Burned Out on Old-School Fantasy

As I noted in this post, Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter didn't do much for me. Now that I've finished Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist with similar feelings, I wonder if I wasn't simply burned out on pre-Tolkein fantasy. I'd read rather a lot of it over the last year, and it was with a feeling of homecoming that I turned back to Olaf Stapledon's science fiction (to be covered in a later post).

Lud-in-the-Mist is the story of the upper class of a prosperous town dealing with drug smuggling from Fairyland. Early in the story, the entire class of the young ladies' finishing school is corrupted by the 'fairy fruit' and runs off to Fairyland. The town and the town government greets this with an upset but resigned shrug. But when the Mayor, Nat Chanticleer, feels that his only son may be in jeopardy from this source, he moves Heaven and Earth and changes his entire personality, sacrificing his role and his reputation to protect his boy. I'm really feelin' the love there. (I know, applying different standards to an older work. But *no one* goes running off after their vulnerable daughters? Really? OK.)

The transformation of Nat is a pretty dramatic one, and it's really the heart of the story. Most of the rest of the book is atmosphere and world-building as we learn about Lud, Fairyland and their historical relationship. There are also lots of satirical digs at English class relations. It's all pretty impressive, and I'm sure it was even more so for people reading it back in the 1920's. However, I found it to be easy to put down. Actually, I ended up putting it down for almost three weeks in the middle, which almost certainly didn't help me get a unified view of the book. Certainly being an American in the 21st century, the social commentary didn't really resonate with me.

One thing that stuck with me is that the people of Lud felt very much like Hobbits. I assume that Mirrlees and Tolkein were drawing off the same source material for their characters. In that, Nat's journey from inaction to action is a bit like Bilbo's at the beginning of The Hobbit. Another interesting bit is that Mirrlees' Fairy is rather more threatening than Elfland in Dunsany. Elfland was a place of dreamlike stasis, but Mirrlees' fairy is a bit more active and almost meanacing, with various denizens running around spreading mischief. It felt more alien, and in that way one can see echoes with Neil Gaiman's work (who of course provides an introduction for the volume I read).

Anyway, that wraps up my pre-Tolkein fantasy reading. What have I learned? Overall, there is a rich vein of Western fantasy that existed before Tolkein--he in no way sprang fully formed from the veins of the Norse eddas. (Not news to many of you, of course, but I had only known that in an academic way before.) You can definitely trace these early works through their influence on modern authors such as Gaiman and Kelly Link. Many of these early works are beautifully written (although some aren't: I'm looking at you, Worm Ouroboros!) and many are very psychologically and philosophically complex (I'm thinking of George MacDonald's Phantastes and David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus respectively). And of course, you've got the mix of satire, fluffy entertainment, and serious themes that we still find today. There's a lot of richness to be found in the literature of the late 19th and early 20th century. I'm very glad that I took this rather long tour through that history, I've found it to be entirely rewarding, even if I didn't uncritically love every work that I read.

Stuff that Makes Tolkien Look Like a Radical Progressive

Imagine reading The Lord of the Rings. Now imagine it without any truly memorable or empathetic characters, or any good dialog. Imagine the battles scaled down, the bloodthirstiness ramped up, and the quests made kind of pointless. Now imagine no longer! E. R. Eddison's Worm Ouroboros was published in 1922.

I'm being a bit harsh here, but really, this one makes Tolkien look like a superlative genius. The fact that his characters rise to two-dimensionality is a huge improvement over Ouroboros. After so much of my pre-1930s reading, I've come to believe that the fact that Tolkien's characters are so memorable and well-beloved is what truly lifts his work above so much that came before. This makes him seem almost sui generis, but all these earlier examples show that he clearly is not. Ouroboros in particular is a direct ancestor of LotR, and apparently it is well established that Tolkien read it. But this is the book that makes me picture Tolkien reading it, throwing it down and shouting "I can write something better than this!" and stomping off to start The Hobbit. Ouroboros shares with LotR a somewhat Norse outlook on things, a supernatural bad guy, quests, etc. What it lacks is epic scope and any trace of charm.

The main players in the story are Demonland and Witchland. Despite the names, all the people involved in the conflict are basically human, and Demonland turns out to be the 'good guys.' Witchland is ruled by a King who made a deal with some sort of evil powers to get insti-reincarnation. Whenever he gets killed, he spawns again in his Iron Tower. This is symbolized in his ouroboros ring (this ring, once mentioned, will have no further importance to the story). Early in the story, Gorice XI gets killed in a wrestling match with a demon lord, and Gorice XII pops up.

To avenge the death of his previous self, Gorice summons up a eldritch sea monster to wreck the demon fleet heading home. Lord Juss, our super-heroic hero, survives, but his brother Goldry Blusco is nowhere to be found. Nonetheless, Juss is sure that Goldry isn't dead (WTF?), and heads off on a quest to rescue him. While he and his only-slightly-less super-heroic lordly sidekicks are away, the Witchlanders conquer and sack Demonland. Chalk one up for incredibly bad leadership on Juss' part.

So Juss goes off questing. This has many different phases: wandering through a peaceful landscape, holed up in a fort with several hundred men against several thousand, wandering some more and being nice to animals, and mountaineering up to the abode of a demigoddess. She confirms that his brother isn't exactly dead, and Juss can get to him with the help of a hippogriff. However, their first hippogriff gets hijacked, so they head back to Demonland and kick out the Witches.

The Demons start cleaning things up, and eventually Juss finds another hippogriff. He flies over, climbs some more, avoids some temptation, and rescues his brother. Now the Demons go on the offensive: they destroy the Witches' fleet, and land on the Witches' doorstep.

Now the Witch King Gorice has a choice: fight square or use magic? Unfortunately, there's a hitch: a prophecy related to his immortality that says if he unleashes the big magic again, he'll be really dead this time. So he fights square, but loses due to the tactical brilliance and general heroic-ness of Juss and the Demons (although Juss' hard-won brother doesn't play any pivotal role in the battle, and one of the more interestingly ambiguous side character gets killed off almost casually).

Then the Witch King goes off to try magic while his inner circle poisons itself through treachery. The Iron Tower falls (Gorice's last moments happen totally off-stage), breeching the walls and allowing the Demons to come waltzing in.

Yay, they've won! There's peace all over the world and the Demons rule everything. But, when talking to the demigoddess who helped them with the brother quest, it turns out that the Demon lords are all sad. They'll have no more epic fights in which to prove their valor and heroism, no mighty enemies worthy of their might of arms and storied weapons. They've got nothing to look forward to except peace and prosperity for all of their days; how boring! So the demigoddess actually brings all the bad guys back to life, and the last page of the book literally returns to the first page--hence the ouroboros.

So yeah, just the fact that in LotR the third age actually ends, the elves actually leave, and Frodo really can't go home again looks like a brilliant dose of realism compared to this stuff. Some of Ouroboros' other flaws: Lists of stuff in lieu of descriptions. Spending way too much time with the bad guys, seeing them be mean to each other and lewd with women. It makes them silly instead of threatening. And it doesn't help to make your battles sound really epic when you actually give the troop numbers: 800, 3000, 5000, etc. I think the biggest number is around 6,000, which is supposed to be a devastatingly huge force. Considering that this was written after WWI, I found it almost quaint--maybe the readers of the time found it comforting.

Also, there are lots of other minor plot points that are never really paid off. One good guy gets hit with a curse, and all the terms of the curse come true (of course), but it doesn't really seem to bother him that much. And generally, we are supposed to understand that things matter because the author says so, not because he shows them. These guys are awesome/heroic/really evil/really good/really attractive/etc.--because he said so! None of them really come across as any of those things in casual reading. Certainly the characters all blur together after a while (especially the three Witch lords whose names all begin with 'Cor-').

You can definitely see the Norse influences here: the emphasis on personal heroism over actual leadership and the desire for perpetual war to prove valor, among other things. There are also place names such as "Threngrim." However, it's definitely not a pure influence: "Threngrim" is in the same region as "Taranadale" and "Owlwick." That must have set the linguist in Tolkien twitching.

Of the classics I've read so far, the only one with really memorable characters is George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin, which was written specifically for children. Actually, I'll throw Alice in Wonderland in there too, also for children. I suspect this may be one of the reasons that Tolkien started with The Hobbit instead of the more adult-oriented LotR. Even Lord Dunsany, whose short fiction I've enjoyed immensely, wasn't that big on character. Over time I'm definitely coming to realize why Tolkien stood out in the field the way he did.

