A Deliberate Tale of Adventure

Gentlemen of the Road is different from any other Michael Chabon book that I've read. It's quite short, it's historical, and it's a pure adventure story. In it, two unlikely companions get saddled with an annoying young prince and must return him to his homeland. They go from being charming rogues to stepping up and helping with matters of power and governance. Along the way they get into and out of scrapes and experience plot twists. It couldn't be more different from the contemporary angst of Wonder Boys, the near-past character drama of The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay or the alternate history musings of The Yiddish Policeman's Union. Give Chabon props for not being repetitive! Unfortunately, however much I've loved Chabon's other writing, Gentleman failed to impress.

There were a few things that I was hoping for from this story, based on Chabon's demonstrated talents, that I didn't get. For a short, almost pulp adventure story, I was hoping for something a bit closer to a page-turning romp. However, the pacing was slower and more deliberate than I'd have liked to see. Several scenes seem to over-stay their welcome compared to what you'd get in a rip-roaring adventure, and it seemed to take too long to get everyone from A to B. The advantage of that decision would come if it gave Chabon more time to show off his clever, sparkling prose and his unique way with similes. However, that snap was also lacking: I felt that the prose in this book was actually duller than that of any of the other books of his that I've read. Very few memorable lines or passages stand out to me. If I were more conspiracy-minded I would think that he'd deliberately dumbed things down because he felt that adventure tales have to be pitched to a lower grade level. Given all that, the fact that the characters never seemed to gain their third dimension left me entirely underwhelmed by the enterprise.

While the whole set-up is a fascinating one (being, as Chabon has put it, a basically historically realistic tale of "Jews with swords"), the fact that none of Chabon's strengths came to the fore left me disappointed. It's a pleasant enough read that doesn't try the reader's patience, but it's definitely not what I was hoping Chabon would bring to the historical adventure genre. If you’re looking for a rip-roaring adventure of past times, I’d recommend re-reading H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines instead.

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.}

In Which Suspension of Disbelief = FAIL

Analog's December 2008 issue starts out in a less-than-promising way. "Misquoting the Star" by David Bartell begins: "No one wanted to be remembered as The Voice at the End of the World, so when the asteroid nicknamed "Big Bastard" exploded into the Earth, the event went unnarrated. No one wanted to direct the angles from the cameras on the Moon, on the Earth, in their orbits and Lagrange points, so the video feeds cycled mosaics of them all, automatically." This didn't help me suspend my disbelief for the story; it is my fervent belief that a number of journalists/newscasters secretly hope that the world will end someday, just so they can report it. In my own personal experience I've heard paramedics wish for a jetliner crash, just so they can respond to it--same concept.

After that opening, I never fully trusted the story. The basic background, that a handful of people escaped the Earth before it was wiped out by a dinosaur-killer asteroid, was no problem (and apparently was described in a previously published story). However, this story centers on a woman who administers one of the colonies. She starts to fall for an African guy. Then she discovers he's got AIDS (all the people in the colony were supposed to be screened against this sort of virus, but his father had given up his seat for him). Aaaand she discovers that it's still incurable, despite a quack doctor's attempt to do so (not quite sure how that was necessary to the story, except to delay the inevitable). But here's the part that I really had problems with: she eventually understands that when they resettle Earth, things won't be perfect no matter how much she wants them to be, so she will eventually let this guy return to Earth instead of forcing him to stay on the Moon forever. Really? You're going to let a guy with AIDS possibly re-introduce this deadly virus to an otherwise virus-free population (maybe you'll ask him to promise nicely not to have unprotected sex?) just because the future won’t be a utopia? There's not-perfect, and then there's being stupid, and I felt that this character ended up on the wrong side of that line. Oh well.

