The Great Science Fiction Stories 9 (1947)

The ninth in this anthology series, this volume contains stories that were being written and revised soon after the close of World War II. It’s obvious that the shadow of that war and its ending hangs over the stories, as more than the usual number are concerned with the after-effects of atomic warfare. It’s a stereotype that science fiction is inherently optimistic, and a number of stories show the reality opposing the stereotype.

“Little Lost Robot” by Isaac Asimov (Astounding) – I admit to not being very fond of Asimov’s famous Robot series. It’s not that I don’t like them; it’s just that I don’t think they are as amazing as is generally held. For me, this story is a great example of their weakness. There is no denying the impact of Asimov’s robotic laws both on fiction and in developing technology, but that doesn’t mean that all the stories that used those laws are necessarily good. While a lot of science fiction uses aliens as the gimmick on which to write other genres of fiction, Asimov instead used robots.

“Little Lost Robot” is, really, a mystery, a tidy little logic problem based on the premise of the robotic laws. The characterization, often a problem with Asimov, is decidedly flat. Asimov actively makes the characters share animosity towards one another for no reason that is apparent in the story itself, while the story implies that they should get along, not just for a common purpose, but because they are smart and thoughtful people. The story ends up being ingenious, but not really “great”. It makes a terrific example of what was good about the writing of that time, but I have a lot of trouble making it signpost of the best science fiction has to offer.

“Tomorrow's Children” Poul Anderson (Astounding) – Given the current interest in post-apocalyptic stories, Anderson’s first story in this anthology series might be interesting to modern readers. I find it interesting that the story comes out of Astounding, whose editor John Campbell believed in human exceptionalism and the ability to rise above any obstacle. Then again, the story does go to an interesting place if only because it is far more realistic than most of the current post-apocalyptic stories. Still, it’s a bit over-long and flat in its delivery, making it a little difficult to read. However, given that it was Anderson’s first published work, it serves as a sign of what was to follow in a long and brilliant career.

“Child's Play” by William Tenn (Astounding) – There seems to be a running motif, usually found in stories by Kuttner and Moore, of toys from the future coming back to wreak havoc on contemporary characters. This is another of those stories by a mostly forgotten writer, William Tenn. The motif allows the story to dance along the edge of whimsy and dread, but they usually end up strongly on the side of dread. This one cuts a little harder, since it involves biogenetics, and the narrator may not be entirely sane as he plays with a child’s science kit from the future. While the ending is telegraphed pretty early on, it is still an evocative piece.

“Time and Time Again” by H. Beam Piper (Astounding) – Piper is probably best known for his Fuzzy novels, which are enjoying a resurrection among modern readers. “Time and Time Again” is an interesting twist on a time travel story, probably fairly ground-breaking in its day but a little clichéd now. If you could travel back into your own past, how would you change things? Piper chooses to use an altruist as his protagonist, so his interest is in changing rotten history rather than just making his life easier. It’s a departure from the Piper I know and so valuable for that alone. The story also makes an interesting introduction into the possibility of time travel, forming an interesting resonance with the recent move Looper.

“Tiny and the Monster” by Theodore Sturgeon (Astounding) – Science fiction of this time is stereotypically known for its alien invasion story, but Sturgeon turns that trope around a bit. The gimmick ends up being a little bit hokey, but Sturgeon’s writing is fun and breezy. Sturgeon shows off his ability to build characters in this story as well, adding straightforward humor to a story that otherwise could be considered twee.

“E for Effort” by T. L. Sherred (Astounding) - This is a fairly well-known piece, reprinted in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. It’s an interesting take on time travel, imagining that instead of physically moving backwards in time, the characters can merely see into the past. They decide to use this technology to make movies, and the story becomes an interesting view into mid-century moviemaking with a slow progression to something bigger. The writing is very much like Robert Heinlein’s short stories, with a mildly cynical take on culture and human nature. Its climax comes fast and requires a few re-readings to fully understand, but it’s powerful in its delivery. I’ve thought about this story often recently and was delighted to uncover it again.

“Letter to Ellen” by Chan Davis (Astounding) – One of the characteristics of some of the best short stories from this general time period is the attempt to put a human emotional face on technological changes. Science and invention were blossoming at the end of World War II, and the best science fiction stories attempted to put an emotional element on those advances, weighing if they were perhaps not worth their cost. “Letter to Ellen” is an interesting story about technology that we’ve really only begun to explore to its full potential in the past decade, so there is a predictive element to Davis’s writing. However, he points out a bias that grows because of the use of the technology, a bias that doesn’t feel logical but I’m sure would happen if our science reaches the state described in the novel. Interestingly enough, it’s a similar question raised by the novel Frankenstein, but from a different point of view.

“The Figure” by Edward Grendon (Astounding) – This story is very much like an episode of Twilight Zone: short with a twist ending that leaves the audience dangling to find out what happens next. While it is fun, the twist is unfortunately telegraphed early and often. It may well be that decades of watching Twilight Zone and similarly themed and paced TV shows has made it easy to spot the twists of such things.

“With Folded Hands . . .” by Jack Williamson (Astounding) – This is perhaps the most well-known story in this collection. I’ve also come across it in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, so it is fairly well regarded by readers and critics.

I think this story is a nice counterpoint to the Robot stories by Asimov, wherein the three laws of robotics generally force the robots to be relatively docile and benign. But Williamson extrapolates the idea of telling a near-perfect machine to help man to ironic but plausible extremes. Given the near-universal understanding that the greatest threat to man is man itself, it’s fairly amazing that no one attempted to write this story before. In addition, the story has Williamson’s knack for placing a contemporary man of the 40s into a future that is easily recognizable, but different enough to allow there to be space for the story. While a lot of science fiction projects a future where the world is far less complicated, Williamson also recognizes that no matter how automated the world might become, the nature of people is less likely to change quickly.

“The Fires Within” by Arthur C. Clarke (Fantasy) – This is a strong example of Clarke’s own puzzle stories, involving characters trying to solve a mystery. To me, Clarke does this much better than Asimov, especially because his characters are far more believable. Clarke also doesn’t fall back on the clichés as models for what he writes. The framing device for this story is fairly unique, definitely unpredictable, and a delight when fully revealed. The final few paragraphs may seem trite, especially to an audience familiar with the twists and turns of The Twilight Zone, but that ending is merely Clarke’s nifty way of closing out his story, rather than the shocking purpose for the story in the first place. It’s not a weighty story and not Clarke’s best, but it is a good example of what he does when he truly excels (see “The Star” and “Nine Billion Names of God”).

“Zero Hour” by Ray Bradbury (Planet Stories) – “Zero Hour” is a great example of Ray Bradbury’s ability to take the mundane and turn it into something terrifying. The story focuses on fairly generic children’s games based on imagination, but as it proceeds, the sense of lurking dread grows and grows. The story begins with the adults laughing on the childish games until coincidences begin piling up. Bradbury pulls off a neat trick, allowing the reader to know exactly what is going on, so the horror comes not from our discovery of the truth but of the slow realization by the adult characters about what is going to happen. I’m reminded of the lengthier “Something Wicked This Way Comes” in the story’s basis on the usually innocent, but the the brevity of “Zero Hour” compacts and condenses the chill.

“Hobbyist” by Eric Frank Russell (Astounding) – Eric Frank Russell is a mostly forgotten writer from the 40s and 50s, but whose admirers think he deserves a revival. “Hobbyist” concerns an explorer who ends up far from human culture with no fuel. His lone companion on the planet he finds himself on is a macaw named Laura. Russell spends some time justifying choosing a macaw, but I’ve never been a fan of pet birds, so the explanations ring hollow. But it does give the lead character someone to talk to and to provide a second reaction to the story’s events for the reader.

The planet the explorer finds himself on is lush and lively, but something about it unsettles him. It was pretty clear to me what that something was, but it takes the trained explorer a while to figure it out. And just as he struggles to understand the cause of his concern, the action accelerates and gives the explorer an extremely deus ex machina way home.

Russell’s writing has a fine style and subtle humor, more subtle than the story that follows it, for example. Russell also raises some huge questions, especially in the last few paragraphs, but his handling of those large questions feels a little trite. Nonetheless, the story is engrossing despite the macaw and the “sense of humor” she displays.

“Exit the Professor” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (Thrilling Wonder Stories) – It’s astonishing how small a role humor plays in longer fiction. “Exit the Professor” is another of Kuttner and Moore’s outrageously charming stories where the science fiction takes a backseat to making the reader laugh. The story is based on a fairly common premise—a few individuals have taken the next step evolutionary step, but the story imagines them being brought up as, for lack of a better word, rednecks. And when their difference is uncovered by a visiting professor, all sorts of mayhem ensues as they race to keep their secret from the world at large.

“Thunder and Roses” by Theodore Sturgeon (Astounding) – Asimov makes the point that atomic destruction certainly seemed to be on everyone’s minds as reflected in the stories of 1947. With the dramatic end of World War II and the revelation of the resources available via atomic power, there was perhaps reason to be fearful. Sturgeon’s story is a powerful piece set after the United States has been devastated by a surprise attack. The narrator stumbles across an important secret and must weigh whether to use it, balancing his instinct against the request of an unexpected companion. The writing is contemplative and compelling, and it’s difficult to not feel for the narrator as he puzzles through his final days in a city dying from fallout.

