Locus Online Reviews

Searching for Tomorrow: A Second Look at FlashForward

2010-03-14T19:41:00.001-07:00

by Gary Westfahl

Now that ABC is finally bringing back its new series FlashForward (unseen since last November, it will relaunch on Thursday, March 18), a discussion of its first ten episodes might function as a helpful orientation for new and returning viewers. Such a progress report could have been completed in early December; however, I missed two of the first ten episodes when they first aired and, amidst various distractions, it took me a while to track down all the episodes, rewatch those I had seen, and belatedly watch the unseen episodes. And that observation in itself constitutes a critical commentary on the series; clearly, if I had been utterly fascinated by what I was watching, I never would have allowed myself to miss one minute of a single episode.

As to why I have not been utterly fascinated by FlashForward, in a sense it is puzzling. Certainly, I have no complaints about the overall quality of the acting, writing, and production values, and the series has some distinctive virtues. For example, the character of physicist Simon Campos (Dominic Monaghan) — brilliant, arrogant, caustic, witty, and somehow charmingly childlike — reminds me of actual scientists I have known much more than Hollywood's typical representatives of the profession, and amidst various plot threads all designed to tug at the heartstrings, at least one of them worked for me: the story, featured in "Believe," of physician Bryce Varley (Zachary Knighton), suffering from a terminal disease, and Japanese roboticist Keiko Arahida (Yuko Takeuchi), oppressed by match-making parents and her paternalistic corporation, who discover through their FlashForwards that they are soulmates of sorts and begin searching for each other.

Still, the series finds ways to make itself irritating, one factor being the egregious cynicism that radiates from the entire project. Now, I am not naïve, and I know that every series in the history of television has been created and produced primarily as a way to make money. Yet the series that people remember, the series that people care about — with examples ranging from Star Trek to Seinfeld — always manage to project the impression (truthfully or not) that it wasn't all about the money, that the creators and writers went about their work because they sincerely wanted to convey something of importance to a wide audience. The creators of FlashForward, Brannon Braga and David S. Goyer, have not yet been able to project such an impression. Thus, if you ask me what this series is about, there is only one answer I can give: it is about persuading me to watch the next episode.

And this is a shame, since the series did inherit a genuinely interesting idea from the Robert J. Sawyer novel which "inspired" it: how would people and their society be changed if everyone could get a brief glimpse of their probable futures, either twenty years from now (in the novel) or six months from now (in the series)? To date, except for a few portentous comments during occasional calm intervals between the pyrotechnics, the series' answers are all obvious: since the blackouts that were a byproduct of the FlashForwards caused numerous deaths and injuries, the basic phenomenon is perceived as an evil, requiring stalwart FBI agents Mark Benford (Joseph Fiennes), Demetri Noh (John Cho), Janis Hawk (Christine Woods), and boss Stanford Wedeck (Courtney B. Vance) to track down the perpetrators and prevent them from doing it again. As for the effects of the individual FlashForwards: people who saw pleasant futures are elated and look forward to the future; people who saw unpleasant futures are saddened and desperately want to avoid the future; and people who saw nothing at all, presumably meaning that they are destined to die within the next six months, become deeply depressed or nihilistic. It is extraordinarily difficult to interpret any of these reactions as an insightful revelation about the effects of prophetic visions.

The series is also less than adventurous in the ways that Braga and Goyer are visibly endeavoring to throw everything but the kitchen sink into their convoluted plot while never doing anything that might offend anyone — testifying to their cleverness if not their integrity. It is easy to envision the story conferences that led to particular plot threads: "Okay, we need a way to work the war in Afghanistan into the story while appealing to both pro-war and anti-war viewers." "Wait, I know — let's say Mark Benford's friend and fellow ex-alcoholic Aaron Stark (Bryan O'Byrne) has a beautiful daughter who became a soldier in Afghanistan, and everyone thinks she was killed, but it turns out she is really alive, only she has been on the run, hiding out because she has information about covered-up atrocities committed by members of a Blackwater-like private security unit who will kill her if they think she'll tell anybody what she knows." "Yeah, that'll work." Or consider the character of Joyce Clemente (Barbara Williams), a powerful, capable senator in line to become vice president, or even president — a nod to feminists. But she's a raving bitch whom everyone despises — a nod to misogynists.