For an interesting alternate take, see Georges T. Dodds' review at SFSite. It acknowledges all the flaws listed above but loves it anyway.

Ruined, Ruined I Tell You!

Just a note: after reading Jurgen with it's innumerable double entendres, reading other classic fantasy books that talk about swords, large swords, magic swords and your father's sword is really, really hard to do without giggling. If I had it to do over again, I would finish reading all of Lord Dunsany's stuff before reading Jurgen. As it is, I still have King of Elfland's Daughter and Book of Wonder to go. Wish me luck.

Some things you just can't un-read.

However, with that in mind, I realized that I'm getting very close to finishing this period of my reading of genre precursor classics. By my estimation, here's what I have left (books that I don't have a copy of yet are marked with the *):

The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, Edgar Allen Poe (1838)
The Princess and Curdie, George MacDonald (1883) Optional
Lilith, George MacDonald (1895)
Book of Wonder, Lord Dunsany (1912) Optional
The Worm Ouroborous, E. R. Eddington (1922)
King of Elfland's Daughter, Lord Dunsany (1924)
We, George Zamiatin (1925)
Lud-in-the-Mist, Mirrlees (1926)
The Greatest Adventure, John Taine (1929)
*The Crystal Horde, John Taine (1930)
*The Time Stream, John Taine (1931)
*Before the Dawn, John Taine (1934)
Odd John, Olaf Stapledon (1935)
(Since they're bundled together, I'll also pick up Sirius by Stapledon, 1944)
Shadows Over Innsmouth, Lovecraft (1936)
At the Mountains of Madness, Lovecraft (1936)
Out of the Silent Planet, C. S. Lewis (1938)

After which I'll be able to head into the "Golden Age" with a clear conscience, probably starting with Lest Darkness Fall (L. Sprague De Camp, 1939) and Slan (A. E. van Vogt 1946).

Depending on how I find them, I may not read all four John Taine books. However, they were highly recommended to me by the late Charles Brown, so the plan is to read them all. None of them are terribly long.

It's really quite exciting to be so close to the end of this phase. With any luck I'll be done by the end of the year. I'm really looking forward to getting into the 50s and thence on to the New Wave. I think I may be close to ready for it now.

An Adventure of Cynicism

Having finally finished three large personal projects in the space of two weeks, I finally have some room to breathe. Although most of that new breathing room will be directed towards homework--only two classes to go to finish my MSEE! So please enjoy this review. You can also see my latest review for Strange Horizons, of Brain Thief by Alexander Jablokov. Check out Andrew Wheeler's review of the same book for an interestingly different slant on it.

Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice by James Branch Cabell may be one of the most deeply cynical books that I have ever read. It's probably not a coincidence that it was published in 1919 in the immediate aftermath of World War I. Like so many other books I've read for my learning-about-the-classic-roots-of-the-genre project, Jurgen tells the tale of a man wandering through fantastic landscapes, having 'adventures' and dialogues about weighty topics. Unlike any of those books, but more like contemporary D. H. Lawrence, Jurgen is chock full of sex. While never using explicit or graphic language, the eponymous character has lots and lots of sex: anything that can be a double entendre is one in this novel.

Jurgen starts on his journey after he speaks in praise of the devil to a priest. The god-figure Koschei (a sinister character lifted from Slavic mythology) overhears this and takes a liking to this middle-aged pawnbroker and self-described "monstrous clever fellow." When asked for a boon, Jurgen requests to be freed from his shrewish wife. That works fine for a while, but eventually he goes off looking for her. He first encounters the centaur Nessus (Greek mythology) and is granted his shirt (the same shirt that killed Hercules, presumably). Then his adventures truly begin.

At first he meets the idealized persona of a girl (not his wife) that he loved in his youth. After that rather dispiriting encounter, he is granted youth (and a somewhat disturbing shadow) by another mythical figure. He gets to go back to that youthful lover one more time, with youth himself, but even then he cannot recapture idealism--he can't unknow the rather less pleasant woman she becomes.

Now representing himself as a duke, he rescues and woos (and has sex with) Guinevere before her marriage to Arthur (with her father's consent). Letting Guinevere go to her proper destiny, he is taken to Avalon to be the play thing of the Lady of the Lake. Even in a land of non-stop sexual pleasures he gets bored. He becomes the Sun symbol to the Lady's Moon symbol, and eventually must leave her land, following the seasons. (The tale places itself very specifically in time, with various days, seasons, and festival days mentioned. I believe the whole journey takes up one full year, reinforcing its cyclical nature.) Jurgen chooses to head to another mythological land where Queen Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, rules. He sees her, and to him she looks just like his youthful and idealized love. But she is married to Achilles. Jurgen, now representing himself as a King, instead settles down with a tree nymph. He doesn't love her the way she loves him, but he feels quite a bit of affection for her. Eventually he sneaks into Queen Helen's bedroom, and could have his way with her but after lengthy debate with himself instead walks away.

Unfortunately, then the kingdom is overrun by Philistines. (Cabell has nothing but scorn for censors, especially after they worked very hard to get Jurgen banned. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice filed an obscenity lawsuit over it; apparently Cabell eventually won and added even more derision to a new edition of the book.) Representing himself as a great philosopher, Jurgen is taken to the queen of the Philistines, and over the course of a night quite wins her over with his *ahem* mathematical discourses. But it does not avail to save his nymph, the kingdom, or Jurgen's life, and he is dispatched to Hell.

This is where the narrative becomes even more fascinating. Hell is basically ruled by the damned according to their own preferences and demands for painful atonement. Jurgen's father runs the demons ragged, insisting that he is not yet suffering enough for his sins. Jurgen (promoting himself to Emperor, but still transparent to his father) can't trick the old man into imagining him out of Hell, but he does get him to imagine a really luscious vampire/succubus for Jurgen to shack up with on the shores of a lake of blood. Here's a representative sample of the style of Jurgen's conquests (I've left out mention of several of his more casual encounters):

So Florimel [the vampire] conducted Jurgen, through the changeless twilight of Barathum, like that of a gray winter afternoon, to a quiet cleft by the Sea of Blood, which she had fitted out very cosily in imitation of her girlhood home; and she lighted a candle, and made him welcome to her cleft....

So Florimel extinguished the candle, with a good-will that delighted Jurgen. And now they were in utter darkness, and in the dark nobody can see what is happening. But that Florimel now trusted Jurgen and his Noumarian claims was evinced by her very first remark.

"I was in the beginning suspicious of your majesty," said Florimel, "because I had always heard that every emperor carried a magnificent sceptre, and you then displayed nothing of the sort. But now, somehow, I do not doubt you any longer."

Jurgen talks with Satan quite a bit, and learns that while Hell is technically a representative democracy, the demons have voted 'temporary' dictatorial powers to Satan 'for the duration of the War with Heaven.' This is probably where the 1919 publication date is most obvious, but it certainly hasn't ceased to be a problem since.

Eventually Jurgen's lover has to head back to the world, and Jurgen decides to take himself to Heaven. There as well everything is run according to the notions of the inmates, in this case Jurgen's grandmother. He first meets himself as a child--in fact, as his grandmother's idealized version of his childhood self. He bluffs himself into Heaven by pretending to be a Pope, for whom there are loopholes in the rules. Then he spends some time talking to his younger self, and in brief but poignant moment:

"And Jurgen talked with the boy that he had once been, and stood face to face with all that Jurgen had been and was not any longer. And this was the one happening which befell Jurgen that the writer of the tale lacked heart to tell of."

Eventually Jurgen goes to talk with God. Even looking at Him, Jurgen professes his unbelief. Unsurprisingly, God is not the all-powerful creator of the universe. In fact, He was created by Koschei to satisfy the imaginings of people like Jurgen's grandmother. God doesn't quite disappear in a puff of logic, but Jurgen does eventually sit upon the throne of Heaven:

Jurgen sat thus, for a long while regarding the bright vacant courts of Heaven. "And what will you do now?" says Jurgen, aloud. "Oh, fretful little Jurgen, you that have complained because you had not your desire, you are omnipotent over Earth and all the affairs of men. What now is your desire?" And sitting thus terribly enthroned, the heart of Jurgen was as lead within him, and he felt old and very tired. "For I do not know. Oh, nothing can help me, for I do not know what thing it is that I desire! And this book and this sceptre and this throne avail me nothing at all, and nothing can ever avail me: for I am Jurgen who seeks he knows not what."