Next up is a story by Jason Sanford, whose work I had previously enjoyed in Interzone ("The Ships Like Clouds, Risen by Their Rain"). Here he gives us a story with another interesting background. This near future Earth has a made-up religion, and its members are terrorists trying to keep people on Earth, away from space. Before the story started, they exploded a bomb that damaged a lot of satellites. This keeps a woman raised in this religion from becoming an astronaut. She's pretty disillusioned, but eventually agrees to help one of her co-religionists with a repair mission (they've been challenging the blockade with high-altitude aerostat balloons). However, she realizes that her repair mission is supposed to be one-way, and would threaten a NASA installation. She eventually saves the day, causes her priest and employer to be arrested, and winds up back in NASA's good graces. This is a good adventure story, no doubt, but I felt like the world-building could support a deeper examination into religious fanaticism, and I was a bit disappointed that it didn't happen. No worries, Sanford's world-building skills are good enough that I'm sure he'll get there someday.

"Moby Digital" ended up being a "skip" story for me. It features a VR environment where students can immerse themselves in a fictional world. A group of students gets trapped there while examining "Moby Dick," and a tech has to go in to save them. They'll die if he doesn't, because when the power runs out on the VR modules they contract and crush the user. I refuse to follow a story motivated by incredibly bad/stupid/unsafe engineering (especially in our time of over-engineering and over-warning-labeling everything because of liability issues). Basically, if the engineering of the modules was half-way competent, there'd be no story. I’ll pass.

Lastly, we get the second installment of Robert Sawyer's new serial, "Wake." I reviewed part one and liked it, and I liked this section as well. It introduced a new plot thread in having two sign-language capable simians talk to each other over the Internet, and a chimp subsequently developing the ability to paint figures instead of abstracts. The math-whiz blind girl develops more abilities with her new implant, and also deals with a boorish high school dance date. There's an unfortunate moment when a sulky walk home could have been avoided if she'd brought her cellphone, and it's hard to imagine a Western teen being without one even at a dance, but I still like the way the character is written. I'm waiting to see how all the plot threads connect; I can see their thematic similarities, but they're not meshing yet.

I'm not planning to continue this project of keeping up with this much magazine short fiction in 2009, as I've already mentioned. However, I am considering finishing "Wake" and also the serial that David Brin is running over at Baen's, "Shoresteading." These are reliable authors, good storytellers, and I'm always curious to see what they'll come up with next.

Even the Good Stuff Has Flaws.

This issue doesn't have anything outstanding in it--even the stories I liked seemed flawed. Consider "Way Down East" by Tim Sullivan. Two lobstermen allow their boat to be chartered by a visiting alien (or more accurately, its support staff). The main lobsterman is at first horrified by the alien, then comes to terms with it, even as the alien chooses their boat as its place to quietly expire. This parallels the man’s estrangement from his openly gay son; at the end he appears ready to reconcile that relationship as well. This is one of the most explicit pairings of Gayness with Alienness/Otherness I've ever seen, and it's generally a lovely story. The flaw in it stems from the protagonist. A lot of the story deals with his internal state and his own introspection. It's a little hard to swallow that such a reflexively introspective man would need the prod of coming face to face with an alien to get over his knee-jerk dislike of gayness. Basically, this story sold us too well on the man he becomes to convince us of the difficult transition from the man he was.

"Welcome to Valhalla" is a story by Kathryn Lance and Jack McDevitt. I'm a fan of McDevitt's work (I’m unfamiliar with Lance), but this story struck me as too simplistic by half. A valkyrie visits Richard Wagner on the eve of the debut of the Ring cycle opera. She shows him the horrors that will be perpetrated by the Nazis, and asks him to kill his own epic saga—to cancel all performances and bury it. She admits that this will not stop the Holocaust, but she's offering him the chance to not have his name associated with that period. Wagner refuses (and who can blame him?), and the show goes on. Basically, this story throws a premise against a wall to see if it'll stick; it doesn't examine its thesis in any depth.