Leviathan Wakes

It strikes me that space opera is the epic fantasy of science fiction. That is, you expect vast settings and a large cast of characters, all moving about their little narratives that eventually get tied up by the end of the book/series and somehow weave together to overcome the threat that imperils the solar system/galaxy/universe. Even if you are fairly unfamiliar with either subgenre, you can most likely do a quick comparison of the Star Wars (I’m thinking of the original trilogy mostly) and Lord of the Rings movies in your mind. They both have their avatars of oppressive evil—Darth Vader and  Emperor Palpatine versus Saruman and Sauron. They are both far-flung, moving through planetary systems quickly and several countries in Middle Earth respectively. They both have a number of characters whose stories have to be maintained and which come together at the climax to thwart the evil avatars and their attempt to dominate everything and everyone. Therefore it is something of a delight to find a novel that is clearly space opera, but succeeds in escaping these tropes to do something innovative. Leviathan Wakes, by James S. A. Corey (the pseudonym of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) is that novel, finding a crevice in the stalwart tradition of space opera and exploiting it with a compelling story.

While the scope of Leviathan Wakes is the entire solar system and while the threat does involve something extra-solar “invading”, the scope is smaller by magnitudes than the galactic milieu of most space opera and especially smaller than the universe-sized setting of the earliest space opera. The novel still makes it clear that we are talking about vast stretches of distance and time, larger than most people truly comprehend, but it also is satisfied to only deal with the solar system from the asteroid belt in. The novel also doesn’t posit a far-distant future where the science allows people to move freely around spacecraft that exceed the speed of light; rather, the science of Leviathan Wakes is not that far advanced from what we currently have now. This also results in delayed communication as participants in the conversation wait for their parts in a conversation to travel at light speed. Thus the setting that the novel inhabits is grand, but doesn’t require the suspension of disbelief of most space operas.

This realistic approach is enhanced by the novel’s focus on really just two characters, James Holden and Joe Miller. Holden is the executive officer on the Canterbury, an ice miner plying the asteroid belt. Holden is sent with a small crew to discover the source of a distress signal, but he ends up witnessing the destruction of the Canterbury by unknown forces. Joe Miller is a nourish private police officer on the asteroid Ceres, who notices strange goings-on among the criminal elements before being given a scut assignment to track down the missing heiress of an Earth industrial mogul. Both characters pull on the threads that are left to them as disaster after disaster strikes—a war breaks out between Earth, Mars, and the largely independent asteroid belt—and both characters try to minimize not only the damage around them but their own unexpected responsibility for the events shaping the war. While there are a few other minor characters that play parts in the ongoing story, Holden and Miller alternate the story’s point-of-view, even as they end up together on the same ship.

The two main characters are pretty deeply flawed, which is a twist on space opera’s general insistence on paragons, or characters who overcome their flaws to become paragons. This is not to say that Holden and Miller are not good people, because they are. But they are fully rounded characters, existing on a continuum rather than a binary. Holden is something of an idealist, expecting that people will do the right thing especially in the cold light of truth. Miller on the other hand is a cynic, expecting people to only act in their self-interest unless forced to do otherwise. This dichotomy causes real friction between them; even though they have the same goals, their respective methodologies disturb each other. And this lies at the heart of space opera—as humans explore the vast expanse of space, the very enormity of their endeavor highlights and intensifies the humanity of the characters. Paradoxically, it is against the largest setting, when individuals appear the smallest, do the characters excel the most.

The large backdrop also exacerbates the worst qualities as well. Given such a large arena in which to succeed, when failures happen, they are often spectacular. In Leviathan Wakes, it is human folly which enables the circumstances that drive the story: the war between the planets is a façade, a ploy setting ignorant militaries at each other’s’ throats in order to hide a corporate power grab, which in turn potentially endangers the entirety of the human race. This is the crux on which Miller and Holden’s differences lie.

Despite its differences from the stereotypes of the genre, Leviathan Wakes remains clearly a space opera. The action is relentless and on a large scale. The questions are big and the answers that Holden and Miller uncover in their search are bigger. And like well-written space opera, Leviathan Wakes is engaging and fun, difficult to put down once started. I’m pleased that there is a sequel and potentially a series.

Empire State

I keep a list of books that I want to read, mostly gathering it from reviews from all over, including the Internet and magazines. I also look at forthcoming book lists to see what my favorite authors are doing, usually putting their next offerings on my to-read list. The list is fairly large, so it sometimes takes me a while to get to things on it, and when I come to a first book by a new author, I’m generally hard-pressed to remember what it is that attracted me to the book in the first place. Was it a review, an advertisement? Did I like the cover art? Such was not the case with Adam Christopher’s Empire State. Just looking at the blurbs, I had no difficulty remembering what had grabbed my attention about this book. Alternate history 1930s New York City with superheroes? I’m there!

It starts out promising enough, a small-time gangster named Rex, on the run from a rival mob, crashes his car and escapes into a crowd watching New York’s two superheroes, the Skyguard and the Science Pirate duking it out against the backdrop of an uncompleted Empire State Building. Both heroes use rocket suits (a la The Rocketeer) and their battle lights up the sky. One hero wins decidedly and the crowd’s mixed reaction allows Rex to slip away unnoticed. But the events have consequences that nobody on the scene could have imagined. The story jumps to detective Rad Bradbury, a fairly stereotypical private eye from the period—living out of the back room of his office and avoiding divorce papers from his wife—who takes on an attractive female client, looking for her missing partner.

The novel becomes even more noir, as Rad’s narrative reveals that his city, which he refers to as the Empire State, is in perpetual Wartime with an unseen enemy, forcing rationing and prohibition laws. It’s always raining in the Empire State, and fog and clouds restrict sight of anything more than a few miles away from the island city. And for some reason, it’s almost always night. The phone in Rad’s office rings often but he is never able to get to it before it stops. Christopher evokes the same suspenseful texturing as the underrated movie Dark City, with something just as disturbing at its core. However, Christopher begins to lose control of that texturing, building convoluted level after level that eventually confuses even his characters, so that while the action is thrilling and the ideas interesting, the reader really has no idea what’s going on. We just have to trust that the private dick with the heart of gold is going to work it out.

In some ways this is no different from the best noir stories, which seem to involve a number of characters whose real goals and purposes remain obscure to the reader. And somehow the detective can piece them all together due to his innate, nearly supernatural, ability to read character and motivation in the people he meets. But Empire State suffers because the characters and their motivations are complicated by the revelation of an alternate dimension with doppelgangers of dubious motivation who apparently move back and forth across the dimensional divide with less difficulty than what might be imagined. And every time the characters provide a rule set for how something works, whether it be the culture of the Empire State or the physics of the dimensions, that rule set ends up being broken. And of course, like the best noir stories, characters perform double- and triple-crosses, again made more complicated by the doppelgangery as well as the supposed motivation not being clear in the first place.

Some characters want the dimensional rift closed for reasons that are never made completely clear. Other characters want to keep the rift open because they feel that destroying it will destroy the cities on both sides of the rift. And then some characters do contradictory things, working at their own purposes and which only seem somewhat tangential to the existence of the rift in the first place. Of course, there are allusions to the world that we know as well, further clouding the circumstances as the import of those allusions is never played out—there’s a cult based on a book entitled Seduction of the Innocent, but why that book and its hysteria regarding comic books is never made clear (let alone why people would follow it).

One of the most defining traits of noir fiction is that the detective doesn’t move from clue to clue as in true detective fiction, like Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. Instead, the detective is led around by the nose, getting kidnapped or beat up and following leads down blind alleys, somehow gleaning scraps of important information from the people he interacts with. I’ve always felt that the detective is a surrogate from the reader, making manifest the reader’s role in most detective fiction—being led from place to place without any real control over direction and picking up what clues they can through observation. But with Empire State, the framework is precarious and the reader is especially aware that they are being led about without much real hope of figuring out what is going on. None of the characters are given very much depth, usually another hallmark of noir fiction, so after a while I felt like I was being batted back and forth by characters I didn’t care much about one way or another. This ended up making a book that began with potential and strong ideas become a trudge, a tedious quest to find out how it all gets resolved, in the hopes of it getting better.

What Empire State needed more than anything else was a good edit, a tightening up. Noir stories generally move fast, but this one gets bogged down in its own complexity. The potential for a strong story was there but was never met. Adam Christopher shows promise—and has several more books on the way, including a sequel to Empire State—and he clearly knows comics and science fiction tradition. I look forward to the growth from this flawed start.

The Quantum Thief

I'm not sure there is such a thing as bibliographic karma, but there are moments when the right book appears at exactly the right time. I've long been a fan of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat series, and I was saddened by Harrison's death this last 15 August. That series details the antics of Slippery Jim DiGriz, the eponymous Stainless Steel Rat and the galaxy's best thief. The Quantum Thief is a proud follower on the trail that Harrison blazed; Hannu Rajaniemi's Jean de Flambeur is a worthy successor to Slippery Jim now that his stories have ended.

