘‘fools’’ are doomed to miserable death. Life will go on, uncowed, beyond the final page.
Looking back from this work to Rucker’s, I was surprised by how much they have in common. Despite their very different settings and styles – the prose in Turing & Burroughs can flow like a drug-stoked dream, while The Folly of the World moves with more of a Frankenstein’s Monster lurch – they don’t just share outrageous wit, X-rated talk, and streaks of unearthly fantasy. Both novels feature gay male characters, escapees from near-misses with death yet who are stubbornly determined to head right back into the thick of things under new identities, still as horny as ever. This might even represent a (new?) subgenre of SF/F. Perhaps some well-read scholar already plans to do a treatise on it.
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The Six-Gun Tarot, a strong first novel by R.S. Belcher, features a genre mix that’s very much in vogue these days: the dark and twisted Western. Two months ago, I dealt with one of these from an established writer, Joe Abercrombie’s Red Country. Belcher takes to it like a natural, with no signs of newbie hesitation. He jumps right in!
One element here is theological. As of 1869, the cattle town of Golgotha NV is already infamous as ‘‘a haven for the blessed and the damned,’’ especially the latter. In the aftermath of our Civil War, refugees are heading West, along with over-optimistic pioneers, criminals on the run, and the founders of a new faith. The book’s wild array of religions comes to include Mormonism and a grim version of more traditional Christianity, plus Taoism (those railroad-building Chinese), neo-Celtic feminist paganism, and something truly sinister that ruled long before Golgotha’s founding. We’d call it Lovecraftian – though Belcher’s rabid believers have crashed through all of HPL’s sexual constraints, and its origin dates back to the dawn of Creation.
Each chapter title comes from a card of the Tarot, a notion that turns out to suit this Western’s intricate plot and large cast of characters. Things begin with Jim Negrey as the Page of Wands. He’s a teenager on the run after a killing. (When details finally emerge, his act may seem justified, but the Law would never see it that way.) After barely surviving the 40-Mile Desert east of Golgotha, with help from a local who may have his own private agenda, Jim must adapt rapidly to his new surroundings. As he first sees it, ‘‘Golgotha seemed an odd mixture of old ruin and new paint, boom and bust – like an old lady all gussied up and powdered to meet her suitor, wearing too much makeup and gaudy schoolgirl ribbons in her hair, not caring about the incongruity of it, just happy to be alive and in love.’’ That’s the initial image of a town with many hidden depths, some of them dark indeed.
Whereas Rucker and Bullington introduce angels and the afterlife almost casually, not as major plot drivers, Belcher links the supernatural more closely to his tale. Though most events take place in his increasingly weird version of the Wild West, some interludes go much farther afield in space and time. A chapter called ‘‘The World’’ begins with Aputel, something like a cosmic bounty hunter who ‘‘rode a steed of divine fire across the Fields of Radiance in search of a truant angel.’’ When hunter and truant meet (in a zone ‘‘where the Darkness still held dominion’’), they argue about the nature of God and the worth or madness of His plans for the new universe.
One particularly bold divine scheme intends to take a virulent Supernatural Menace and bury it, in a state that should be eternal narcolepsy, deep in a mountain near the quasi-wasteland that will become Golgotha. But the sleeping monster attracts a cadre of fervent believers early on, and by the 1860s, mining in quest of precious ore is all the rage.
Jim Negrey stumbles into a place where ordinary life has almost ceased to exist. The sheriff has survived hanging (much like Bullington’s Sander), his deputy’s a born shapeshifter, gurus and conjurers show up without warning…. When the town suffers invasion by a horde of Undead, singing ‘‘an idiot falsetto parroting Genesis in a language not designed for human ears,’’ rough-talking Jim and his new compadres know t
hey’re in deep, deep shit. It takes some truly inspired authorial maneuvering to get anyone out alive, and reasonably sane.
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January traditionally serves as the month for catching up with books that deserve attention but didn’t get covered when they first appeared. The Rucker turned out to fall into this category, as does my other choice, Holly Phillips’s remarkable second collection, At the Edge of Waking.
I tend to let other reviewers deal with this kind of thing, since they have the expertise and I can be stymied by the combination of brevity and wide variety in a comprehensive collection. But Edge features less than a dozen works, most of them long enough to make far more of an impression on me than a five-page ‘‘passing fancy.’’
If I cited much from Peter S. Beagle’s excellent introduction, there might be little left to say, but one parenthetical observation really bears repeating. With regard to a tale that may be set in the Antarctic, he exclaims, ‘‘and, my God, can she do cold!’’
Phillips makes her settings intensely real to all the senses. If it’s well below freezing, you’ll shiver; your fingers may even start to turn blue. A brief passage from one of this book’s longest pieces, ‘‘Proving the Rule’’, shows how this rare ability can triumph over what should be impossible odds:
Perhaps where Lucy walked was no-place, no-time, nothing but a memory in the Marshal’s skull. A fading memory, all that was left of the Empire that was. And yet the black mud sucked at her shoes. Puddles bright as mirrors cupped in worn paving stones reflected her face, the edge of a wall. The thrushes singing in the woods that guarded the hilltops sang like the first springtime in the world.
Locus, January 2013 Page 8