In addition, anyone familiar with Sawyer's work will keep noticing how this series both keeps drawing upon, and dumbing down, material from his novel. For one thing, after killing some time and provoking some violence by foregrounding the silly theory that the FlashForwards were caused by malevolent terrorists, the series seemingly is now acknowledging that, as in the novel, they were the inadvertent effect of a physics experiment overseen by noted scientist Lloyd Simcoe (Jack Davenport) and a colleague — Theo Procopides in the novel and Campos in the series. But the writers are unwilling to risk alienating an audience they clearly have little respect for by offering a detailed explanation as to what sort of experiment it was (in the novel, it was the use of a high-energy particle accelerator in an effort to detect the Higgs boson). The novel also describes a young Greek waiter and aspiring writer who is very discouraged when his FlashForward indicates that, twenty years from now, he will still be working as a waiter, proving that his dreams of authorial success are doomed to failure; the resulting depression soon drives him to commit suicide, thereby proving that the FlashForwards are not inevitable and that people's observed futures can be changed. Granted, the series' shift from FlashForwards twenty years in advance to FlashForwards six months in advance made this precise scenario unworkable, since a lack of progress toward becoming a renowned writer in six months would be of no special significance. But there was a broader problem: all people who read science fiction novels probably have at least briefly considered becoming writers themselves and hence could readily sympathize with someone in anguish over the news that their fervent desire for recognition as a talented writer would forever be unfulfilled. However, the Joe Six-Packs who are presumably this series' main target audience might struggle to understand the situation: "So he ain't going be a big-time writer? So what? Maybe he'll win the lottery." Therefore, in the series, FBI agent Al Gough (Lee Thompson Young) commits suicide and thus demonstrates the malleability of the future because, according to his FlashForward, he was destined to accidentally cause the death of a single mother with two sons. Hey, everybody can relate to that.

It is perhaps inevitable, but still disheartening, that the series further disappoints by so regularly falling back upon the tired tropes of television drama: whenever the story seems to be slowing down, mysterious assailants burst upon the scene to provoke a fierce gunfight with the heroic FBI agents, or a dying patient is miraculously saved in the operating room by the masterful efforts of surgeons Olivia Benford (Sonya Walger) and Varley. To be sure, science fiction novels may also feature such incidents, and indeed, Sawyer's Flashforward itself includes a gun battle involving Procopides and a would-be assassin. But Sawyer at least provided a novel backdrop for the action — the corridors of a particle accelerator — instead of the street corners, parking garages, and abandoned warehouses where Mark Benford and company keep encountering their armed assailants. Another minor annoyance is that, reflecting the fact that most people are continually pondering their FlashForwards, the series keeps repeating the same clips of those visions — a defensible device, I suppose, but I am surely not the only person who has figured out that this practice is economically enabling the producers to give ABC 41-minute episodes with only, say, 40 minutes of new footage. Moreover, since seeing the same thing over and over again can get tiresome, I am surely not the only viewer who is now thinking, "if I see Simcoe looking over his shoulder while Olivia calls him 'honey' one more time, I'm going to scream!"

Still, all of these quibbles are secondary to my major issue with the series, which is that, like so many stories crafted for "mainstream" audiences, FlashForward both is, and is not, really science fiction.

Throughout the last century, one can find innumerable adventures not written by science fiction authors, or not published in science fiction venues, which feature some sort of amazing new invention, qualifying them by many definitions as science fiction. Yet the innovation is routinely presented as the work of a single, isolated scientist, who either unknowingly or deliberately causes tremendous harm to society by means of his discovery, and the happy ending is that the scientist is either killed, or volunteers to destroy all of his notes and equipment, so that the knowledge needed to create the invention is forever lost and the status quo is restored. Yet science fiction writers, who understand how science really works, recognize that advances in science are invariably produced by teams of scientists who consider themselves part of a community, that new results will always be shared with other scientists or eventually duplicated by other researchers, and that major discoveries, for better or worse, cannot and never will be erased from human consciousness. Thus, by one argument, a genuine science fiction story will involve not only significant scientific progress, but a civilization permanently altered because of that progress. Sawyer's novel moves in such a direction when the people of Earth, once they learn that their FlashForwards were caused by a physics experiment, do not respond by condemning the scientists as villains, understanding that they had no criminal intent, and after the scientists cautiously suggest that it might be interesting to repeat the experiment, everyone agrees to permit it — as long as precautions are taken this time to avoid deaths or accidents during the blackout period. So, the stage is set for a depiction of a transformed future world in which all citizens periodically receive glimpses of their personal futures — so as to profitably inspire them with images of their coming achievements, to allow them to take certain steps to ensure desirable futures, and to provide opportunities for them to avoid undesirable fates. Yet Sawyer is ultimately unwilling to take his story to that natural denouément: when the vast majority of people see absolutely nothing during their second blackouts, they conclude that the prophecies were a one-time anomaly, and no plans are made for another experiment. (In fact, FlashForwards did happen again, but this time on a much vaster time scale, so that only a few people destined for effective immortality were treated to cosmic visions of unimaginable human advances.)