This first novel by Hannu Rajaniemi, a Finn living in Scotland, is both a challenge and a delight. The delight comes from following the exploits of a thief just rescued from prison and obliged to help his benefactress, Mieli, on a mission/quest of a dubious nature: one does not break a thief out of prison without usually desiring his talents. Unfortunately, de Flambeur's memories of his felonious ways have been carefully locked up in a Martian city called the Oubliette, so he has to steal his own memories back from a city that is walking across the Martian desert. The challenge comes from the far future setting that Rajaniemi creates; his world-building is elaborate and immersive, and his narrative throws the reader into the action without any guidance whatsoever. Much as in Steven Erikson's Malazan books, exotic names and ideas are bandied about without explanation, forcing the reader to glean meaning from context and repetition.

The world Rajaniemi has created is chock full of the big ideas that are the stereotype of speculative fiction. Especially fascinating is the culture of the Oubliette, hinging as it does on dual axes of time and privacy. On the one hand, the citizens of the Oubliette use a currency of time, paying for items with seconds counted out from their personal Watches. Anyone who has seen the movie In Time (http://perrynomasia.blogspot.com/2012/02/in-time.html) or read Harlan Ellison's "Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman" will recognize this conceit, but Rajaniemi changes it somewhat so that when a citizen's time runs out, instead of dying he serves a stint as a Quiet, a cyborg unit doing menial labor for the city. The citizen retains all his memories but performs service for a period of time before being allowed to be reborn into a new body with all his memories intact. The process takes for granted the ability to communicate consciousness and thought from body to body, and sometimes to machine. 

The second fundamental concept of the Oubliette also takes advantage of this capability: privacy is paramount to all the Oubliette's citizens, and every interaction includes a contract that details the extent of how much can be revealed or even remembered by the participants. Imagine a night on the town with the contract that stipulates that you could only remember that you had a good time but can remember no details of what you did or who you did it with. Such manipulation requires a monstrous computer that works on a quantum scale with interfaces to each and every citizen and a security protocol that guides how much can and cannot be remembered. People also share messages via co-memories—you receive a message from a friend that is actually a memory; you remember a conversation that you never had, because you have agreed that messages from the sender will allow the security program to shape your memory that you had it all along. The concept raises all sorts of fascinating philosophical questions, but Rajaniemi only touches on them in passing, allowing the reader to wander into that labyrinth on their own. Instead, The Quantum Thief focuses on how such a system could be manipulated by artists and thieves, both of which describe Jean de Flambeur. As is the tradition with the great literary thieves, de Flambeur is also something of a trickster, and so recovering his own memories is a task made more complicated by a sense of humor he doesn't entirely remember having. 

Rajaniemi deftly interweaves de Flambeur's story with that of Isidore, a young Martian architectural student whose daily life provides a great deal of the explanation of how the Oubliette culture works. The story follows him as he tries to work out his relationship with Pixil, a member of a culture based on 20^th and 21^st century gaming culture. Pixil's people are supreme crafters and technicians who are the most adept at the quantum computing required by the Oubliette, but they are just barely trusted, treated much like gypsies. Isidore is also getting something of a reputation as an amateur detective which is the source of his conflict with Pixil, who wants him to devote more time to her. But Isidore suspects he is being groomed by the Oubliette's tzaddikim, superheroes who act as voluntary police for the city and beloved by its citizens. And of course, if Isidore is a detective, then his path must somehow eventually cross de Flambeur's. But instead of being clichéd, Rajaniemi surprises the reader by letting their stories run parallel for a good bit before winding them together in unexpected ways. There are also outside forces that appear to be guiding the lives of the characters in the story; Rajaniemi fortunately only mentions them, letting them appear only very briefly—just hinting that their roles will be much bigger in future books before assuring it in the final chapter.

All the pieces come together in a whirlwind of storytelling, pushing the reader pell-mell across exotic locales and big ideas. Rajaniemi is an exciting new voice in speculative fiction, and The Quantum Thief promises more excitement and big ideas in future installments.

Zoo City

One of the most tried and true forms of modern narrative is the detective story. It’s been used so often that audiences interested in the art of storytelling can often determine who the criminal is based on plot lines and character appearances rather than using the evidence provided by the story. Two of the guilty pleasures of the Speculator household are Castle and Bones, television programs that follow the basic premise and structure of most mystery stories. And generally, we’ve solved the crime (usually murder) of the week after about ten minutes of viewing, based totally on metafiction. We eliminate suspects based on their being too prominent in the storyline (“that would be too obvious”) or because it’s too soon in the hour time slot for the criminal to be revealed. There are rules to these stories, you see, and if those rules are broken, you lose the audience’s trust and eventually patience. For instance, it’s not fair to have the villain be someone that has never been introduced in the story; if that happens, the audience has no chance to solve the crime. Disguising the villain, putting them on the fringe of the action but not so far on the fringe that they are not relevant is an art—see the recent movie Poe for a master class in disguising the villain (the movie Seven comes to mind also, but it’s not really about solving the crimes after all). But Mrs. Speculator and I are not really watching these specific shows because of the mysteries the characters are solving; in fact, we watch despite those crimes. Instead, we watch Castle and Bones for the character interaction and development, including season- and series-long arcs for the characters. Characters are one of the methods by which storytellers push mundane and often-used plots into a new place. And if the characters and their stories are really good (or really consuming), then the mystery part gets a pass.

Another method of disguising timeworn narrative is setting. In the past I’ve reviewed some of Alex Bledsoe’s Eddie Lacrosse books; while Bledsoe is also interested in developing good characters (with some success, I should add), his bigger twist is on the detective format since his books are set in a medieval world. Part of the success of the Dresden series by Jim Butcher is the ongoing development of his characters, but on a novel-by-novel basis, especially as the series started, a lot of the strength lay in the exotic setting of a modern Chicago where magic works. Exotic setting also allows the writer to add wrinkles to the mystery that make it somewhat more difficult for the reader to solve.

Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City follows the traditional mystery plotline using a number of the tropes associated with noir, but it succeeds despite the relatively obvious mystery component because of the strength of its characters and setting. The novel is set in a contemporary Johannesburg that I suspect most South Africans would recognize but which is somewhat exotic to Western readers. Beyond the unfamiliar setting, Beukes has added a twist that goes beyond the kinds of bumps that are traditionally used to enliven detective stories: the main character, Zinzi December is a “zoo”, that is she has a sloth that is emotionally and mentally attuned to her and provides her with a psychic ability to find lost things. Oh, and if the sloth dies, December dies a horrible death within a mysterious black cloud called the Undertow. She has been “animalled”, mystically attached to a suddenly appearing creature that seems to be called by a tremendous amount of guilt. In December’s case, she did something that led to her brother’s death and is a recovering drug addict. Beukes does a tremendous job of explaining being animalled by example and by the technique of interspersing the early chapters of Zoo City with reports and accounts of others who have been animalled and the history of the plague. Zoos suffer nearly instant prejudice upon the arrival of their animals and are often treated as secondary citizens despite having perhaps lived exemplary lives. They live in slums and tenements and have to rely on their own underground community to survive on the fringes of a society that does not understand the source of their plague and thus shuns them.

December was a journalist before her brother’s death and the arrival of Sloth, as she calls her animal, and her psychic ability seems tied to her former life. But other zoos have animals and abilities that are nearly random, and while the journalistic chapters of the book offer scientific analysis, the condition defies logical study. In the course of her job, finding lost items for people who see her fliers in stores and on public bulletin boards, she is approached by a couple of unsavory characters with animals of their own. The Marabou and the Maltese as she calls them (perhaps another allusion to classic noir) invite her to take a job for a reclusive music mogul. Despite her suspicions, December meets with Odi Huron and takes his job, to find one of his stars who has gone missing. The mystery plot generally goes as you would expect, including false leads and fake endings, but it is also interwoven with the zoos, evolving them and highlighting them in exciting ways.

As we’ve come to expect with most noir, there is as much attention, if not more, paid to the development of the main character and her supporting cast. December has the checkered past of all noir detectives and continues to feel the effects of her past transgressions. She also has street smarts and has friends who are willing to use their resources on her behalf. It’s these interactions that help to expand the concept of the zoos, and we grow to be fond of December despite her wisecracks, just for her sheer pluck. Underneath all that dross, as is always the case in these kinds of novels, is a Good Person.

When we discover that the plague has been around since the 80s, it seems obvious that it is a metaphor for AIDS. But if that was the intent, it is never explored. I think such a reading puts too fine a granularity on the device—it seems to represent just the next in the list of reasons society has used to repress those that are different. Zoo City could be cynical in this observation, but it’s more ironic since becoming animalled gives the zoo abilities that normal people don’t have. And of course, having special abilities further ghettoizes the recipients. Beukes also avoids the trap of explaining away the plague, describing the selection process that causes individuals to get which animals and which abilities. And while it could almost be taken as comedic to have to carry around a stork or an anteater, Beukes makes it clear that there is a cost as well when we watch a gang fight that targets members's animals and evokes the malignant Undertow, sweeping away the zoos that survive. The plague and the Undertow cry out to be metaphors but resist simple categorization.