Steven Utley gives us "Perfect Everything," another story that didn't quite work for me. It has some clunky dialog, but the main problem is that its two plot threads don't reinforce each other. In one, a man is on a spaceship that is heading back to Earth after failing in their mission to look for extraterrestrial life. To help pass the time, he spends his off-duty hours immersed in a tech-enabled dream world, where he and his perfect girl lounge around on a perfect beach. Unfortunately, all has not been well back home, and when they return they find Earth under siege by aliens. In the course of the story, his dream-bauble gets damaged, and his perfect girl, based on someone he knew in real life, starts rebelling. It turns out that she never liked him "that way" back on Earth, but he's so pathetic that he couldn't let it go. Knowing how he's built her up in his mind, she feels a bit used. Anyway, he volunteers for a mission to go down to Earth and see what's left. The end. So you've got this alien invasion/Earth's been destroyed story playing backdrop to a "Dude, she's just not that into you" story. This leaves the story with skewed priorities, and the additional problem that the reality thread and the dream thread don't reinforce each other terribly well. They do in terms of tone: normalcy on the ship is broken by the aliens, normality in the dream world is broken when it gets damaged. However, the whole invasion plot ends up seeming like an excuse to break the bauble and then an excuse for the guy getting all distraught over the possibility that the real girl is dead. That seems like a flimsy reason for killing off most of humanity, I'm afraid.

A story that works much better (and is easily the best of the issue) is "In Concert" by Melanie Tem and Steve Rasnic Tem. They describe a woman who has always had (or suffered from) telepathic glimpses into other minds, totally at random. She is getting towards the end of her life, but she starts seeing situations that indicate that she is making contact with an astronaut who has gotten lost in space with no hope of return. She contacts the NASA-equivalent at his behest, and is able to convince one of his co-workers of the reality of this connection, thus giving the astronaut the chance to pass on final messages. Both the astronaut's and the woman's grasp on life is tenuous and fading. It is in this beautiful duet of plot and character that the story works so well. It's not Earth-shattering; it's all very quiet and sedate, but quite moving.

Geoffrey Landis gives us "Still on the Road," a purely stylistic exercise of putting the beat poetry style of "On the Road" into space. Unfortunately, I'm not up on that style of literature (my catching-up-with-literature-project, both genre and "mainstream" is currently around 1920 for the former and ~1200 for the latter), so I can't say how well it worked.

Unfortunately, the issue fails to end on a high note. "The Flowers of Nicosia" by David Ira Cleary never resolved into a story I liked. It's got a silly premise: a band ('Downtown Dharma') of middle-aged rockers obsessed with Nirvana and Kurt Cobain are close to an outbreak of Islamic terrorism. Their response is to try to use rock music to heal the rifts. Thanks to the lead singer's aunt in the State Dept., they get to perform in divided Cypress, especially on the Turkish side of the island. They meet lots of interesting people: a Muslim woman who also fronts her own rock band, and older rejected lover of hers that acts as the band's manager, and other characters on both sides of the cultural divide. They have some success in their two concerts, but there is a severe bioterrorism outbreak on the island and in the end there's nothing they can do to help. The drug-addict drummer had hooked up with the woman, but they both succumb to the disease. In reading the story I was afraid that the characters were being set up to fail, and it disappointed me when they finally did. It takes a long time and a lot of whingeing about by the main character/lead singer to get there, and if the message is simply that well-meaning people can't actually do anything to help solve the tensions between the Americanized West and the Islamic world, that's the kind of nihilism I can do without. I got to the end of the story and wished I'd skipped it.

Slipstream Nostalgia

"The Auctioneer and the Antiquarian, or, 1962" by Forrest Aguirre illustrates a trend in stories that ride the genre/slipstream line while tapping in to the rich vein of nostalgia surrounding the 1950s and 60s. (See also "The Boarder" by Alexander Jablokov in March's F&SF.) However, in "1962" it doesn't add up to much.