And, if Sawyer himself cannot bring himself to imagine a society permanently changed by periodic FlashForwards, one can be sure that the producers of this television series will also do nothing of that kind. As noted, the entire phenomenon of the FlashForwards, following the pattern of "mainstream" science fiction, has been universally regarded as a malevolent interruption of society's desirable routine, to be properly investigated and remedied by law enforcement officials, and a major priority that Wedeck announces in the very first episode is to make sure that they never happen again. When Simcoe reveals in the tenth episode that his experiment probably caused the FlashForwards, he is verbally and physically attacked, condemned as a mass murderer by a rabble-rousing television commentator, and violently abducted by mysterious figures, as society displays the attitude toward pioneering scientists long observed in popular culture, dating back to the vicious mobs who traditionally went after Dr. Frankenstein in film adaptations of Mary Shelley's novel. If it indeed turns out that Simcoe's experiment was responsible for the FlashForwards (the series, in attempting to generate suspense in as many ways as possible, has not yet established this unequivocally), one can anticipate a conclusion in which either he and his colleague will be killed, purportedly taking the information needed to create FlashForwards to their graves, or they will contritely burn all their data, smash all their equipment, and promise to never do it again.

And FlashForward is visibly committed to preserving the status quo in another way. As I pointed out during a panel at the 2009 Loscon, the entire series is structured as a mystery, the genre in which a temporary disruption of standard conditions (usually, an unsolved murder) is resolved by a charismatic detective, restoring normalcy, until the detective (if the adventure proves popular) is again confronted with a temporary disruption of standard conditions, which the detective again resolves, and so on and so on as long as the author is able to write such stories and the readers are willing to buy them. The overall structure of this series is similarly clear: whenever one mystery is cleared up, another one is going to be introduced, and so on and so on until either the producers or the viewing public gets bored by it all. And this represents another departure from the typical nature of science fiction, wherein even long series, in print or on television, tend to change and progress over time instead of constantly running in place in the manner of most television series. So it is that, while I will be watching, out of morbid curiosity if nothing else, the series' final first-season episode on or around April 29, 2010 — the date observed in the FlashForwards — I entertain no hopes that all of the mysteries so far generated by the series will be completely resolved at that time — because, as it happens, the producers have admitted from the very start that they will not. For Mark Benford's FlashForward has already shown us that on April 29, he will still be utterly baffled by everything, he will still be vainly trying to put all the pieces together, and he will still be dodging bullets from unknown enemies. The only difference is that, by that time, the whole situation will have driven him to drink. Hey, some viewers will be able to relate to that.

Gary Westfahl's works include the Hugo-nominated Science Fiction Quotations: From the Inner Mind to the Outer Limits (2005) and The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy (2005); samples from these and his other works are available at his World of Westfahl website. His recent books include a collection of essays, Science Fiction and the Two Cultures, co-edited with George Slusser; the Second Edition of Islands in the Sky: The Space Station Theme in Science Fiction Literature; and its companion text The Other Side of the Sky: An Annotated Bibliography of Space Stations in Science Fiction, 1869-1993.

FlashForward. Television series created and produced by Brannon Braga and David S. Goyer, "inspired" by the novel Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer.

Episodes to date: "No More Good Days," September 24, 2009; "White to Play," October 1, 2009; "137 Sekunden," October 8, 2009; "Black Swan," October 15, 2009; "Gimme Some Truth," October 22, 2009; "Scary Monsters and Super Creeps," October 29, 2009; "The Gift," November 5, 2009; "Playing Cards with Coyote," November 12, 2009; "Believe," November 19, 2009; and "A561984," November 30, 2009.

Starring Joseph Fiennes, John Cho, Sonya Walger, Zachary Knighton, Jack Davenport, Dominic Monaghan, Peyton List, Brian O'Byrne, Christine Woods, Courtney B. Vance, Ryan Wynott, and Lennon Wynn.

Official Website: ABC.com - FlashForward

An Overview of International Science Fiction/Fantasy in 2009

2010-03-11T21:22:00.001-08:00

Compiled by Jeff VanderMeer

Although my year's best selections included some international fiction, I thought it would be of use to compile a few "core samples" of work mostly in other languages that my contacts found of particular interest in 2009. Except for the books from places like Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines, these titles are not yet available in English. It's worth noting, too, that the term "International Fiction" or "World SF" requires further specificity of detail, in the sense that some countries have a stronger tradition of supporting non-realistic fiction than others. In addition, some countries have a stronger tradition of supporting their own authors than others. (For example, the Russian books noted represent just a fraction of Russian authors published there.)