Zoo City is grim and gritty, a real throwback to noir. Beukes has created a strong female lead in December, and her supporting cast and setting are fascinating. If there is any complaint about the story, it’s that it ends too soon—just as the reader begins to get a grasp on all that is going on, the mystery is resolved and the denouement closes out the novel. I hope that there is more story to tell, but even if there is not, Beukes is an engaging and thoughtful writer to look out for down the road.

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(I have to add one note, not about the story but about the ebook experience. The publisher, Angry Robot, is a relatively new undertaking and is aggressively pursuing strong new voices, which I applaud. However, the formatting of the ebook was error-prone and often got in the way of enjoying the story, confounding attempts even to parse the paragraphs. I look forward to more books from Angry Robot and hope that they can overcome these issues in the future.)

The Windup Girl and the Transporter

On the one hand, I lately finished reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel. And on the other, I read it on my new tablet, bought in part to ease the growing shortage of book space in my life.

First, the tablet, an ASUS Transporter Infinity. I can’t figure out a way to take a picture of it with its own built-in camera, but here’s a nice picture of one like it, along with the separate and way cool docking station: http://eee.asus.com/html/eeepad/img/tf700/common/visual-model.png. I found it interesting that there is an assumption on the part of ASUS that anyone who buys such a thing would automatically know how the interface worked. As a technical writer and editor, I was astonished that neither the tablet nor its separate docking station came with any kind of documentation, including something like a QuickStart Guide. Fortunately, I’ve watched enough other people use Android devices and seen enough commercials that I could muddle my way through my first attempts to use it. Though there were interesting paradigm-shift moments such as when I saw that I had a number of applications open and running but could not formulate a plan to close them. It was a good thing that Mrs. Speculator is more conversant with Android than me. There was also the humorous first few attempts to unlock the pad by sliding the lock icon; I discovered that 1) if you slide the lock to the left, you put the tablet in camera mode and 2) if you’re a little patient, the tablet will actually tell you the direction you really want to slide it in to use the tablet without going through camera mode first.

I decided to use a Kindle app on the tablet for ebooks. I’m not really sure I appreciate all of Amazon’s practices when it comes to publishing, but I already have an Amazon Prime account, which facilitated continuing to use their services. Again, there is an assumption that using the app is intuitive. I figured out how to go to the Kindle store and buy my book, and was told it would be delivered to my tablet via WhisperSynch. Eventually, I got an email telling me that it had been delivered…but now how to access it. I would open the Kindle app hoping to see the cover of my newly purchased book on the home screen, only to find nothing. A bit of poking around led me to determine that I had to go to another menu and tell the Kindle to synch itself up with the downloads. And then! I had the cover on the front page.

Reading my first ebook was not the experience I expected. I have not thought so deeply about the reading process since I was taking a class in literary criticism and we were covering the post-Modernists. For example, by default, the Kindle app gives you black text on a white background, simulating the experience of reading a book. But even though there’s a brightness control, the white that the app delivers is far brighter than the white of the paper in a book. So in the case of the first ten pages or so, I spent as much time reading and getting the beginning of a headache with the intensity of the images on the screen as I did fiddling with the controls to get the settings right. Fortunately, I have lately read a couple of books from the 70s with paper slowly turning brown, so I was reminded that sepia might be a better choice than pure white and eventually ended up with black print on sepia with the brightness turned down. Then I went back and forth between horizontal and vertical orientations for a few pages to decide which I liked better, eventually deciding to go horizontal and two columns. I spent some time trying to use the dictionary, only to discover that I had to download the dictionary and then discovering that a lot of the words in my novel based in Thailand weren’t in the dictionary. I guess the built-in dictionary is put on the tablet to accommodate folks who are reading outside of a network, but why take up space on an Internet tool to pack a dictionary when a Web search direct from the page makes so much more sense? Especially when that’s what I had to do anyway to find the meaning of a number of the words in the novel?

I was delighted to discover that the layout of the pages pretty solidly matched the format of a printed book. Having worked in companies where the electronic version of a text was an afterthought to the printed version, I was concerned I would be spending as much for a paperback book for less readability. And because of the intense graphics of the Transporter Infinity, the cover of the book is vibrant and gorgeous, though I really would like to magnify sections of it for detail, mimicking holding the book really close to my face to find a plot point nicely portrayed in the cover art. I know that comic book readers support the magnification of their images, so I’m not concerned about the art for when I start looking at comics with the tablet. It makes me wonder if the combination of a tablet and music might bring about the return of awesome liner notes included with albums.

The tablet is also very convenient: Mrs. Speculator did not wake up at all when I found myself unable to sleep one night and read for about a half hour. No bright lights from the nightstand and perfect readability in the dark. I understand that with the Kindle app, my books will be automatically archived after a certain amount of time passes without them being opened. In the archive, I will have access to them again as will anyone who uses my Amazon account, like Mrs. Speculator. I emphasize being told this because, again, there was no documentation anywhere and I had to search for information, finding forum responses mired with all the dross that goes with them and the report of a friend who also uses the Kindle app. I’m hoping for the best.

In short, I’m becoming hooked; at last I am the 21st century schizoid man that King Crimson used to sing about—I want to read books and hold and smell them but am satisfying myself with getting the latest releases via ebook (outside of a few exceptions like Mieville, Brust, Kay, and Banks).

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As for the book itself, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl is a real delight. It is set in a not-too-distant future where the combination of the effects of global warming and genetic engineering has visited a catastrophe to the world. Thailand hides behind massive sea walls as it slowly sinks below the world’s new sea level. Genetically modified grains spawn genetically modified diseases, killing grains and people alike. Use of fossil fuels is severely limited and infractions severely punished in attempts to halt the continued rise of sea level and perhaps to reverse it. Symbolic of these ills are the cheshires, domestic housecats originally modified so that they blend in with their surroundings, chameleonlike, as a marketing ploy to sell cats. However, the modification bred true, and the cheshires have replaced the domestic housecats and the feral ones around the world, a vastly improved predator.

Bacigalupi introduces a handful of characters to this setting—Anderson Lake, an American entrepreneur who acts as an agent for a multinational in a country where foreigners, especially Americans, are reviled for the havoc they have brought to the world; Hock Seng, a Chinese immigrant who has come to Thailand in order to escape Muslim fundamentalists and works for Lake as he plots to recoup the shipping corporation he lost in his flight; Emiko, a Japanese “New Person”, a genetically modified human, molded to be the perfect servant and unable to reproduce; and Jaidee Rojjanasukchai, the Tiger of Bangkok, a native captain in the Environment Ministry, tasked with ensuring there are no further incursions of non-native life in Thailand. Bacigalupi’s plot follows them each in their individual machinations to merely survive in this hostile new world that experimentation has created. The characters’ movement throught Bangkok and its environs allows Bacigalupi to build up a picture of a horribly broken world, and as one might expect, the more the reader interacts with the characters, the more broken they appear to be as well.

Emiko is explicitly the windup girl in the title of the novel, and her actions do set off the biggest crisis, a battle for superiority between the Trade Ministry and the Environment Ministry, with all of the expatriates caught between the warring factions and neither side offering them very much support. Emiko struggles against her very nature, having been bred to need to serve even when it goes against her strongest instincts. She constantly fights her own body’s responses to stimuli with varying and ultimately surprising results. Her story is an example of the tried and true plot device, nature versus nurture with the added quibble that her nature has been modified by corporations.

But there is a second windup girl in the novel also—Kanya, the Tiger of Bangkok’s trusted lieutenant and protégé. Slowly, the reader learns Kanya’s back-story and discovers she is not all she seems to be either, fighting her own battle between two masters. While Emiko’s development and conflict drive the opening narrative of the novel, Kanya takes it over in its crisis and drives it to its unexpected and harrowing conclusion.

There is no room for optimism in The Windup Girl. In an analogy of our world today, the problems of Bacigalupi’s world are manmade, and rather than working at solving the issues, the smartest and most powerful people struggle to find ways to profit, to make their own lives that much easier. There are several scenes where foreign entrepreneurs sit on the balcony of a local bar during the hottest part of the day in order to better catch what breezes there may be and completely about their hard lives while the people in the street below suffer and struggle. It would be very easy to strip The Windup Girl of its power and suggest it is an anti-Western novel, but it doesn’t take much close reading to see that the Thais are just as complicit in their troubles as everyone else, despite their blame for the rest of the world.

In a number of ways, The Windup Girl reminds me of Brave New World, with its interest in genetic manipulation and unrelenting cynicism. While the endings are somewhat different, there remains a sympathetic character in both novels who is not in the world of the novel by their own choice. Bacigalupi’s writing is perhaps more accessible than Huxley’s while Huxley’s characters are more fully realized. This is not to say that Bacigalupi’s characters are not fully formed; Huxley’s are just more memorable.

The Windup Girl is a powerful novel, deserving of the Hugo and Nebula awards it has won. It’s one of those novels that we may look back on in a decade or so and recognize as being incredibly important not only for its writing but for its message. It likely should transcend its genre to become something of interest to mainstream readers as well.