He shrugs, leaves the throne, and returns "to such illusions as are congenial." After a chat with St. Peter (who is quite annoyed with horridness committed in the name of the Apostles) Jurgen begins to wend his way back towards his wife. He gets his normal shadow back and has a concluding conversation with Koschei, who offers him several beautiful and nobel women. But Jurgen decides to return to his normal life with his shrewish wife, and indeed is returned exactly to the starting point of the book.

Jurgen is the earliest book that I've yet read that contains the idea that people literally create their own heavens and hells. Obviously this has since shown up in innumerable sf/f pieces since, from Heinlein to Piers Anthony. Jurgen is an acknowledged influence on Heinlein, who titled one of his books Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984). Now Heinlein's Job, named Alex, has tribulations that are much less under his control, and instead of bluffing his way from encounter to encounter he mostly gets by through hard work and luck. Also, he doesn't do so much wooing of women as being seduced by them. Alex ditches his original shrewish wife, never looking back after picking up the gorgeous & infinitely sexually available Margrethe (a pagan herself) to accompany him on his travels through the universes.

By the way, with all the sex and also Jurgen's commentary on women, I was a bit surprised that the book did not strike me as egregiously misogynist. Frankly, the narrative gives rather more respect to the women characters than Jurgen does, imbuing several of them with rather more wisdom and intelligence than Jurgen gives them credit for.

Anyway, Heinlein's Alex has a journey of a devout Christian man coming to grips with the fact that the world is in no way what he thought it was (and that he wouldn't like it even if it was). Jurgen basically discovers that the world is pretty much exactly what he feared: devoid of any meaning or justice. In his travels he often says that he is looking for justice, but I don't see that he ever found any, except perhaps to be returned to his life as he had been living it. And Koschei, as a more-or-less hands-off creator god, who may in fact be the puppet of some even higher creator god, doesn't offer much in the way of a moral compass. Jurgen is cynical about sex, religion, mythology, literature, politics, morals, and fate. Although written in a pseudo-archaic style as seen in the above quotes, it is not grating or wearing. It is indeed a comedy, although not one that often induces outright laughter. It is thought-provoking, and still relevant to the moral and public climate we find ourselves in today. Certainly its influence on later sf/f writers is undeniable. If you don't mind lots of thinly veiled sexual humor wrapped around close-to-nihilistic philosophy, I'd highly recommend this to the student of the field.

Galadriel's Secret Origins

If I previously found drops and streams of modern fantasy in George MacDonald's Phantastes (1858), in his children's book The Princess and the Goblin (1872) I seem to have found the headwaters. It makes sense that the fantastic imagination had more room to roam in children's literature at the time. Today's resurgence of YA sf/f (see the flap about the YA-heavy Hugo novel nominees in 2009) shows this cycle continuing. And of course, J. R. R. Tolkein wrote The Hobbit before he tackled The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, if you've read The Hobbit to your children but they're not quite old enough to head off for Harry Potter or LotR yet, pick this one up. It strikes many of the same notes, and has aged quite well.

Irene is a princess (a true princess, not spoilt at all), and she lives in one of her father's country houses. There's the household and retinue, and out in the mountains there are miners and (unbeknownst to the princess) goblins. Irene discovers her magical grandmother living in parts of her house that are only there sometimes. None of the rest of the house knows about the grandmother, and even Irene sometimes thinks she dreamed it all. However, she is true to her word and believes in herself, and the grandmother gives her a magic ring that will see her through troubling times to come.

Curdie is a brave young miner, a little older than Irene. He rescued her when she stayed out too late one night. He discovers that the goblins have hatched a plot against the miners and the King's men. However, in his spying he eventually gets captured by the goblins. Irene, following a thread (that neatly ties the plot together, literally and metaphorically) from the magic ring, finds Curdie and rescues him. He's very grateful, but doesn't believe in the ring or the grandmother, which he can't see. Irene is very vexed with him.

Curdie continues spying on the goblins, but is then captured by the King's men. They don't believe him any more than he believed Irene. However when the goblins overrun the house he escapes and helps drive them back. He knows their two weakness: recited poetry (much simpler than the lyrical verse found in Phantastes, same comparison between poetry in Hobbit vs LotR) and very tender feet. Goblins don't have toes (although their Queen does, and she's very self-conscious about it). And they've lost any and all creativity, so the creativity of others causes them pain. The princess had already escaped the goblins of her own accord, but she gets stuck with Curdie and his (very noble) parents for a while. Eventually they make it back in time to present her to her father, who had finally ridden in with his men in response to the emergency. There's one more crisis before the end, but Irene's nobility and Curdie's leadership see everyone through safe and sound.

My description makes it sound a bit trite, but there are some interesting elements here. For one, Irene rescues Curdie, and there's a lot to be said for that. Also unusually, there are three strong women here: Irene, the mysterious grandmother, and Curdie's mother. Another prominent, although a bit flibbertigibbet figure is Irene's nurse. Amazingly enough, this short novel from 1872 passes the Bechdel test with flying colors in that Irene speaks to all the other women about things that aren't boys or men or Curdie. Considering how few modern narratives can say the same, I found this quite refreshing.

The links to Tolkein are very clear. The mountain & the goblins feel just like the situation where Bilbo meets Gollum for the first time in Hobbit. The description of how the goblins evolved has strong parallels with Gollum's backstory:

There was a legend current in the country that at one time they lived above ground, and were very like other people. But for some reason or other, concerning which there were different legendary theories... and the consequence was that they had all disappeared from the face of the country. According to the legend, however, instead of going to some other country, they had taken refuge in the subterranean caverns, whence they never came out but at night... Those who had caught sight of any of them said that they had greatly altered in the course of the generations; and no wonder, seeing that they lived away from the sun, in cold and wet and dark places. They were now, not ordinarily ugly, but either absolutely hideous, or ludicrously grotesque both in face and form... The goblins themselves were not so far removed from the human as such a description would imply... as they grew in cunning, they grew in mischief, and their great delight was in every way they could think of to annoy the people who lived in the open-air storey above them.

There's a magic ring, although Irene's is limited and very specific to her adventures. And in the grandmother, I believe we have the template for Galadriel, amazingly enough. In her bedroom is a bath that appears to be the antecedent of the fountain in which Frodo & Sam see bits of the future.

'Do you see that bath behind you?'

The princess looked, and saw a large oval tub of silver, shining brilliantly in the light of the wonderful lamp.

'Go and look into it,' said the lady.

Irene went, and came back very silent with her eyes shining.

'What did you see?' asked her grandmother.

'The sky, and the moon and the stars,' she answered. 'It looked as if there were no bottom to it.'

Add to that her whole mien, her wisdom & beauty that are almost as frightening as comforting, which speaks to what would later be Tolkein's elvish.

Read today, her introduction feels a bit sinister. A magical old woman, in control of who can see her and who can't, who has intense interest in a particular child. I was all set for her to be a bad witch, which says depressing things about how wise women are portrayed today. Delightfully, she actually is good and wise. And intriguingly, she keeps her secrets! Her story isn't at all explained at the end of the book, which just left me wanting more. I understand that there's a sequel, The Princess and Curdie, and I'm hoping to track down a copy. Irene & Curdie are both nice enough, very brave & courageous children who make it through some very dark places together, but I really want to know more about that grandmother!

Here's another way that you know that a story is good: I told my mother that I was picking up some George MacDonald. She said that she felt like she'd heard the name before. I mentioned Phantastes and Lilith, but when I mentioned The Princess and the Goblin she lit up. She proceeded to tell me the whole story, which she'd loved as a girl in the 40's. I was mildly put out, since I thought Mom and Dad had read all the good English children's lit to me growing up, but apparently they missed that one. No matter, it just gives me the opportunity to discover it now, when I can appreciate just how much it relates to the genre as a whole. Chalk up another one in the "delightful!" column of the classics roster.

A Mirror, Dark & Fantastic

2009 is finally drawing to a close, and good riddance to it! Too many very low lows, with one great big high high do not average out to a good year! If I could have one wish for 2010, it would be summed up in the word "moderate." As you can see from the state of this blog, writing was one of the first things to be sacrified to the meat grinder of full-time employment + finishing my MSEE. Since I have a month off here between semesters, I'll be posting some short reviews of books I read this fall but didn't get around to reviewing. Aside from that, I can't promise that 2010 will be much better. My New Year's Resolution will be to start saying "No!" to new and wonderful opportunities that come my way. Finishing school has to be the number one priority for my free time. Here's to getting back into the world for real and for good in 2011!

In the meantime, enjoy some short-ish reviews, starting with the latest Mieville.