In 1962 Hayden is a young boy suffering from cancer. The US space program is in the midst of setbacks, suffering several significant (and public) failures to get unmanned probes on the Moon. Hayden's father passed away, so his mom has encouraged him to hang around Mr. Simms (the Antiquarian) and Lenny (the Auctioneer) who can act as father figures. Mr. Simms seems to represent rationalism, talking often about Cuba and worries about politics. He's rooting for the space program to work. Lenny seems to symbolize more magical thinking. He gives Hayden a "space helmet" with "healing" properties to help him fight his cancer. He thinks that aliens around the Moon must be sabotaging the NASA missions, and he's getting Hayden worried that the aliens may not appreciate human expansion. The reader is never sure how much Lenny believes and how much is him just trying to help the boy by making up stories.

Hayden is pulled in both directions. He's naturally skeptical, but after getting the helmet his cancer eventually goes into remission. He starts to think that he's hearing alien voices through the helmet as well. At the end of the story, the Cuban missile crisis is on, and the US is on the brink of nuclear war. The story ends without any clear resolution between the poles represented by Mr. Simms and Lenny. One would expect Hayden to either choose one or represent a compromise between them, but the story ends abruptly before that can happen. It has an interesting premise, but I found the ending didn't pay off the set up.

In Which it Turns Out I Don't Like Reading About Jerks

Generally speaking, I start every story with the intention of finishing it. That's the default setting that most authors want to encourage. Unfortunately, in the opening novella in May's Analog ("Test Signals" by David Bartell), I felt like I was running into repeated stumbling blocks thrown into my path, telling me to go no further.

The first bit seemed promising: a gigantic computer runs genetic simulations over an astronomical number of combinations. When it finds a viable organism, it turns it over to some underpaid staffers to pick out the potentially useful or salable ones. So far, so good. One of these staffers is our protagonist.

He gets a call from one of his co-workers Tina, identified as "the company whore," (bad sign #1) who has recently been promoted. He had once considered going out with her, but a deformity on her neck made him queasy, then he found out about her reputation. He identifies himself as an asshole around this time as well. (Bad sign #2)

Anyway, he goes up to Tina's office to see what she's found. One of the simulated organisms that she's found has four arms, just like our protagonist turns out to have. This disturbs them both greatly, for no reason I was able to discern (#3). They're so concerned that they go have a talk with a senior analyst who's crazy about trees (??). The senior guy suggests that Tina has arranged it just to get our hero to go out with her (#4), leading to this gem of a quote:

"Her face was getting red, so I decided to change the subject. Not that I don't like seeing people squirm, but in her case, I'd rather see it in private."

(#5) Basically, this guy is just the kind of jerk I really dislike in real life. I'm already not looking forward to spending more time with him, but I forge on!

They're still freaked out about the 4-armed humanoid, so they go out together across town for lunch (#6), where they proceed to not talk about work at all (#7). Instead they insult each other about their deformities (#8), which apparently makes them like each other even more (#9).

So what we have here are two dislikable people. The author has established that the boy doesn't like the girl, so of course they end up going out. They're both worried about this work thing, but instead of talking about it at work they go out, despite the aforementioned dislike. They insult each other, which leads to attraction somehow. And the actual topic that they thought was so important (although we're still not sure why) gets completely dropped while this version of "flirting" goes on.

Count me out.

Exoticism without Depth

"Firooz and His Brother" by Alex Jeffers is a well-written tale set in the Middle East and Africa in the time of caravans. When Firooz is on his first caravan journey, he goes off hunting a deer, but instead is accosted by a fierce dog. When he and his dog have dispatched their attacker, they realize it was guarding an infant. Firooz brings the baby back to the caravan, and they decide the raise the baby, now named Haider, as Firooz's brother.