The Crippled God

You might imagine that it's difficult to write about the tenth and final book in a series without taking a step back and viewing the entire series as a unit. The inertia of over 3 million words and close to 11,000 pages just does not allow for no retrospection at all.
The Crippled God alone is a difficult book to read since it bears the weight of all the unfinished narratives in the previous nine volumes. In some ways, the nearly 1200 pages feel rushed, moving often from viewpoint to viewpoint sometimes after only a few paragraphs. Needless to say, I cannot with any conscience recommend that someone unfamiliar with the other books even look at The Crippled God; it would simply be opaque to all attempts to understand what is going on.
Nonetheless, The Crippled God typifies what has made the Malazan Book of the Fallen such an entertaining and thoughtful series. Despite the cast of hundreds (if not thousands), each character has a unique voice and backstory that is brought to the fore upon their appearance. And although most of the characters are soldiers fighting for causes they sometimes barely understand, the book steadfastly refuses to become cynical. It's too easy for world-weary fighters to think the worst of people, and Erikson refuses to take that path. Instead, his writing emphasizes the individual humanity of the characters, ticking through their foibles (sometimes with tremendous humor) and ultimately the family-like nature of their companionship as they work and fight for a common cause. The resulting emotion is the opposite of cynicism—it's one of tremendous hope, especially as the human armies gather more and more unlikely allies in their struggle. These allies recognize the strengths of being human—that same hope, but also perseverance and sacrifice—and it causes them to join when otherwise they might not.
Erikson accomplishes this by actually concentrating the narrative more on the individuals in the midst of the struggle than on the global effects of the struggle. Anywhere from a third to half of the novel is interior dialogue, characters thinking to themselves about their circumstances, their histories, and their future. This also has the effect of slowing down the reading, forcing the reader to follow the trains of through that are often more twisty than the action taking place in the physical sphere. It's powerful writing, much the same that endeared the reader to these characters and their stories volumes ago. It's just more than what we usually get.
The Crippled God is a fine capstone to a magnificent series, one that will influence fantasy writing for years to come. My first two reactions upon finishing the series are indicative of its power: for the last 25 pages or so I held back tears until I could do so no longer. These are characters that I have come to know and appreciate, fully realized and brimming with personality. To read the conclusions to their paths was emotional, and to recognize the appropriateness of each was even more so. I wept not just for the loss of the characters as the last book concluded, but for the mastery Erikson used to create and portray them. My second reaction was to go back and start over, to recapture the joys of discovery and to discover more as threads I had lost over the last decade of reading were brought back together. And I am confident that I will reread them all someday, perhaps not soon as my book stack has grown large over the past few weeks. But I'm sure thoughts of the story and the characters will return again and again until I pick the books up for another reading.

Railsea

If you were to think of the works of China Mieville as a multicourse meal, Railsea would act as something like a palate cleanser between heavier, more consuming courses (that's right, I just called it Mieville's lemon sherbet). Following such weighty tomes as The City and the City, Embassytown, and Kraken, Mieville's latest work is still filled with ideas but is not philosophically complex. This is not to say that there aren't fresh ideas in Railsea—on the contrary, Railsea is packed with ideas that would give a lot of other writers an entire career to explore; Railsea instead tosses out ideas and moves on, not exploring every nook and cranny of them in the detail of Mieville's previous three novels. In fact, this novel acts more as a playground for Mieville as he experiments with narrative technique and voice, delighting the audience with light fare rather than delighting them with deep ideas.

The story follows Shamus ap Soorap as he attempts to discover a career for himself in a world where trains move between communities like sailing vessels of old (hence the title of the book). Sham, as he is known, finds himself the doctor's assistant on a train dedicated to hunting the prodigious subterranean creatures of this world—mole rats, burrowinging turtles, and digger bees (oh my!)—when all he really wants to be is a scavenger, dedicating his life to salvage the strange treasures that lie just underground and sometimes above it. The reader is immediately thrown into a hunt for a giant mole, establishing the explosiveness and momentum Railsea maintains throughout. The pace is often frenetic and when, about halfway through the novel, the narration divides into three parts, it only grows more frantic. And through it all Mieville uses a narrative voice that is not only omniscient but deliberate—the narrator discusses where to go next in the story, teasing the reader about when the story will return to the thread that the narrator imagines the reader finds most important (and by doing so making that thread the most important).

Described everywhere as a "young adult" novel (a term I have grown to despise—fodder for another blog entry perhaps), Railsea incorporates the balancing act that such fare must have. Consider the best "all ages" media (a MUCH better term): the story has to both entertain the younger audience and yet remain appealing to the adult audience. This is the great success of Pixar movies and the best animation, like Warner Brothers cartoons—children are enthralled by the escapades and adults appreciate the depth and humor that is often outside the younger audience's experience. What fertile ground for Mieville, whose career is made of playing with the borders of genre and trope! And he revels in the dance, appropriating the narrative techniques used for younger audiences and still writing a story that adults can return to. Children don't really care about the background of how this fantastic world was created, but adults will appreciate that the Earth has lost all of its seas to a global multinational war, and in fact that the railseas that the trains ride on are the actual beds of our oceans.

Similarly, younger readers will revel in Sham's captain, Naphi, and her quest for the great albino mole rat, Mocker Jack. Adults will recognize the parallels to Moby Dick, and appreciate the idea that each hunting captain pursues a great beast of their own across the wastes, a quest the captains term their philosophy. Melville plays with this idea giddily, pondering what happens when a captain achieves his or her philosophy—even going so far as to imagine a museum of completed philosophies, where the great captains enshrine their epic quests' souvenirs—and what happens if captains unintentionally share a philosophy. And adult readers read this and ponder life's obsessions, while younger readers can just be amazed at the tales of hunting giant burrowing locusts.

As always, Mieville's language is astounding. The sentences rattle with the life that Mieville gives them, fairly leaping off the page despite the neologisms that this new world forces into them. The setting and the plot spark allusions to such disparate stories as Mad Max and Dune, the effect of Mieville's conglomerative passion for pulling together wildly different influences in order to poke at their similarities.

The sum total of all the parts is fun—Railsea is a romp on many levels, moving quickly from idea to idea in a delight of creative excess. It continues Mieville's pattern of weird, and the weird made more weird by its similarity to what passes as normal. And while it invites more thought, unlike his more recent work, Railsea doesn't require a large commitment of thinking time. Railsea is thus a great summertime read for all ages and a tremendous introduction to the works of China Mieville and the potentials of the newer voices in speculative fiction.

The Best of John W. Campbell

For those unfamiliar with the history of science fiction, the name John W. Campbell means very little. And yet Campbell may be the most important and influential man in the history of the genre. After the bright lights of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells at the end of the nineteenth century, science fiction entered a difficult time—the writing was generally not very good nor very well received; it is at this point, I think, that science fiction became stereotypically attached to juvenile readers. And there had been no leading lights in American science fiction at all, no names that resound to mainstream readers like Wells and Verne. But in 1937, Campbell took over the editor duties for Astounding Stories, with (as Lester del Rey says in the introduction of this collection) "a clear vision of what science fiction should become." And thus began the golden age of science fiction, as Campbell mentored the writers that are now recognized both in the genre and outside as great: Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon and many more. For 34 years, Campbell preached his vision and science fiction thrived, at first due to his near single-handed raising of both the potential and the literacy of the genre and then later, inevitably, in reaction to his vision. Campbell saw beyond the bug-eyed monsters and the ripped bodices of the women on the covers of the pulps to a genre that could deal equally with adventure and technology, mingling action and contemplation with style and storytelling craft.

But most of my generation of science fiction readers are unaware that Campbell also had a career as a writer before he became an editor, that he was extraordinarily popular among fans looking for the best stories that the pulp magazines had to offer in the early 1930s. Part of del Rey's premise in the introduction is that you can find threads of Campbell the editor by examining his writing. Such a premise seems intuitive to the point of obviousness, but unfortunately, the stories collected in the volume don't bear out the premise very well at all. I've spent three weeks struggling through a 350-page collection, struggling to see the beliefs and style that are somewhat characteristic of Campbell's editing (and mentoring—never forget the mentoring), until I closed the book this afternoon with relief.

What is astonishingly clear from this collection is that, if Campbell ever really was considered a great stylist in his own works, then the stories just have not aged very well at all. I found the general tone of the stories to be dry to the point of dust, and every story felt like a slog through dense and baleful language. There was no joy in the wordcraft, no poetry in his sentences. This is not the storytelling that I imagine kept young boys up reading through the night against the stern warnings of wary parents. And while I recognize that it might just be a matter of taste that causes me not to appreciate what Campbell is trying to do, the dissonance between his perceived greatness and my appreciation is so great, I look for reasons outside of taste to explain it. It may well be that you need to be the right age to be captivated by his work, and once beyond that age, the stories fail to excite. But whatever the reason, this collection was a difficult read.

Often, poor writing can be balanced by an effective story—the action pulls the reader along despite the drag of the words used to tell it. Sadly, this was not true of the stories in this collection either. And I found it ironic that the most strongly held belief in Campbell's view of science fiction recedes into the background of his writing whereas he used his career as an editor to push it to the forefront. Campbell fully endorsed the idea of human dominion over nature and thus, eventually, over the universe. He believed that there is no problem so great that man will not eventually overcome it, whether it be travelling faster than the speed of light or dealing with races immeasurably superior to our own. It may take time, but man eventually finds a way, usually due to equal parts of his insatiable curiosity and his joy for life. This human exceptionalism is a thread that ties so many of his students' work together throughout the decades, and it is primarily this facet that later writers rebelled against with the free-thinking of the 60s and the cynicism of the 70s.