China Mieville's much talked about 2009 novel, The City & The City has an unusual central conceit. Besides that, it is a straight work-through of the implications: what if two cities could co-exist in a shared space, such that people walking in their own city must "unsee" the other city that they are also walking through? Specifically, how does that shed light on how we live in our world? Mieville uses a murder mystery as the plot and noir as the style to walk us through this world.

I had little trouble accepting the dual cities--although I accepted it on fantastic terms. In other words, I don't think it could work in our world without some sort of fantastical or magical intervention, no matter how quietly it must be happening in the background (no magic was directly invoked in the text, and it was only barely implied). But with that mental reading-between-the-lines, I was able to relax and enjoy the book. I liked the world-building quite a bit, especially as it reflected on the mental filters that we all wear to get through the day. In these cities, the detective must avoid seeing the storefronts and smelling the restaurants of the other city; in modern cities people walking to white collar jobs avoid seeing the homeless huddled around subway grates. In the book Mieville brings up the comparison to more mundanely divided cities: East & West Berlin, Jersusalem, etc. and the narrator explicitly rejects that comparison. I'm still not sure that's not a red herring meant to draw attention to those divided cities; certainly the different-yet-parallel cities experienced by those of different class strata seems a more natural target for this metaphor.

However, as a story I had more reservations: I didn't enjoy the noir-styled, spare narration. It didn't flow for me. I found it grating and annoying because of its staccato nature. I much preferred the narrative voice that Mieville used in the Bas-Lag novels (which I loved, with The Scar being my favorite). I'm actually dreading starting Jeff VanderMeer's Finch because I hear it uses a similar style, no matter how much I've loved the other Ambergris novels.

The central murder mystery was tolerably engaging, but was often pushed into the background by the world-building. I was OK with that narrative choice. My biggest reservation with the book came from the ending: without giving too much away, I felt that Mieville goes back to his political touchstones for his bad guys without justifying their inclusion in the plot. The ending seemed to come from left field without being adequately set up in the rest of the narrative. On the other hand, the character and career trajectory of the narrator in his world worked out smoothly and naturally.

Overall, I felt that The City & The City was an uneven novel, even when the reader can completely suspend disbelief in regards to the central conceit. Nonetheless, it raises a thought-provoking mirror to our world today in a way that's more immediate than the more surreal and lyrical Bas-Lag novels.

On Charm

It took a short story collection from 1908 to finally crystalize an aesthetic principle that had been sloshing about in my brain. Reading The Sword of Welleran and Others by Lord Dunsany (the incomparably named Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany) was a revelation. In reading it I was transported in a way that is much too rare. In approaching this review then, I had to try to elaborate what exactly about it I loved so much. The too-obvious answer was that it reminded me very much of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman stories (unsurprisingly, as Gaiman will sing Dunsany’s praises every time he’s asked about influences). Digging deeper, I had to ask: What is it I love so much about Gaiman? That required meditation.

During that time of reflection, duty called and I continued reading slush pile stories for Strange Horizons. Here’s what they don’t tell you about the slush pile before you start: it’s really not that bad. Very few of the stories are submitted by illiterate mouth-breathers. Most of them are at the very least competent. The vast majority (unsurprisingly) fall into the RUMIR category. Yet we still reject at least 98% of them (see Jed Hartman for exact statistics). A number of the stories cover subject matter very similar to Gaiman and Dunsany: the gothic, the epic, the mythical. Yet so few of them achieve the heights that those two authors reach reliably. What’s the difference? For the most part, the slush story lacks a certain spark. It’s probably indefinable, but my meditations have finally yielded a name for this mysterious quality: I’ll call it charm.

The charm of Gaiman and Dunsany stories (and others spring to mind, not just in fantasy: I believe Connie Willis’ charm has propelled her to her vast number of Hugo statuettes) comes from their ability to hold the big and the small in mind all at once. While the stories are often epic, mythic, and touching, they are also aware that things don’t always go smoothly. Not in a “The Dark Lord is thwarting me” way or even an “All my choices have come to ill” way, but in more of a “herding cats” sort of way. These stories have the confidence to be playful. The dream-speaker runs afoul of the overly literal mind; the heavenly song is interrupted by the soulless being who talks during the theatre (see Rev. Book’s ‘special hell’); “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth” is laid low—who knew?—by none other than Sacnoth; Lines such as: “And the long ride was a hard and weary one for Soorenard and Akanax, for they both had mortal wounds; but the long ride was easy for Rollary, for he was dead.”

What makes for a charming story? At the very least, it can’t take itself 100% seriously. There must be some perspective, some awareness that humor is what keeps our worlds from crashing in on us even when they are literally crashing in on us. The stories should have at least some people that act like people: not everyone is a hero or a villain; most of them just try to get by on their own ground (see the Discworld novels and the “pile of money the size of St. Paul’s” it has charmed out of its legions of readers). It helps when the prose sings on the sentence level as well. I hasten to add that this is not because of any Hemingway/Asimovian journalistic “transparency,” but because the words are a joy and you want to keep going from one to the next. Dunsany’s is an odd brand of poetry; you’d think too many of his sentences begin with “And…” for it to work (“And Iraine was the last of the captains, and rode away alone”), but from those humble, biblical roots he spins unforgettable imagery. And while this doesn’t directly relate to Dunsany so much, I’d also like to make a pitch for that brand of charming dialog that manages to sound natural while being funnier, more rhythmic, and more charming than any of us can ever manage in real time (see Mssrs Shakespeare, Whedon, and Scalzi for various examples of that craft).

So many of the very deep, very serious gothic investigations of grief, philosophical deconstruction of fae, and musings upon the fates of gods that come through the slush pile could use a dash of charm: an awareness that gods come and go but that someone out there will always be trying to herd cats with only the most marginal success. Does every story need to be charming? Not at all, it would be antithetical to the purpose of certain kinds of fantasy and science fiction—the kinds that focus on the grand ideas of things, and less on the human scale. I can’t see what this sort of aesthetic would really add to Greg Egan’s work, and he’s one of my all-time favorites. But even some of those grand and serious works could do with a little more confidence—the confidence to bring up the silly to further enhance the sublime (see also Neal Stephenson, he manages it even in Anathem).

So what of The Sword of Welleran and Others? I’ll leave you with this: GO READ IT. Not every story in it is a flat-out winner, but the first three entries count amongst the finest fantasy I have ever read. If that wasn’t clear enough: EVERY PERSON WHO ENJOYS THE WORK OF NEIL GAIMAN MUST GO READ DUNSANY. Go forth, all the legions! (And as it’s available on Project Gutenberg, there is no excuse for avoiding it.)

Old-School Xenophobia

[Before I get started on this I'd like to point your attention to an article of mine that Strange Horizons published this week. In complete contrast to this review, it does some theorizing about contemporary literature that features superheroes.]

House on the Borderland is the sort of thing that people called 'fantasy' before Tolkein came along; i.e., it’s supernatural horror. It's really rather shocking by today's standards: xenophobic only just begins to describe it. I'd heard some things about William Hope Hogson being quite influential over the years, but now I'm hoping that applies more to his story The Night Land, which is currently being mentioned in the context of Greg Bear's City at the End of Time. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend Borderland, but I am planning to continue on to Night Land before too long.

Value judgements aside, what is this book? In the framing narrative, two gents go out fishing to a remote and mysterious (i.e., they haven't been able to find it on any map since) part of Ireland. One day they follow a stream down until they find a massive crater. Sitting on a precipice jutting into the crater are the ruins of a large stone house. The gentlemen investigate the ruins and find the remains of a hand-written book there. They return to their camp and start to read.

The narrative is from the POV of the last owner of that house. He had moved there for the solitude, and had no companions other than his sister and dog. The dog, BTW, is much more interesting and has much more agency than the sister, to give you some feel for the pre-feminist times. Then lots of odd things start to happen. First, the guy has a vivid nightmare. Then a chasm opens up next to the house. Then the house comes under attack for a few nights by pig-men from that nightmare. There's some very vivid writing as the (unnamed) narrator sets up defences against the pig-men siege. After the pig-men seem to permanently retreat (for no adequately explained reason), he goes to investigate the chasm. It begins to flood while he's down there, and he's saved only by his dog. He also manages to save the dog in return, which made me happy.

In an odd choice, there is next some kind of romance with some kind of supernatural female described, but only from 'damaged' portions of the book, so we only get snippets of the narrative. These make no sense at all. Then, the guy is flung forward in time, forced to watch as the world decays, freezes, and falls into the sun. He then goes on an interstellar journey of sorts (ala Stapledon later), possibly sees some things that connect to his first dream, and meets the woman referenced in the romance segments. Unfortunately they can't stay together, and he is flung back to the present day. Then the book more or less trails off.