As they both grow, they journey together on caravans, leaving their wives and families behind them. Haider has several children with his wife, but Firooz remains childless. They've been engaging in some away-from-wives step-brother sex on the road, but when they return to the place where Haider was originally found, something very different happens. [**Here there be spoilers**]

Haider turns into a woman, and offers to carry Firooz's child. He agrees (with some trepidation). To all appearances Haider remains a man, but inside he's carrying a baby. Eventually he gives birth, and Firooz claims they "found" another baby. Once they get home, Haider admits that he's something very different, and disappears.

I very much enjoy stories that deal with different cultures, and Middle Eastern cultures especially. There is a deep story-telling tradition there, and given the politics of the world today, it's especially important to seek understanding. A story that did that exceptionally well last year was Ted Chiang's Hugo-nominated, Nebula-winning novelette "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" which adopted the nested Arabian Night's-style story structure perfectly to a science fiction time-traveling story. However, "Firooz" didn't necessarily add to or expand my understanding of either Middle Eastern culture or gender.

From a cultural point of view, the only high points are the existence of caravans, the importance of family and the importance of having children. Maybe also an acceptance of magical happenings that we would find odd today, but that's no different from reading anything by the ancient Greeks. From a gender point of view, what do we get? These two men love each other as brothers and as lovers. In an "ultimate" expression of love, however, one of the men becomes a woman to give Firooz the one thing his wife can't: a child. On the one hand, it's a touching gift involving much pain and sacrifice and showing true devotion. On the other, it's an implication that gay lovers cannot give each other what straight lovers can.

I hate to be one of those critics who read into stories things that shouldn't be there. However, if you flip through the archives of this blog, you'll I've been getting a rapid education in gender and queer theory lately. Any story that involves fluidity between genders invites the reader to analyze what it's saying about gender. This story doesn't seem to be saying much of anything, except possibly something mildly offensive. Other than that, it's just a pretty love story in an exotic setting with an Alien Other. When I went looking for something deeper in it, I didn't find anything.

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.

Interzone #215, Blah, Blah, EGAN

I was disappointed that this issue of Interzone led with a skippable story. "The Endling" by Jamie Barras never cohered for me, and I finally abandoned it. It starts with a paragraph about "Asha," who is looking for icebergs to carry out some sort of scan. That's the last we hear from her for five pages (presumably the printed version of the story has clearer indications of scene shifts than my electronic copy - one of the few complaints I have with it so far.) Next we get an "as you know, Bob" - style dialog between the human Wright and the alien, Antonov. Antonov has obviously had a rough time in his past. So as they're working together on something, Wright asks questions like "How many of your fellow captives had died by then?" With no background on their relationship, this seems like the sort of thing he should already know, or the sort of thing a polite person wouldn't ask. As the dialog continues, they continually refer to things such as the Melzemi, the Stro, the colony on Chard IVe, the VXIIers, etc. I have no problem with made-up terms in sf, but if you're going to use them for long you have to give the reader some context to work with. After awkward info-dumping dialog that didn't enlighten me in the slightest, I decided to skip it and move on.

"Dragonfly Summer" by Patrick Samphire was also disappointing. Two men and two women had been the best of friends during a year of college. Eventually sexual tensions got the better of them and their friendships were ripped apart. Twenty years later they reunite because one of them is having disturbing dreams. They discover that the abandoned windmill where they used to drink and laugh and fuck is now gone. It's not just that it has been torn down, it apparently never existed. No one remembers anything like that ever having been there. The main character, who was the source of most of the trouble back in the day, has to face the consequences of what he did. That appears to be the message of the story: actions have consequences. Well, duh. The disappearing windmill, and the dragonflies that used to buzz around inside it, are nothing but metaphors: it's never explained and doesn't have any plot significance. I understand that this is supposed to be a character story, but I feel that it is cheating the reader when things like that are used but not explained. You'd think at least one character in the story would be more concerned about the wholesale re-writing of their reality, but they're all obsessed with twenty year-old sex scandals, so the disappearing windmill is ignored. I finished the story, always waiting for something to happen, but it never does. The character lesson is learned, and the story stops.