Most typical of this attitude is Campbell's most famous work, the novella "Who Goes There?" which has been adapted into movies twice, once as The Thing from Another World and again as John Carpetner's The Thing. Typical (and arguably stereotypical) of the idea of human exceptionalism, man stumbles upon a race of aliens with a biology so alien and so destructive that it is terrifying and potentially cataclysmic. If its discoverers cannot defeat the alien, surely it will go on and singlehandedly take over and/or destroy the world. And after some hesitating starts, man defeats the creature through a combination of pluck and fast thinking. Man emerges from the story wary but triumphant, better prepared to take on the next challenge that Nature can throw at him. "Who Goes There?" is a fine story and worthy of reading for its role as a milestone of the genre, but also to see how far both film presentations go in changing the story as they brought it to the screen.

But while the rest of the stories in this collection eventually end up with man being triumphant, in those same stories man spends literally generations under the yoke of alien races, emphasizing his being conquered with sheer number of words instead of his triumph at the end of the story. And while man triumphs, often the means of his original fall point out the inherent weakness that balances man's potential when he succeeds. Two of the stories that best typify this narrative path have titles that speak to the weakness of man: "Blindness" and "Forgetfulness". These stories have the common thread of man achieving the heights of technology—creating a paradise run by science—only to lose it all from laziness and idle boredom, making humans easy targets for invading races. The stories include wondering aliens who are amazed at the technology humankind once possessed and lost because life was too easy, because there was nothing to struggle against. Yet those aliens never consider that their very presence is the impetus for the struggle to begin again, the catalyst for man's inevitable rise to superiority. And while that narrative path might be appealing to readers enamoured with the gloss of the stories, more astute readers cannot help but hear the warnings and criticism of humanity, depictions of his inherent weakness rather than his exceptionalism.

Campbell also seems to feel that traits such as rebellion and curiosity can be worn away by carefully planned eugenics, essentially bred out of the human population over time. Following the theories of evolution, when those traits return, it is a mutant characteristic but one that is seized upon as essential for survival of the individual and eventually the species. This position muddles the idea of the exceptionality of humans—if there is something inherently more valuable about humans, how can it be bred away and then return again? Given that evolution would appear to be a universal constant, how then can he be assured that other intelligent species don't have the same traits? Through Campbell's long career as a writer and editor, I don't believe he ever addressed that possibility, laying the foundation for later generations of writers to rebel against his paradigm.

The Bards of Bone Plain

I spend a lot of time reading and reviewing books that I think are on the edge of genres or across genres, because those places are intuitively where the leading edge generally is. I have admitted many times that I like seeing the genres being stretched and sometimes busted. But this is not to say that I don't also like writing that is firmly entrenched in genre tropes and tradition, so long as it is not just a retread of the same old worn stories. I'm delighted then to bring Patricia A. McKillip's The Bards of Bone Plain to the attention of fans of old-style fantasy. While McKillip does some interesting things with the setting of the fantastic genre, at its heart, The Bards of Bone Plain harkens back to the roots of fantasy, to the storyteller and the bard and the sense of something more than natural just outside our sight.

The narrative structure of The Bards of Bone Plain is delightfully deceiving, appearing to alternate between a fairly modern world where bards are nothing more than singers, and a world in the past where music and magic were intertwined and the more powerful the musician, the better the magician. The bridge between these two storylines is Phelan Cle, a young man about to graduate from the bardic school but for the required thesis. Like many students in that stage of their education, he is unsure what to write about, and the topics that most interest him have been worn out by earlier students. And so half of the story follows him and his friends as he decides on his topic and then works on the paper, while the other half is a mix of the paper he is writing and the actual events in the history his paper tries to recount. And as usually happens in such bifurcated storytelling, the two storylines come together in evocative and unexpected ways. This structure ends up putting the reader in the narrative space of the more modern storyline, as Phelan acts as our representative in this world until the rug is pulled out from under him and the reader.

Such playfulness makes The Bards of Bone Plain a primer for readers new to the fantastic genre, carefully setting the reader in a safe place in relation to the narrative—learning the ins and outs of the most basic tropes—before using crafty storytelling to open the readers' and characters' eyes to the beauty of the magic and music in her world. The fullness of her characters and the obvious joy in her wordsmithing also serve to display the potential in well-crafted genre writing. And McKillip is able to suffuse the story with an ethereality, a sense of wonder, that serves both to pull the reader in to the story being told and to take away the reader's breath when Things Happen. All of these things happen as McKillip tells the story of many fantasy novels—why the magic went away, again showing of its entrenchedness in the tradition.

Talking much more about the plot and characters of the novel would spoil them for readers, and this is one book that deserves to remain unspoiled so that its emotional charge in its closing chapters is not blunted. In that way, in its emotion and power, I am reminded of how I felt upon first finishing China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. Despite them being nearly opposite ends of the fantastic continuum, they both have a voice that demands attention and appreciation as they tell powerful stories with precision and skill. And as with Mieville's work, the reader will close The Bards of Bone Plain convinced that the story goes on from there and desperately wanting more of it. I regret that I have not read any of McKillip's work since the mid-70s, but this novel has inspired not only hunting to find some of those other books but also re-reading and proselytizing this one.

The Heroes

Often when discussing genre fiction with its nonreaders and detractors, I discover that the aspect that causes the piece to be considered genre in the first place is the thing that causes people to squirm when it is talked about. It would seem that some folks can willingly suspend their disbelief only so far: superheroes (or aliens or elves) just go too far, and the unhappy reader despairs of really immersing themselves in the work. And yet, the fans of those genres not only can accept those things but laugh about it amongst themselves, irate when an author pushes the disbelief too far.

And so it was that, in 1986, a brilliant young writer named Frank Miller decided to contemplate what a world full of superheroes would be like if they really could exist. The result was the seminal The Dark Knight Returns, in which actions have consequences and people become superheroes because they have psychological issues. In the series, Miller posits a Batman in his 70s, paranoid and violent after a lifetime of trying to avenge the death of his parents in what is otherwise described as "the never-ending fight". Never-ending, it turns out, has dire consequences. The difference in the story-telling was stark—for those folks who are more familiar with other media might compare the campy 1960s live action Batman, with Adam West, to the most recent Batman movie, The Dark Knight, for an idea of the scope of difference.

Miller's work was groundbreaking, and as usually happens when groundbreaking work takes place, it was fervently copied. The idea of "grim and gritty" heroes as it became known was duplicated across every major comic company and probably helped inspire a few new ones. The issue was, as usual, that the copies failed in two important ways: they copied the effect of the story-telling rather than examined its causes, with the result that the new branch of story-telling just stagnated as no new ideas were attempted beyond the first steps that Miller set out upon.

Fantasy literature, most often thought of as involving elves and magic, has been typified and celebrated most thoroughly in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Tolkien has been copied flagrantly, but over the decades since The Lord of the Rings's publication in paperback, there have been a number of attempts to do something different, to break out of the long shadow of Middle Earth. But no one applied Frank Miller's superhero logic to the fantastic tropes as convincingly and thoroughly as Joe Abercrombie has in his novels. Abercrombie really works through the implications of the fantasy world he sets up, wondering what it would be like to really live in that world on a daily basis. And with The Heroes, Abercrombie sets his sights on that most epic of fantasy tropes—war in a medieval age. The best mainstream analogy for The Heroes is Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, the Civil War story that rips to shreds any romantic notions of what war is like.

Abercrombie cheats the tropes a little bit in the world he has created: there are no elves and dwarves, usually the first sign that we are in a fantasy world, and while there is magic in his world, it is not pervasive, and practitioners are more likely to be hidden than seen strutting their stuff with large pointy hats and staves. And Abercrombie can also be a little heavy-handed; titling his destruction of the romantic ideas of medieval war The Heroes gives away the irony that its characters and readers feel as the plot progresses. Even though the title refers to a group of ancient menhirs on the battle field between two warring nations, the characters remark on the name of their battlefield with disgust, as they ponder their own role in the war and if there is really any such thing as a hero in their circumstances.

What Abercrombie achieves in his novel is reinstalling humanity in a cliché that is most often reserved for characters that somehow pass into supernatural on the battlefield. In many ways, The Heroes could have devolved into a historic account of troop movements over three days of battle, so determined is Abercrombie to focus on the human aspect of war. But by causing his novel to rotate through characters on all parts of the battlefield, from the newest recruit to the marshall of one of the opposing armies, we get to see not only the war but also its players, in many different lights, building the characters from many dimensions into superbly full and interesting characters. Abercrombie also recognizes that people, strangely enough, are often contradictory—the most noble can do the most heinous deeds, and the most amateur can rise up—especially under pressure, which nothing brings to bear like warfare.