So what you've got is a lot of plot segments that don't dovetail particularly neatly, and some absolutely shocking xenophobia. Take the pig-men: they're portrayed as 100% menacing and violent. The man doesn't seek to communicate with them or to understand anything about them. They just set about trying to kill one another. Likewise, contrast the time-travel bits with Stapledon: when Stapledonian narrators undertake such a journey, they learn all about humanity, and aliens, and the fate of the universe. Here no such enlightenment comes to the narrator. Here, nothing is ever explained: the chasm, the dreams, the things that are physically real and those that aren’t. Basically, everything that is unknown is scary, with the sole exception of the exotic love-affair that is only sketchily described. And there’s no attempt to make it less scary by seeking to figure it out. At the end, when we return to the framing narrative, even the readers of the man's tale don't quite seem to know what to make of it. I suspect that I’m applying the wrong reading protocols to this book, but I can’t think of any protocol that would make it good from a modern perspective. Probably the horror readers of the day enjoyed it rather more.

There is some strong writing here when Hogson hits his stride, but honestly I wouldn't recommend it to today’s readers. I'll be interested to see if his other two major titles (Night Land and Ghost Pirates) hold up better over time. But that's me! Sorting through the influential classics of the field so you don't have to!

{In a note of contrast, consider my review of Bram Stoker's Dracula, which is about 20 years older. It really drew me in, and seems to hold up much better, especially in terms of style. Although it has its own feminist issues to deal with.}

New Review Up

Just a quick note to mention that I've reviewed Ken Scholes' debut novel: Lamentation over at SFSignal. Quick version: this is a good fantasy novel and very readable, but he hits some cliches pretty hard. Still, I'm interested to see if he's setting those cliches up to be undermined in later books in the series, so I think I'll be sticking around for this one.

...And, Just for Completeness' Sake

The other half of Paul McAuley's "Essential Books" meme, this one dealing with Fantasy & Horror. Same rules as before. Again, thanks to SFSignal for the link.

1. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus MARY SHELLEY 1818
2. Tales of Mystery and Imagination EDGAR ALLAN POE 1838
3. A Christmas Carol CHARLES DICKENS 1843
4. Jane Eyre CHARLOTTE BRONTE 1847
5. The Hunting of the Snark LEWIS CARROLL 1876
6. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ROBERT LOUIS STEPHENSON 1886
7. The Well At The World's End WILLIAM MORRIS 1896
8. Dracula BRAM STOKER 1897
9. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary MR JAMES 1904
10. Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things LAFCADIO HEARN 1904
11. The Wind in the Willows KENNETH GRAHAME 1908
12. Jurgen JAMES BRANCH CABELL 1919
13. A Voyage to Arcturus DAVID LINDSAY 1920
14. The King of Elfland's Daughter LORD DUNSANY 1924
15. The Trial FRANZ KAFKA 1925
16. Lud-in-the-Mist HOPE MIRRLEES 1926
17. Orlando VIRGINIA WOOLF 1928
18. The Big Sleep RAYMOND CHANDLER 1939
19. The Outsider and Others HP LOVECRAFT 1939
20. Gormenghast MERVYN PEAKE 1946
21. Night's Black Agents FRITZ LEIBER JR 1947
22. The Sword of Rhiannon LEIGH BRACKETT 1953
23. Conan the Barbarian ROBERT E HOWARD collected 1954
24. The Lord of the Rings JRR TOLKEIN 1954-5
25. The Once and Future King TH WHITE 1958
26. The Haunting of Hill House SHIRLEY JACKSON 1959
27. The Wierdstone of Brinsingamen ALAN GARNER 1960
28. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase JOAN AIKEN 1962
29. Something Wicked This Way Comes RAY BRADBURY 1963
30. The Book of Imaginary Beings JORGE LUIS BORGES 1967
31. Ice ANA CAVAN 1967
32. One Hundred Years of Solitude GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ 1967
33. Earthsea URSULA LE GUIN 1968-1972
34. Jirel of Joiry CL MOORE collected 1969
35. Grendel JOHN GARDNER 1971
36. The Pastel City M JOHN HARRISON 1971
37. Carrie STEPHEN KING 1974
38. Peace GENE WOLFE 1975
39. Gloriana, or the Unfulfill'd Queen MICHAEL MOORCOCK 1978
40. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories ANGELA CARTER 1979
41. Little, Big JOHN CROWLEY 1981
42. The Anubis Gates TIM POWERS 1983
43. The Colour of Magic TERRY PRATCHETT 1983
44. Mythago Wood ROBERT HOLDSTOCK 1984

And here we see the *problem* with focusing on classics for the last couple of years: 7 books from before WWII, and only 4 books from after? Whoops. Well, time and a chronological reading plan will eventually solve that problem.

Pratchett <=> Aristophanes?

Here’s a cheerful review to lead into the holidays. Small Gods is the thirteenth book in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. I’m obviously quite behind (I only started reading Discworld in late 2006), but I’m eagerly catching up. I’ve found that when you pick up a Discworld book, you never know just what you’re going to get. Politics, celebrity culture, the magic of movies, tourism, capitalism, women’s rights, undead rights… you just never know. Small Gods tackles philosophy and religion head on.

Brutha is a novice in the priestly complex of an extremely overbearing religion. The god is Om, and the country is Omnia. They are absolutely nothing like the Catholic Church. They've got a Cenobiarch, not a pope, and a Quisition, not an Inquisition. See?

One day a tortoise falls into Brutha's garden and starts talking to him. The tortoise claims to be Om. It turns out that he's lost believers--everyone worshipping at the church of Om believes in the Church, not in the Great God Om, and gods dwindle when they're not believed in. Brutha is one of the only remaining people who truly believes in Om, thanks mostly to an overbearing grandma and a lack of imagination.

Given the somewhat madcap plotting of these books, I'll give you the quick run-down of the other plot threads: the Church is expecting the next prophet any day. The head of the Quisition has been setting himself up for it--he scares everyone. He plans to conquer Ephebe, the place that is nothing like Athens, that we've been to in other books (including one of my favorites, Pyramids). There's also a rebellion movement afoot in Omnia, one that believes that the world is not spherical, as Om proclaimed, but instead is flat and rests on the back of a giant turtle. During the Ephebe segment, the rebellion ends up with a couple of philosophers. One turns out to be an engineer who may end up regretting building engines of war, even in a good cause, and the other refuses to have anything to do with the lot of them.

That's a lot of plates to keep spinning, but by this point in the series Pratchett knows just what he's doing. He keeps them all going and ties them all together with ease. In the end, Brutha is as pivotal as you'd expect, and things generally turn out alright. Along the way, we see the deep power of true believers and how one is as bad as the next, and that people really should make their own ways without doing things just because "God said so" because usually He didn't.

Now, as it happened, I was reading the section in Ephebe at the same time I was reading Aristophanes’ The Clouds. Aristophanes was a playwright who lived at the same time as Socrates in Greece. His specialty was comedic plays, and Clouds is a direct hit on Socrates. In it, a man and his son have racked up some serious debt. They hear that learning philosophy, especially from Socrates, can help a man win any argument at court, no matter how unjust. First the man, then the son, goes to Socrates to learn. Socrates mostly doesn't want anything to do with them (especially the obnoxious father), but eventually teaches the son. As a result, the son ends up arguing convincingly that it is right and proper for sons to beat their fathers--so the father gets his just deserts.

While I am not the first one to note this, there is a distinct similarity in the outlook between Aristophanes and Pratchett. For one, while they mock, they do so with understanding and respect. The main philosopher in Small Gods is Didactylos, who lives in a barrel and says "Bugger" a lot. In general the Ephebian philosophical debates end up in fisticuffs. However, they do end up the wisest of the cast, especially Didactylos who opposes getting involved in the Omnian civil war. Likewise Socrates and his philosophy students in the Clouds say many silly things, about how gnats fart and various things about the gods. However, Socrates is smart enough to see the father off for a complete idiot, and at the end I felt that the Aristophanes’ moral is that even good things can be turned to bad ends by people who wish to use them that way—it’s not Socrates’ fault if some people use what they learn from him for less-than-perfectly moral purposes.