After that lackluster opening, Greg Egan comes in and more than makes up for their lack. "Crystal Nights" covers enough ground for any ten short stories. Actions have consequences here too, but messing with the nature of the universe is more than simply metaphorical. A rich dot-com-style billionaire sinks a considerable portion of his fortune into developing the fastest computer ever. And he keeps the technology all to himself. (Egan may not be familiar with how computer geniuses become billionaires - they can be obsessive geniuses, but usually if they keep the things they do secret they don't become the rich kind.) He hires a team of people to put together a complete simulation of a universe inside the computer. His plan is to evolve an intelligent lifeform inside the computer that will then be able to help him in the inevitable war of super-intelligences that he just *knows* is coming. (Again, I'm just not sure that people this unstable really run billion-dollar software companies.) He repeatedly tweaks the design of the universe to keep evolution going in the way he wants it to: towards abstract thought, towards spoken and written language, towards sophisticated mathematics. Entire species evolve and go extinct in a heartbeat. He's literally playing God. Let's stop for a moment and reflect on the implications of intelligent design. What if someone has designed us, and the world, to achieve an evolutionary outcome? Given all the incredible pain, misery, and suffering that goes on in the world, how fucked up would that entity have to be? Egan presents us with the answer to that question in this story's protagonist.

Eventually the billionaire talks to his creations directly, telling one of them essentially what he wants and why. He lays out the choices: help him, or he'll regretfully have to destroy them and start over. He leaves an "Easter Egg" for them on their Moon, in the form of a monolith straight out of 2001. Through this interface, they can interact, in the most limited possible way, with our universe. We've all read "Frankenstein," and we know what happens to unethical creator figures. The computer beings find a third way and forge their own destiny, and we can't help but cheer. This review may seem spoiler-ridden, but there's a so much more going on in this story than my bare-bones summary can begin to cover. Egan is one of my all-time favorite authors, especially when he's using hard sf to examine ethical propositions. Here he's in excellent form. All the world building, the descriptions of the artificial simulation and the computerized evolutionary process are fascinating. This one substantial story is probably worth the price of the issue alone, and I'll be keeping it in mind come awards time.

Finishing March F&SF

Finishing off the March issue of F&SF, there were two ignorable short stories.

"The Second Descent" by Richard Paul Russo is one of those "they're all dead" stories. I was initially hooked by the setting - a group of mountaineers descending a difficult mountain. It seemed that some of them had died up there. They have to get off the mountain, and they're trying to reach a city. However, as time goes on it seems that they aren't making any progress. Sometimes they can see the city, looking nearer or farther, most times they can't. The membership of the group keeps shifting, with people we thought were dead popping up again at points. It's all very vague. The implication is that they're all dead and they'll never get to the city, but so what? None of the characters have much in the way of characterization. I finished this one because I kept hoping it would resolve into something different, but it doesn't. It just ends. Every reader has their own preferences; I've got a large soft spot for stories about sentient books. Unfortunately I have an innate bias against stories about ambiguously dead people wandering aimlessly around a symbolic landscape. This story didn't overcome that bias.

The last story I ended up skipping. "A Ten-Pound Sack of Rice" by Richard Mueller starts out with an old man musing on his mortality. He speculates on the end of the world and his immediate surroundings in a very disconnected way. He thinks a bunch, and after a few pages his cat actually moves, the first action in the story. Then the old man starts musing about the cats he's had. And then I decided to pass. It didn't look like there was any danger of anything actually happening, and the man wasn't an interesting enough character to demand that I find out what happens to him. I suspect that there's something wrong when the apocalypse and the memory of cats past get roughly equal billing.

The Moon Pool

Some books are classic because they are great. Some books are classic because they were the first to do something, and it doesn't matter how well it was done. Then there are the books that are classic for no discernible reason. Moon Pool belongs to this category. It's a Journey to the Center of the Earth-type story, so it certainly wasn't the first of its kind. And it isn't great by any measure. Yet it is mentioned often in works describing the early history of science fiction as a genre, so dutifully I read it. Let me save you the trouble: skip this one, and go back to reading Edgar Rice Burroughs stories if you want to read sf/f from the 1910s.