Especially interesting in this light is a character that has had some minor roles in Abercrombie's earlier works, Bremer dan Gorst. Dan Gorst was once the captain of the King's personal guard, but has fallen into disrepute and is tasked to be the Union King's observer of the war against the North. But dan Gorst's narrative is filled with self-loathing and loathing of everything around him, such that his passages become difficult to read, honest though they may be in their evaluation of the Union's leadership. But to the troops of the King's army, dan Gorst is a hero, personally winning major skirmishes in the first two days of the battle for the Heroes, and to the North, he is an implacable though respectable opponent. And what Abercrombie's narrative causes the reader to understand is that none of these visions is wrong—dan Gorst is all of these things, a seething mass of contradictory impulse and reputation, a real person. And dan Gorst is only one of about ten characters that are given the same treatment through the book, a tactic which further casts war itself into a brighter light—in Abercrombie's hands, war becomes a mass of orders given and not received, or misunderstood, sacrifice for no reason, and tragic crashes of soldiers one upon the other leaving behind nothing so much as a field of human wreckage.

The Heroes takes place primarily over the three days of the battle for the Heroes, and each day's narrative includes a different astonishing narrative trick that further informs the tragedy and irony of war. On the first day, for the space of scores of pages, Abercrombie suddenly starts a narrative chain of death—we start with a character from the North and follow him until he is dead, and then the narrative switches immediately to his killer, and so on for perhaps a dozen characters. In this way, Abercrombie shows the sorrow and irony of what one person thinks as he is killed compared to the relief and good fortune of his malefactor, until they too become a victim. Similarly, on the second day, Abercrombie follows a written command given by the marshall of the Union's army, describing how it is perverted not only by circumstance but because of the relationships between deliverer and recipient. And then, in a final twist, the message is lost, leading to horrific action from both parties, making moot the original intent of the message and the effect it might have had if delivered.

On the third day, Abercrombie creates a chain similar to the first, but instead of it being caused by death, the links are forged by warriors seeing each other across the battlefield. The action of this chain parallels the primary battle tactic of one of the armies in the field, thus interleaving personal narrative with something broader and fact-based. And again, it shows how the very personal can affect even the biggest movements in a battle, and thus a war.

Abercrombie is also unflinching in his battle narrative. Let's be honest: people fighting with swords, axes, and arrows do not die in pretty ways. Abercrombie does not play this up—he is not interested in a gorefest, but he plays it honestly, allowing the reader to feel something akin to what the witnesses to such horrible deaths also feels and sees.

All of these factors, and the twisty plot that follows any battle, make The Heroes into a seminal work, pushing fantasy into a place where it can have relevance beyond just the fans of the genre. Abercrombie's writing style changes to fit the characters that are narrating and thus exhibits a versatility and ingeniousness that is remarkable and engrossing. This is the kind of touchstone book that both fans of fantasy and fans of groundbreaking and exciting writing will want to return to again and again.

Terminal World

I keep a list of books that I see reviewed or discussed or advertised that interest me enough to buy them. As you may know, given the cost of hardbacks and the lack of available storage space, I usually don't actually buy the book until it comes out in paperback, which sometimes can be a year or more after I initially discover it. And during that time, I often forget the rationale I have for putting it on the list, so that I just have to hope that I was in my right mind when I put a book on the list.

Such was the case this time around: I couldn't remember what caused me to put Alastair Reynolds's Terminal World on the list. But within the first thirty pages or so, I knew why I wanted to read it—the premise is mouth-droppingly cool. Spearpoint is a huge monolith rising for miles, and it is inhabited up to the point where the atmosphere is too thin to support life, even though it continues to rise up into space. It is also divided into zones from the bottom to the topmost inhabitable area, each zone representing a different technological level, from horse and carriage at the bottom, up through contemporary technology at about the middle, to far future technology at the top. The zones are rigidly enforced by some power called the Mire, such that moving high-end technology, say a laser, down the zones will cause it to ultimately cease to function, and even taking it back to its original zone does not fix it. And somehow, people have the same reaction—they seem to be specialized for certain zones, so that moving between the zones can cause zone sickness and require treatment. Left untreated for long enough, zone sickness can kill.

Fortunately, the novel does not explain itself in this fashion—it's slowly revealed to the reader over the course of the first hundred pages or so, as we follow Quillon, a physician in the "modern" zone (called Neon Heights), as he is delivered a corpse fallen from a higher level for autopsy. The corpse is an angel, an example of the topmost level's skill at bioengineering, and just as Quillon is about to begin the autopsy, the corpse sits up and tells him that he needs to run, to leave Spearpoint because his enemies are coming for him from the higher levels.

The premise is epic and filled with potential, and it would be difficult to craft a cover blurb or press release that did not make Terminal World sound appealing to even moderate fans of speculative fiction. The problem, as usual, lies in the fulfilling of that potential, and unfortunately the vast majority of the novel doesn't live up to the potential. It's a telling detail that, out of the 550 pages of the novel, Quillon and his guide are off of Spearpoint within the first 100 pages. This pattern continues through the course of the novel: big big ideas never fully realized.

As the novel progresses, Reynolds provides clues in a case of something like literary irony, where the readers know things that the characters do not, but even together, they don't know everything. It becomes clear that, even though the people of this world refer to it as "Earth", it isn't terrestrial, and so the reader has that as the primary mystery he is interested in. Which leads to the questions of how did these people get wherever "here" is, and what happened to them to create the Mire and the zones and Spearpoint? I apologize if this seems spoilerish, but it is essential to express my disappointment in the novel—we never truly find out. We have a great many clues that together form a framework for the answers to these questions to fill in, but we never learn details. On the one hand, I admire Reynolds for the writerly decision here—often when the mysteries are explained in similar circumstances in other novels, it feels clunky and contrived, but Reynolds sticks with the notion that his characters will not know enough by the end of the novel to figure it out. On the other hand, I have to wonder if Reynolds stayed too far on the other side of that demarcation—couldn't there have been a way for the reader to figure it out without the characters doing so as well? I imagine that there is, and it would take some fine plotting and writing to pull it off. And if Reynolds made that attempt, it failed.

Reynolds does pull off an interesting trick with his characters—they don't seem so much to grow through the course of the novel as they are slowly revealed to the reader. Quillon's personality is pretty fixed as we first encounter him, and nothing that happens through the narrative path of the novel changes him—but what does happen is that his setting and the people around him do change, allowing more and more of the secretive Quillon to show itself. The same thing happens with Meroka, his guide out of Spearpoint and out into the rest of the world. At first she seems gruff, even antagonistic but her character flaws are explained away, and as she comes to accept Quillon and the other people they encounter, her real personality is revealed—including indications that she generally appears closed off for self-protection.

Also an issue for me is the general clunkiness of the writing. From plot issues to language, the novel often exasperated me more than entertained me. Characters are developed and then conveniently shuffled offstage with little reason. Especially egregious is Commander Apatha, Quillon's nemesis in his newfound home off of Spearpoint. Apatha is stereotypically evil, stopping just short of twisting his moustaches a la Snidely Whiplash. He is also stupid and obvious, but those he opposes allow him to be maleficent without check. Perhaps they feel it is better to have an enemy that is easily recognized, but it would be great if they had a conversation describing that. Reynolds also proves less than adept with foreshadowing: at three separate occasions, one character says to another, "Let's hope we don't run into X." And in each case, they do.
All of this aside, my biggest issue with Terminal World may be entirely subjective. It's difficult to describe what pacing is, and I suspect that it changes from reader to reader. But throughout the time that I read this book, it was tedious and difficult, forcing me to want to put it down after four to six pages and go do something else. And it wasn't just the difficulties of the plot and characters I describe above, it was a flat declarative style in the language and the characters, more often than not Quillon, doing or saying things that seemed to be pointers for the reader rather than any sort of natural action that a real person might perform. (As a counterexample, it took me three weeks to read this 550 page paperback. I picked up the next book in my stack and read 150 pages in a single day….)

And so I applaud Reynolds for the scope and the ideas in Terminal World, but I find it to be extremely flawed and perhaps fatally so. It is possible that this book is intended to begin a series, in which case, a few of my issues may be alleviated. But other issues, such as the pacing and plot flaws, will remain. It's a shame, especially since I see Reynolds described so glowingly in other places. Part of me wants to read another book to see if it's a pattern or if Terminal World is an outlier. In fact, there was a fascinating description of another of Reynolds's books in the back pages of Terminal World, but my experience was so unsatisfying that I can't quite work up the will to add to my already long reading list.

The Fuller Memorandum

The first two volumes in the Laundry Files series by Charles Stross are something of a whimsical blend of spy novel and Lovecraftian horror. While the protagonist Bob Howard is often in danger, sometimes mortal and sometimes immortal, Howard's voice is cynical in the world-weary way of the British. The otherworldly horrors that Howard faces seem somehow mundane as he gathers himself up to fight them. Part of the whimsy also derives from the satirical nature of Howard's down time; when he is not fighting Elder Gods, he has to wade through ribbons of red tape and mounds of paperwork because he works for a government agency. And Howard makes it clear that the penalties for not performing to bureaucratic standards—did you log in the number of paper clips you used?—are just as deadly, if not more so, than Cthulhoid horrors intent on taking his soul.

The Fuller Memorandum, the third book in the Laundry Files, is subtly different. Stross allows the bureaucratic fumbling to move into the background of his story, and instead focuses on the human cost of the very real and impending invasion by extradimensional horrors. There is very little whimsy, even though Howard remains stoically cynical; instead the novel begins with a gruesome accident in the field and grows to supernatural dread. Along the way Stross moves the story more clearly into the realm of Lovecraft by invoking the best definition of horror—man fighting against enemies he cannot overcome. Stross drives this perspective home with Howard's meditations on how he wishes he could be an atheist, but he has actually seen the gods and is terrified of their return.