The other marked similarity between the two involves their contempt for pretentious pie-in-the-sky thinking. I read Clouds directly after reading Plato's Republic in which Socrates argues for all sorts of things that are impossible unless people somehow become perfect. It's this mash-up of highfalutin' thinking meeting everyday Joes that makes the Clouds so funny. Likewise, it's the meeting of a huge, all-powerful church and a very small god with normal folks like Brutha and Cut-Me-Own-Hand-Off Dhblah that generates much of the humor in Small Gods (and in most of the Discworld books). I'm not claiming to have discovered some eternal principle of humor here, but it's pretty neat to see two authors so distant in time and space having such similar wry views on human nature. They're not angry comedians, they're just bemused by people being people no matter what philosophers or priests think they should be. Will the Discworld books stand the same test of time that Aristophanes has (~2400 years)? I doubt Pratchett himself thinks so, but I rather hope they will.

Kalpa Imperial by Angélica Gorodischer

Kalpa Imperial is the product of celebrated Argentinean author Angélica Gorodischer. No less an authority than Ursula K. Le Guin provides the translation. It is a loose collection of stories that share a common setting, the empire of the title: the “Greatest Empire that Never Was.” In some ways Kalpa is a traditional fantasy milieu—a monarchy with strict hierarchies that keep getting overthrown every few generations, based on the glory of the past, without much technology above that needed to sail ships and build castles. However, its stories share the tone of fantasy more than the trappings; one doesn’t find much in the way of overt magic here, certainly no guiding wizards. While some farm boys make good, they do it mostly through their own efforts and luck, not via being a “Chosen One” of some nature. In many ways the stories in “Kalpa Imperial” read more like historical fiction set in a time and place that never existed.

The sense that things were better in the old days suffuses all the stories. The opening story “Portrait of the Emperor” tells of the founding of the empire, but even then the first emperor builds upon the ruins that he alone has the courage to explore. The Golden Throne upon which he sits was not built by him or his craftsman, it is a relic from days when people achieved more than we could ever imagine. This sense pervades all the stories: the characters never believe that they are living in golden days, they never believe that they are achieving a pinnacle of any sort. The times they live in are always somewhat decadent, somewhat violent, somewhat degraded.

This sense is possibly a human universal; it certainly dates back to our earliest writings. Homer speaks repeatedly of how much better men were during the Heroic age (i.e., The Trojan War) than we mere mortals that make up his audience. In the Iliad he writes: “Aeneas seized a great stone, so huge that two men, as men now are, would be unable to lift it, but Aeneas wielded it quite easily.” Tennyson captures this feeling most beautifully at the end of his poem Ulysses:

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Of course, Tennyson is much more optimistic than Gorodischer’s storyteller. These storytellers (each story except the last starts with the phrase “The storyteller said:") seem to have a mission to make sure that those listening do not harbor too many illusions. At the beginning of my favorite story in the book (“Concerning the Unchecked Growth of Cities”):

The storyteller said: They gave all kinds of names to it, they made up all kinds of origins for it, and all of them were false. The names were mere inventions of obscure, scheming little men whose sole ambition was to get one step higher on a miserable official ladder or obtain a place among the palace lickspittles or a little extra money to satisfy some petty vanity. And the origins were laborious artifacts constructed to display some influential personage as a descendant of the hero who was supposed to have founded it in a fit of divine madness.

The story goes on to relate the “true” history of the city—from its beginning as a stopping post between the capital and the ports, its first mayor who was the only survivor of a bunch of bandits wiped out by the militia, its subsequent rises, falls, periods of being in favor and out of favor. It tells the story of the city, not of the people within it although they sometimes surface. In a way it is like an Olaf Stapledon story, covering an individual microcosm in the same way he tackled the universe. There’s something both real and world-weary in the way the tale is related: regular folks, good and bad, make decisions almost randomly that later generations build up into acts of greatness or folly—legends add grandeur to banal reality. While one would imagine that in the normal course of things storytellers would be the main perpetrators of this sort of heroic white-washing, these storytellers don’t countenance that sort of thing. They put the smallness back in the stories of the “great,” and for that alone this books stands as a nice counter-balance to much high/epic fantasy.

This is not to say that the stories aren’t interesting! I don’t want to make this sound like a depressing or boring short story collection. These stories tell of rebellions both successful and un-, revenge and obsession, good leaders and bad ones, insane ones, insane ones who are also good ones, and battles for reasons good and bad.

The Empire has never been able to conquer the lands to the South, but often tries. The final story, “The Old Incense Road” finally tells us a little bit about the South itself—at which point one’s knowledge of the book’s context makes it hard to avoid overlaying allegorical elements onto the narrative. The South is hotter and more tropical, less technological and more tribal, with a slower pace of life—standing in a similar relation to the Empire that South America does to the United States. The Empire never understands the challenges of operating there and certainly does not grasp the cultural differences and their import. One man from the Empire ends up, through a series of random happenstances, sort of “going native,” spawning legends about himself as he wanders through the jungle, rumors which are then misinterpreted by Empire intelligence agents. At this point one need must remember that “Kalpa Imperial” was originally published in 1983 although it wasn’t translated until 2003. While most of the stories are not “political” in the sense of bearing on contemporary politics (they are very political in the sense of dealing with governance and power relationships), “Incense Road” may strike a little closer to home. Various Western superpowers have been meddling in places they fail to understand long before our current misadventures in the Middle East, and certain South American countries still bear the scars of some of that meddling.

Kalpa Imperial is an impressive collection of short stories. In their tone of decay they remind me somewhat of “New Weird” authors Jeff VanderMeer and China Mieville, although she obviously predates them by a decade or two. Still, that feeling of urban realism in a fantastic setting, of people and politics driving events instead of magic, binds them together. I was a little disappointed that the stories did not feel more exotic or foreign—aside from the parts about the South, most of the stories deal with a realm similar in most ways to those found in Western history and fantasy literature. Of course, Argentina is a country with a thriving European culture (especially in Buenos Aires) made up of numerous ex patriates who settled in the exotic continent of South America—it makes sense that the Western literary tradition would be the primary influence on these stories. Nonetheless, I hope to see more of Gorodischer’s work translated in the future; if not by the masterful Le Guin, then at least by somebody. It would surely take a uniquely incompetent translator to ruin the work of such a talented author.

September Asimov's

Sept. seems to be a bit of a lull month in Ye Olde magazines. Although I'm sure I'm making unwarranted inferences, one could believe they're holding back their best material for the big fall double issues; those generally seem to have award nominees in them. In the Sept. issue of Asimov's I ended up skipping two stories ("In the Age of the Quiet Sun" by William Barton and "Slug Hell" by Steven Utley) but they didn't commit any grievous sins, they simply failed to capture my interest. Of the more RUMIR ones "Soldier of the Singularity" by Robert R. Chase has a good twist and "Cut Loose the Bonds of Flesh and Bone" is a well-done emotional tale about standing up to a verbally abusive mother (but offers no new perspective on the time-worn scenario). None of the remaining ones will necessarily be award winners, but they did pique my interest enough to warrant further comment.

"Horse Racing" by Mary Rosenblum tells a story of back-room dealing in human futures. It's a great concept: shadowy corporate interests scan the gene pool for raw talent, work behind the scenes to make sure it's nurtured, then gain an interest/stake in the person's eventual output. Some of these particularly bright young things get to see behind the scenes and some of them even start trading in their own "futures." I love the idea, although probably for all the wrong reasons. It's presented as quite benign which is a BIG change from the usual depiction of back room dealings; it'd be nice if things could be so win-win for everyone. Then there's the slightly "Fans are Slans" aspect of it: smart people really are really special and someone out there will recognize that. So, probably a wish-fulfillment tale, but a nicely done one.

"Midnight Blue" by Will McIntosh takes Collectable Card Games as the structure for its world-building. A boy is growing up relatively poor in a time that feels like the 1950s. A generation earlier, a whole bunch of magical charms had appeared all over the world. When you matched the stones and staffs that made up the charms, they passed on powers to whoever held them. Most of the powers were inconsequential and common: "Sense of Smell," "Singing," "Talk to Animals." Some of them were rarer, but more elaborate, like "Flyer" or "Skin that's Hard to Puncture." However, no new charms ever appeared. People alive then got lots of free powers, and there are none left for kids like our hero to find. You know where this is going. He finds one, and it's incredibly rare, and he has to figure out what to do with it. He finally makes a decision, and the consequence was something I didn't see coming, which I appreciate. This could have profitably been a shorter story, but other than that it was well done.