The Moon Pool, despite its name, does not take place on the Moon, but instead occurs mostly in a lost world inside the Earth. It is interesting to compare the siting of this lost world to those of H. Rider Haggard. He put his lost realms in remote corners of Africa, satisfied that the readers could suspend their disbelief that such fantastic realms had not been previously discovered by Westerners. With the advent of the airplane, however, authors had to get more creative with their new frontiers. After all King Solomon's Mines wouldn't have any suspense at all if Quatermain's band had simply flown in, seen the situation, and flown back to put together an air raid. So when Merritt looks for a place for his lost world, he has to put it somewhere that airplanes can't go, i.e. underground. Considering that E. R. Burroughs had already done this with At the Earth's Core (1914) and even better, gone to Mars with John Carter in 1912, Moon Pool in 1919 seems rather behind the times.

The plot is that a scientist traveling around Indonesia hears an alarming story from an obviously distressed friend, who then disappears. Investigating the story, he finds himself on an island with a slightly lunatic American aviator, a distraught Norse ship captain, and a sinister Russian scientist. They unlock a hidden cavern, and are transported into a deep subterranean realm. There they get involved in the local politics, run afoul of the local gods, fall in love with the local women, etc. The narration is all from the first person perspective of the expedition's only returnee, the scientist Dr. Goodwin. His style is as dry and annoying as any stereotypical scientist one may care to imagine. Merritt takes great pains to be true to his narrator's voice. We see that he can write better, since the dialog from the loony Irish-American pilot is full of life and energy. Unfortunately, Dr. Goodwin is the least interesting and readable possible narrator, and his voice makes every page a slog. Here's an example of his excited narration:

And the Shining One drew back!
Yes, drew back--and back with it stepped Yolara, the doubt in her eyes deepening. Onward paced the handmaiden and the O'Keefe--and step by step, as they advanced, the Dweller withdrew; its bell notes chiming cut, puzzled questioning--half fearful!

Even though much of the story is told in dialog, even most of the dialog (that isn't O'Keefe's) is tendentious. Here's an infodump portion from the main love interest:

"In the Shining One had grown craft, cunning; knowledge to gain that which it desired. Therefore it told its Taithu--and mayhap it told them truth--that not yet was it time for them to go forth; that slowly must they pass into that outer world, for they had sprung from heart of earth and even it lacked power to swirl unaided into and through the above. Then it counselled them, instructing them what to do. They hollowed the chamber wherein first I saw you, cutting their way to it that path down which from it you sped.

This goes on for page after page. Science fiction is known for awkward infodumps, but at least when Yoda's explicating things with weird phrasing, he's also quick about it.

There are some interesting points here amongst the tedium. For one, Merritt is more aware of world cultures and mythical references than is common even today, leading to occasional passages such as:

Dimly there crept into my mind memory of the Dyak legend of the winged messenger of Buddha--the Akia bird whose feathers are woven of the moon rays, whose heart is a living opal, whose wings in flight echo the crystal clear music of the white stars--but whose beak is of frozen flame and shreds the souls of unbelievers.

Also, there is a spiffy way of eliding the requisite "scientific" explanations of obviously fantastic things: when Dr. Goodwin appears to be starting to launch into an actual scientific explanation, the editors of the fictional scientific committee publishing the narrative step in and explain that they are removing the explanations lest they fall into the hands of the Russians.

Despite moments of in interest, this book is too long and too tedious to bother with. There are annoying plots indicating that women having too much power is a bad thing, just like H. Rider Haggard's She, which I also disliked. There are lots of religious themes, and it starts to follow a Christian good vs. evil path, but it doesn't resolve in a satisfying way. In the end the author simply cheats on his foreshadowing, frequently mentioning things like "the last time I saw him alive...," "I never saw them alive again..." and then not following through. The ending, explaining how Dr. Goodwin returns to the surface to present this testimony, is cheesy in the extreme. It's only one degree better than "and then Timmy woke up."