When Howard is sent out to an air museum in the British countryside to exorcise an old haunted airplane, he momentarily takes for granted the apparent ease of his mission, only to see an innocent bystander arrive at exactly the wrong time and die a horrible death, an image that haunts Howard through the rest of the novel. This opening scene sets up a crucial difference between this novel and the others, a difference that adds to the real horror that underlies the novel: humanity's real danger in the current crisis is not the impending invaders from another dimension so much as people themselves. Whether through weakness or incompetence or active belief, it's human nature that is most likely to open the door to the invaders, not anything that the invaders can do themselves. This point is emphasized while the novel's plot rounds into shape, as Howard is pursuing a mole inside the agency created to thwart extradimensional incursions. Again, it is not Deep Ones or Nyarlathotep that he must face down; it is someone that supposedly works with him in the fight against the aliens.

Eventually Howard's wife is endangered as is his immediate supervisor and mentor. And in order to bring the mole into the open, Howard somewhat unwillingly sets himself out as bait in an elaborate trap. But again, human forces are more malign than the supernatural, and mistakes lead to his capture and a potential fate far worse than death. In short, Howard finds himself in the hands of a cult that intends to use him as a portal to bring one of the great gods of the Cthulhu pantheon to Earth.

The Fuller Memorandum brings into sharp focus another axiom of the genre, that a horror is proportionately more terrifying the more closely it takes on human attributes. Consider the current fascination with zombies in movies and books and TV shows like The Walking Dead. What makes the dead returning innately scary? I would argue that if Aunt Hilda rose out of the grave tomorrow and looked and acted as she always did—no unquenchable hunger for brains in this example—we might be somewhat appalled but not terrified. What is terrifying is that it's not Aunt Hilda; it's a monster that has taken her form. It has enough likeness that we can see what used to be Aunt Hilda but it is actually something else, something we want to be able to trust but will kill us if we do. Alien possession movies use this same paradigm; The Invasion of the Body Snatchers is horrible because they aliens are taking our place, looking and acting like us until it suits them not to. And then we die. Alien looking horrors can be plenty scary, but they lack the qualities that incline us to trust them, so the horror of trust betrayed cannot come into play.

The Laundry novels have relied on the fear of the unworldly, stoked to a fever pitch by H.P. Lovecraft and his followers until it is almost cool to know what Cthulhu is and share a joint shudder at the mention of his name. But with The Fuller Memorandum, the horror takes that one extra step—Howard is fighting people, people that he may well know. And they are capable of truly atrocious actions that endanger him and his loved ones. Nothing is more frightening than people turned to something else.

As always, Stross's work is thought-provoking and fun, but it really is a delight for him to turn what could have been considered a "fluff" series into something darker. The dark humor of the earlier books is still there but it is a companion to a horror strain more vibrant than in previous books. If a reader would like to just jump in to the series cold, The Fuller Memorandum makes references to the earlier books, but knowledge of them isn't necessary to appreciate it. But I'm pretty sure reading just one is going to lead to wanting to find the others as well.

Slan

In my recent traipsing about the golden age of science fiction, I have, more often than not, been surprised at the quality of what I have been reading. I have to constantly bear in mind that I am often reading the rudiments of the science fiction I grew up on, so I need to be aware that I am reading for the beginnings of ideas and movements. Given that I am also generally reading collections of short fiction, I have to bear in mind also that the constraints of space also affect the power of the writing.

One of the names that has come up often in my reading journey through the Great Science Fiction anthologies is A. E. van Vogt, who appears some eight times between 1939 and 1945, more than any other author than the Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore collaboration. However, the same author was not given a Best of anthology by Ballantine Books in the mid-70s, and a later Best of by a different publisher doesn't include anything in the Great Science Fiction anthologies up to 1945. It might be that a lot of van Vogt's early work was eventually novelized, but that isn't entirely true; one of the great classic science fiction stories, "Black Destroyer" has never been novelized. Another possibility is that van Vogt's work has just not aged very well.

I set about to find one of his novels to give his longer work some attention. I was astonished to discover that I had a copy of Slan on my bookshelf, as I had no particular memory of reading it. I readily admit to advancing forgetfulness as I grow older (which is why I keep a list of everything that I read now), but van Vogt has always been held up as an icon of the golden age. I'm sure that reputation and the reputation associated with what is considered one of his best works, Slan, are what led me to buy it and read it in the first place. And as I read again, I found that it live up to the reputation it has.

At this point I have to insert a caveat, which is based in part on my supposition on writing and editing in 1940, but please bear with me. It may not be fair to judge van Vogt on Slan alone because it was published in four parts in Astounding in 1940. I don't know the nature of the task—did van Vogt write a novel and editor John Campbell broke it into four pieces? Or did van Vogt write it in four chunks? Given the structure of the novel, I'm more likely to believe the latter, although it may well be that van Vogt wrote it all as one piece but was aware of it being used in four parts and so modified his narration to provide natural points at which the story could be halted until the next month. The problem is that the quarterly ebb and flow of storytelling in Slan is much more marked than in pretty much any other serialized novels I have read, imposing a sort of drag and mechanical nature to the whole story that makes it nearly tedious to read. The plot is classic science fiction, a shining example of what was going on in the golden age. Slans appear to be human but are in fact mutations, possessing greater physical strength and endurance and superior intelligence (the narration makes the strange comparison that a 15 year-old slan is as intelligent and capable of critical thinking as a human 30 year-old), and having the ability to read and manipulate minds. Slans are easy to identify because of golden tendrils that grow from their forehead, appendages used to aid their telepathic powers. When the novel begins, the slans have been hunted for 500 years following a disastrous war between humans and slan, based on fear that the slans were trying to take over the world. Even as the narration starts, rumors and stories of ongoing slan atrocities go on, inciting hatred among humans against the remaining slan.

On one hand the story follows the adventures of nine year-old Jommy Cross, a slan, as he is hunted and persecuted by humanity for being different. On the other hand, the narration follows Kathleen Layton, also a slan, as she is raised in the home of the world's executive power, nominally so she can be studied by humans in order to provide insight in how to fight the slan threat. As you might expect, the narration alternates between the two stories, but the action in them at first appears to be wildly different. Jommy is out in the world struggling to survive, learning the history of his race and growing into the inheritance his murdered father has left for him. When he can disguise himself, Jommy spends his time trying to adapt to his surroundings or better yet, to find more and more ingenious ways to hide. Kathleen, on the other hand, is openly a slan, but she moves in the circles of power in her world, often a pawn in games she cannot understand. She too must learn to adapt, in her case by learning the political game and to bring her special resources to bear against those that threaten her. Jommy proves more successful, growing in strength and intellect as he questions more and more the history that the humans tell each other about the slan and then uncovers a vast conspiracy that threatens both humans and slan. Kathleen, however, fails repeatedly, usually such that she is often moments from execution, but she is rescued time and again by the world's supreme leader, Kier Gray.

So while the general thrust of the story has potential, it falls short of that potential. Part of the issue is the strange divides in the text that I mention above. We turn a page and Jommy goes from nine to 15 years of age, but then the narration has to flashback to describe important events that occurred over the interceding years. Kathleen's story doesn't move at the same pace, so when we come back to her from Jommy's story, the reader is rather lost about where in time her story is in comparison to Jommy's. It's somewhat powerful for a narration to have different time rates for elements of its narration, but it needs to be done in such a way that the reader can't mistakenly assume the same time rate and then have to scrounge around when it becomes clear that they aren't the same. This narrative shortcoming is exacerbated by some generally clunky writing: descriptive passages are few and far between, while action rushes the story headlong until the next chapter, when it doesn't. The result is wickedly uneven, causing the style itself to counter the desire the plot inspires in the reader to get to the end of the story.

As the story moves on, it alternately reveals plots within plots in both narrative threads as the two main characters, predictably, head toward one another. What happens at that meeting is again predictable and acts as the final spur to push the story to its climax. Unfortunately, that climax is about ten pages of exposition explaining all the various discoveries along the way, culminating in a horrendous deus ex machina in, of all things, the final two paragraphs of the novel. It is not much of an understatement to criticize that ending as supremely unsatisfying.

And here is where I have to look back at Slan with historical lenses. Perhaps in 1940, that kind of ending would have been sufficient. Or, if I were the age of the target audience for a lot of that fiction, say in my teens, perhaps I would not have as much of a problem with the conclusion of the novel. (I am reminded here that the literature of adolescent difference has gone on for perhaps as long as there has been literature—most obviously in the Marvel comics of the 60s, such as Spider-man and the X-men. One might even argue that the current rabid fanhood for the Twilight novels and movies is not so much an expression of desire for vampires but as desire for adolescent separation from the mundane and average.) In either case, it doesn't work now, and indications are that Slan hasn't been working for some time. At best it seems that the works of van Vogt continue to act as a touchstone for the science fiction world of the golden age, but what power it might have had has been lost in the much larger and much more mature breadth and depth of current speculative fiction.