"Usurpers" by Derke Zumsteg actually showed me a different perspective on an issue, in this case drug abuse by athletes. Told from the interior perspective of a poor, black, natural runner, it shows him trying to win a major race against rich, white, juiced-up runners. The stilted prose style: "Fifty kids fifteen to eighteen stamp their feet. Stretch. Check each other out. Hopping in place to stay loose. Bitching about the bus ride over…" works very well for this kind of story. (I didn't like it at first, especially after my experience with the serial "Tracking" in recent issues of Analog. But here it developed its own compelling rhythm that really got you inside the guy's head and helped ratchet up the tension.) The guy is an asshole, but he's good at what he does, works hard, and doesn't have the resources to cheat like the other kids do. You root for him, despite all the jerk jock stuff. It makes you realize why it shouldn't be OK to just throw open various sports to doping, as I've occasionally thought myself. I definitely appreciated it.

Finally, "The Ice War" by Stephen Baxter gives us a decidedly odd, but really enjoyable homage to H. G. Wells set in the late 1600s. England is invaded by ice creatures. Our hero, Jack, is initially just trying to survive in whatever sneaky way he can, but via the sort of coincidence typical of historical fiction, is co-opted by Daniel DeFoe, Jonathan Swift and Isaac Newton to help save the country. The ending is predictable and entirely Wellsian, but Baxter tells a heck of a tale here. Jack is a fun character to root for, a charming rogue which is not one of the typical Baxter archetypes. His animation of the historical characters is probably over-the-top but still fun, and he throws in some lit references for the fans: Robinson Crusoe as early SF? Interesting thought! It's a great way to round out the issue.

Darkest Before the End

F&SF has never been afraid to go dark when the situation calls for it, and "Thrilling Wonder Stories" is a chilling attack on nostalgia by Albert E. Cowdrey. The very title evokes a strong sense of nostalgia in sf fans: Thrilling Wonder Stories was published by Hugo Gernsback after he was kicked off of the seminal sf magazine, Amazing Stories. Thrilling ran between 1930 and 1936. It wasn't even a product of the "Golden Age," this was pure pulp.

Reading that sort of thing, it's no wonder that a young boy in the South, listening to his parents yelling at each other, decides that his father must be a Martian. It's easier than imagining that his cuckold of a father is really his dad. However, that's not the least of this kid's psychoses. He's also got the pre-pubescent beginnings of a very unhealthy Oedipal complex. As his parent's relationship deteriorates further, resulting in his mother briefly abandoning the boy and her husband for the boy's biological father, he also shows signs of schizophrenia. When she comes back, having been thoroughly shamed and kicked out by her former lover, the boy devolves all the way into psychopathic violence. (All the psych terms are mine, of course. They didn't necessarily have all those labels back then, at least not for this kid's social class.)

Whew, yeah, those were the Good Old Days. People may yearn for a "simpler time" when everyone had "family values," but there were costs to pay. When a married man can't acknowledge a bastard, and a single, pregnant woman has to find a husband pronto, the resulting child is unlikely to grow up in a healthy environment. Maybe the lucky ones could simply escape into pulp fiction before escaping into a "normal" life, but for the unlucky, unstable ones, life might end up a much, much darker place.

As seen in "The Overseer," Cowdrey has an unflinching ability to get into some dark places in the human psyche. His stories are mighty unsettling, but also potent examinations of the roots of human evil.

Another story with a dark edge involving children is "Traitor" by M. Rickert. In this story, a young girl is being brought up in unusual circumstances. She seems very patriotic, but her mother has a secret room that seems to be dedicated to some sort of resistance movement. The bed time story involves the mother surviving when many other people were killed, and her dedication to staying alive. Terrorism of some nature is implied to be involved, and this little girl may not be the first child her "mother" has raised. There's a lot here that is obliquely implied instead of described. Rickert leaves hints and clues and lets the reader fill in the back story. The core of the story is the emotional relationship between the mother and daughter, and like "Thrilling," it's not a healthy one. This story is less specifically horrorific than Cowdrey's, but the ending is dark and intense.

Finally we wind up the issue on lighter ground. "Circle" by George Tucker is about building condos in Miami. The Circle condo construction project is plagued by accidents. Only one guy seems immune, a native Seminole named Billy Black. He's just doing his job, trying to save up money to buy an ancestral plot of swamp, but he comes to the attention of the developer's executives. Now he has to balance his duty to his Native American ancestors with his need to get by in the modern world. It's not a straightforward path to walk, needless to say, but the resolution of the story is a satisfying one. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution to all the problems of Native Americans, but it works for Billy and that's OK. With a good sense of humor, this story deals with a delicate issue and does it well.

Modern Myths

"Immortal Snake" by Rachel Pollack is one of those stories that casts itself in explicitly mythic language. It begins:

"Long ago, in a time beyond memory, Great Powers owned the land, the water, and even the air. Of all these empires, the strongest was a land called Written in the Sky."

This story form is not uncommon in the pages of short story collections (I don't know of any novel-length work using these conventions). Among others, Michael Swanwick has used it to good effect recently (although I'm not currently coming up with the title of the story I'm thinking of).

Authors typically have a very specific reason for writing using this style. A myth generally has a specific purpose. The ones I've seen are usually either cautionary tales, or explanations of how a world came to be. "Immortal Snake" doesn't make any moves in the direction of the latter purpose; it seems instead to be a story with a cautionary moral. However, I don't think that a story with the moral "damned if you do and damned if you don't" is really the best fit for the mythic style. [Spoilers ahead in the story description.]

The kingdom described in the story has a very elaborate set-up for cycling through their kings. When the astrologers determine that the signs are right, they kill and cook two of the king's companions, feed them to him thus poisoning him, and he dies. They take his skin, hang it up, and then choose a new king. It's symbolic of a snake shedding its skin each year. The king lives a life as hedonistic or as useful as he chooses, but lives under the threat of the astrologers knocking on his door at any time. For time immemorial the realm has been operating this way: it is implied that this has been a very stable arrangement—the kingdom has been successful in its wars, and while there's poverty it isn't described as being extreme.

Obviously, one doesn't write stories about static situations, one writes them about times of change. This king's companions are his sister, who cares passionately about the poor, and a story-teller. It turns out that the story-teller can mesmerize anyone with his gifts, even the astrologers. They neglect their duties in order to listen to him night after night. The sister and the story-teller fall in love, and plot things out in such a way as to overthrow the rule of the astrologers. Their coup succeeds.

The king serves out his term, ruling well and dying a natural death. The story-teller succeeds him, reigns benevolently, and dies peacefully. However, in the last nine paragraphs of this novelette, the story-teller's sons fight a bloody civil war of succession, ruining the kingdom to the extent that their main enemy easily conquers them, kills and enslaves the populace, and sows the land with salt. The end.

WTF? What moral shall we derive from this? An author's note at the end states that this is based on a real myth from the Darfur region, implying that their problems have ancient origins. That seems horrible to me: Darfur's problems stem from mundane conflicts over land, religion and ethnicity, and have been exacerbated by climate change. To imply that they have some mythic origin would be to suggest that there's nothing we can do about it, it's simply their fate.

If the story is meant to have a moral in its own right, the only one I can derive is: it's better to be ruled by a silly, arbitrary, oligarchical system than to rock the boat; if you insist on change it'll all end in tears. That also seems like a less than perfectly useful message in this day and age, when change is what we will dearly need to get out of the straits we're in. Perhaps someone else can offer a better explanation of the author's goal with this story, but as I read it I found it very disappointing.

Finishing Baen's with Fantasy

"Knight of Coins" by Margaret Ronald is a tarot-card based fantasy, which I usually enjoy. (Although not, I hasten to add, Piers Anthony's Tarot books. Those are just whacked.) In Ronald's story a man hires a private investigator (the second one in this issue) to track down three tarot cards that have been enchanted to curse his family. The PI has some magical talent, but hates magic and magical cases (of course). Luckily, "paying the rent" is always enough to motivate these hard-boiled protagonists, so the plot proceeds. Her dislike of magic is soon justified and things get complicated. It's another enjoyable story, nothing special.

"Red Tape and Cold Iron, or A Proposal for the Reintroduction of the Faery Folk To The United Kingdom" by Lucy Bond is a satirical story. A gullible politician agrees to let an activist government Folklorist gather up the denizens of Faery and get them back onto the British scene. The descriptions of the Folklorist are both funny and slightly sinister. It starts off by simply making government eco-do-gooders look ridiculous, which is not hard, but one gains some respect for the Folklorist by the end, with her cucumber sandwiches and her very practical brown boots. The moral of the story is to be on the lookout for all the agendas when one is dealing with government proposals. However, the ending is pretty abrupt. I would've liked some more detail about what happens when the Faery-folk finally cross over. Still, it's better to leave the reader wanting more, I suppose, compared to the alternative.