The best thing about Moon Pool is that its copyright has expired and it is thus available for free from Project Gutenberg. This means that if some masochistic impluse causes you to read it, at least you won't waste money on it. Alexei Panshin, in his study of the history of early sf/f The World Beyond the Hill is quite taken with Merritt's works, noting especially how he blends mysticism and scientific impulses in his stories. That may be, but before one gets to that level a book should be readable and enjoyable on some level, and Moon Pool fails on both counts.

Alien Beach, by A. R. Yngve

If I were to say that Alien Beach is a self-published novel available for free on the web from the Swedish writer A. R. Yngve, you would probably instantly have some preconceived notions about it – namely that it would probably suck. I am here to tell that it does not, in fact, suck. It’s not terribly good, but it is an early work by an author who has been published in quite a few venues. This is not amateurish fan fiction. It is deeply flawed, but if you’re looking for a fast, free story about alien first contact, you could do worse than to read this.

The basic premise is that an alien race comes to visit Earth. They’ve been receiving our TV and Radio broadcasts for quite awhile now, and would like to get to know us better. After a first meeting on the Moon, they lease an island in the South Pacific for a year. They park their ship in a lagoon, and an international crew of scientists set up camp on the island. In a parallel story line, an anonymous Gulf War veteran starts to have strange visions that he believes are related to the aliens. As he moves closer to them, he gets ensnarled with an alien worshipping cult, but eventually manages to free himself and meet the aliens.

Let me address the flaws: Some of the characters are instantly recognizable as real people. This is especially regrettable in the case of the protagonist Carl Sayer, who is obviously Carl Sagan. It gets very distracting, and it lends to the feeling that this is a book written by a science fiction fan for science fiction fans with all the in-jokes that entails. Also, there are lots of “yeah, right” moments in this book. A lot of them involve international politics (would Israel join Iran in withdrawing from the UN because we let aliens visit the Moon?), others involve personal relationships (middle aged female scientist makes pass at respected, married, elder scientist. After being predictably rejected she is so distraught that she leaps onto the camp doctor for a one night stand. There are no consequences from any of this). The characters are usually two-dimensional and often act in ridiculously juvenile ways. The dialog and exposition can be clunky.

However, the soldier is a well-realized character with some depth to him. And the aliens, while not particularly well characterized, have some very interesting characteristics, particularly the way they (perhaps) advance into higher forms of being. Also, the world-building of their culture and background is admirable. While they are aquatic creatures, they aren’t simply dressed-up dolphins or rubber-masked humans, which is better than many.

All in all this is a fast read. If you let yourself go with it and don’t let yourself get distracted by your eyes rolling every now and again, you should enjoy it as a nice light, almost Golden Age-feeling science fiction novel (although showing the lack of a Golden Age editor).

I’ve been in contact with the author, helping him straighten out some typos that were bugging me and giving him some feedback on specific issues that I felt the book needed work on. He asked me to include this statement in my review:

In hindsight, I see that many of the characters in ALIEN BEACH act immaturely ("Soldier" openly says in the final chapter that he has been behaving like a teenager). I'm not sure precisely to what degree this was a conscious choice.

But I do know that the novel contains much intentional satire of the 1990s: the shallowness of the culture, the immaturity of adults, the Monica Lewinsky Affair, religious cults on a suicide trip, and a pervading millennial dread.

Note how several characters, from the very first chapter, talk about The End of The World. During the 1990s, I often heard such comments in real life, from perfectly “normal" people.

Which is another reason why why it would be so difficult for me to rewrite ALIEN BEACH: it was written in and for a different era -- pre-9/11, if you will.

Regards,
-A.R.Yngve