Finally, we close with a flat-out hilarious romp. "Extreme Reservations" by R. J. Ortega describes a man trying to continue the family business: running an inn and saloon out of an old paddle wheel river boat permanently moored in the Sacramento river delta in California. Just as he is coming to the conclusion that this business his uncle left him is simply not profitable, he finds out about a very unique annual engagement that his inn hosts. It's a gathering of immortals, both from legend (The Flying Dutchman) and story (John Carter, Ayesha, etc.). This is a classic homage-packed tale with a little bit of adventure and at least one truly awful, groan-out-loud pun. I have to admit, I love stories like this. It shamelessly appeals to the fan-girl in me, and this one is well done.

The Brass Bed by Jennifer Stevenson

I picked this book up when I was just in the right mood. I was tired and cranky and needed something fun and undemanding. The Brass Bed is a sex farce with demons, and it delivers the comedy. It's light and fluffy (much like, as the cover blurb says, "pillow fighting naked.") This is for people who want the sex of an average Laurel K. Hamilton book, but without the angst.

Jewel is an investigator with Chicago's Department of Consumer Services. She's supposed to make sure scales are honest and the like, but this department has also gotten stuck with implementing the Policy. See, Chicago is suffering a bad infestation of magic (pink smog caused by road rage, pigeons smoking cigarettes, that sort of thing). By government decree, however, there is no magic in Chicago. So there.

Jewel has no reason to believe that there's anything magical involved when her boss asks her to check out his wife's "sex therapist." Jewel is friends with both, and sorry that their marriage is in trouble, and she can't not try to help. So she poses as a client, and the sex therapist (read - con man), Clay, introduces her to his very special brass bed.

The next thing you know, Jewel is having crazy-wild dream sex with the incubus trapped inside the bed by an old curse. Clay's sex therapy is more effective than even he knows, since he didn't know about the demon. Unfortunately, Jewel may have inadvertently broken the curse and freed the demon. Clay, already worried by government-types sniffing around, is shutting things down. Jewel's best friend is shattered by the idea of not getting her sex therapy anymore and starts scheming to get the bed. Jewel has to escort an newly-released incubus around, one who was 18th century nobility before he was cursed. Talk about culture shock. Then there are political pressures from her boss plus his continuing marriage problems, and you've got all the elements you could need for a classic romping farce, with the eponymous bed as the Macguffin.

As necessitated by the form, everything works out well in the end. Jewel gets to keep the incubus and the crazy-wild sex. She gets con-man Clay for a business partner and has some normally awesome normal sex with him as well. Her boss' marriage problems get fixed, and everyone looks to live happily ever after. However, with a good stock of characters and a universe rich with comic possibilities, one imagines they'll be back.

There's a huge market for erotic paranormal fantasy out there, and this book fills a nice niche in that subgenre, which had been focusing more on the sex and less on the comedy. Stevenson writes some truly inspired crazy dream sex scenes, and can go toe-to-toe with Hamilton for arousing sex writing. However, she also milks the comic potential of her set-up for all it's worth. It's not necessarily laugh-out-loud funny, but it gets lots of smiles.

April F&SF, Pt. I

April's F&SF starts with two good but completely different stories. The first, "First Editions" by John Stoddard, is a tale of sentient books. A magician has been transforming people into books and keeping them in his private collections. Our hero has suffered this fate, and rails against it. He talks with the other books, learns about them and falls in love. In this story the metaphor for sex is reading each other's intimate passages (as it were). I believe I've said before that I'm a sucker for stories about books, and this one is well done. It's interesting and exciting, even when not much is happening. It's not cutting edge stuff, but it hangs together nicely. Very enjoyable.

The next story is the stand-out from this issue. "Five Thrillers" by Robert Reed is a truly disturbing take on the thriller genre and its dubious moral values. Our "hero" is a genetically engineered man, handsome, fast, strong and intelligent, but completely lacking a normal moral center. We follow his adventurous career through five episodes. We first meet him on a doomed cargo ship, manipulating the officers and crew of the ship in order to secure himself a spot on the lifeboat. There's no doubt that this man is at least a sociopath, but a very effective one.

After the lifeboat episode, he connives his way into the clandestine services. The main source of conflict through these stories is humanity separating into different tribes, almost different species, as they genetically modify themselves. In the second episode he ruthlessly deals with "rebirth" terrorists, later he will infiltrate the orbital colonies of different rebirth species and strike a blow for "humanity." After surviving an extended period in the depths of space, he is rescued and, now an internationally known hero, gains more power than ever before.

In each vignette, Joe gains more power and commits ever more outrageous acts. Reed makes in clear in each sub-story that Joe is acting in completely unethical, immoral and frankly evil ways. However, he is simultaneously showing off all the traits that we celebrate in our thriller heroes: survival through strength and cleverness, self-sufficiency, and an ability to get the job done no matter the obstacles or the cost. Some of the situations he finds himself in lead to real ethical dilemmas: when the lives of billions of people are on the line, can we condemn evil acts taken to save them? Are there tactics that should never be appropriate?

Obviously in this day and age these questions are more important than ever. I applaud Reed for writing a story that tackles them so well (and again, I admire his ability to raise these issues without losing sight of telling a really good story). He's also raised some questions about the things we take for granted in our beloved action movies, things that have been making me uncomfortable since the first Matrix movie came out. ( When Neo shoots up all the guards in the building lobby, aren't those real people? And don't get me started on the end of the trilogy: it's OK to leave 99% of humanity enslaved in the Matrix because "they're not ready?" How can they be when no one's told them the truth or their options? ) The only quibble I have with the story is that it seems that Joe buys into the humanist mission even to his own detriment, something that needs more explanation with a character this self-centered. However, that's a minor detraction from an amazing story. Another one that I'll try to remember come awards time.

Finishing off Interzone #214

Continuing with Interzone #214, we have "The Trace of Him," a not-terribly memorable story by Christopher Priest. A woman arrives at the room of her now-dead former lover. It's on an island in a world with some magic. He was famous for something. They were intimate briefly. His family doesn't approve of her. She reminisces.

Neither the man nor the woman ever get names, we don't find out what made him famous, the magic never comes into play. Perhaps the central question is whether death has meaning when you've already been estranged, but this piece seems to be more about tone and atmosphere. The writing is, as always with Priest, beautifully crafted. However, it's all so vague that there's nothing to permanently attach it to one's memory.

Next up is the winner of the James White Award, an award in honor of Ireland's premier genre short fiction writer. This year's winner is "The Faces of My Friends" by Jennifer Harwood-Smith, and her story seems quite worthy. It is set in a world where a certain group of people are forced to wear masks, stay silent and never express themselves, on pain of arbitrary death by any higher class person or mob that happens to be around. These oppressed people try to keep the memories of the dead, but with all expression forbidden it is difficult.

Harwood-Smith writes with genuine intensity, and the story is emotionally quite moving. The only quibble I have is that towards the end, we learn the identity of the oppressed group, what it is that sets them apart. The story would have been more powerful if their minority status were generic; then we could all fill in the blanks as it moved us. As it is, I had been imagining various alternatives, and I didn't like her group as much as my own, which made them less sympathetic. There is sometimes real power in keeping things generic, or perhaps universal would be a better term.

Finishing out the fiction in this issue is the long story "The Scent of Their Arrival" by Mercurio D. Rivera. This is a brilliant story, told in two alternating strands. In one, a human survivor tells the story of the destruction of Earth, documenting its overrun by vampiric creatures from another dimension. It is a bleak and hopeless tale. In the other, two alien scientists try to decipher the transmissions from a ship sitting in orbit over their planet. It's been sitting there broadcasting for quite some time, but they can't make any sense of the communication. They've isolated the pictures and displayed them, but without a scent track it is unintelligible to them, since their primary form of communication is through chemical scents.

While I'm sure scent-based communication has been done before in the literature (in fact it popped up recently in Paul Melko's excellent novel Singularity's Ring), this story is very well done. The relationship between the two alien researchers and the world building of their planet and culture are first-rate. The tonal shift between their straight-forward first-contact narrative and the bleak defeatism of the human narration is striking. The ending packs quite a punch as we realize how the threads tie together. The only small criticism I'd have is that the ending's impact is more intellectual than emotional; it would've been a bit better if the reader were so emotionally involved with the aliens that we'd be really shocked and dismayed at their fate instead of going "Wow, so that's how it all ties together. That's gonna suck." As it is however, this is another story that I'll keep in mind come award-nominating time.