I would also note that this is of necessity a haphazard sample — some of my queries went unanswered and some people did not have time to compile lists. Still, an incomplete overview is better than no overview at all. My thanks to all the respondents and to Cheryl Morgan and Lavie Tidhar for their help with intel. —Jeff

Australia, recommended by writer Deborah Biancotti and editor Alisa Krasnostein

Slice of Life, Paul Haines, pub. The Mayne Press
— The cover says it all: a man digging into his own side with a knife. If you've never read Haines before, then brace yourself. This book features 17 stories "from the decaying mind" (to quote the blurb) of one of the country's creepiest writers. All proceeds go to Haines' cancer fund.

Slights, Kaaron Warren, pub. Angry Robot
— Kaaron Warren's debut novel from Angry Robot is getting rave reviews all over the place, so you may have heard about it already. But in case you haven't: Stephanie goes to hell and finds it full of people she's slighted. But that's not the worst of it. In other good news, Warren has two MORE (stand-alone) books already in the Angry Robot schedule.

Make Believe: A Terry Dowling Reader, edited by Russell Farr & published by Ticonderoga Publications
— Twelve essential stories by one of Australia's most respected prose stylists. Dowling is a WFA nominee and International Horror Guild Award winner. We predict this book will be a must-have for fans and a perfect intro for new readers.

X9, Coeur de Lion
— Coeur de lion brings us the 'novellanthology' - an anthology comprising 6 novella-length short stories from some of the current leading Australian writers. Paul Haines' "Wives" is not to missed.

Brazil, recommended by translator/writer Fabio Fernandes

Xochiquetzal by Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro (Editora Draco)
— Considered the foremost name in Alternate History in Brazil, Lodi-Ribeiro had published so far three short story collections and had stories published in Brazil and Portugal. This is his first novel, in which he depicts a 16th Century where Portugal, not Spain, leads the discovery of the Americas (christened Cabralias in that timeline, in honor of Pedro Alvares Cabral, the Portuguese navigator who discovered Brazil). The story of the novel is a chronicle of adventure written by the Aztec princess Xochiquetzal, wife of Vasco da Gama — in that timeline, the Aztecs were incorporated to the Portuguese Empire, not massacrated. The story "Xochiquetzal e a Esquadra da Vingança", which opens the volume as a prologue, was translated to English and was a finalist of Sidewise Awards 2000.

Steampunk—Histórias de Um Passado Extraordinário, edited by Gianpaolo Celli (Tarja Editorial)
— This is the first Brazilian Steampunk anthology, with nine stories ranging from weird to Alternate Fiction (both Brazilian and foreign) also presenting characters from Jules Verne and Conan Doyle. There is also a story of mine in there, a version of a story previously published in English earlier in 2009. Steampunk is growing fast as a subculture in Brazil, and this anthology has been meriting a lot of attention in several reviews among steamers' blogs and sites.

Padrões de Contato, by Jorge Luiz Calife (Editora Devir)
— Calife is the man that started it all. In the early 80s, when Arthur C. Clarke published 2010, Calife's name was in his acknowledgments. That happened because Calife sent Clarke a short story called "2002" and told him to do whatever he wanted with it. Clarke didn´t use the story, but it came to him as an inspiration to write the long-awaited sequel to 2001—A Space Odyssey. Calife became famous in Brazil overnight; a science and tech journalist, he soon published his first novel, "Padrões de Contato" (1985) , a fix-up of four novellas set up in a the far future, where humankind lived in a Clarkean-inspired utopia. This novel was followed by other two in the same setting, "Horizonte de Eventos" (1986) and "Linha Terminal" (1991). In 2009, the classic trilogy was finally republished in an omnibus volume.

China, recommended by writer and professor Wu Yan, Beijing Normal University

Cross by Wang Jinkang (Chongqing Publishing Co. Ltd.)
— Sept. 12, a bio-crisis which stems from extremists spreading a dangerous virus in the United States. The only difference is, a Chinese female scientist is involved. How will the international relationship change and human beings survive? Wang Jinkang is a award winner of many Galaxy Awards and very famous in the Chinese SF field in the past 20 years.

Czech Republic, recommended by editor Martin Sust

Asfalt (Asphalt) by Štĕpán Kopřiva (Crew)
— Possibly the Czech SF/F book of the year, the author has told a bloody action-packed but also absurdist tale about the last job of a mercenary commando and his subsequent journey to Hell. It's very funny and really enjoyable.

Beton, kosti a sny (Concrete, Bones and Dreams) by Pavel Renčín
— This short story collection by one of the most interesting Czech authors of last few years showcases Renčín's natural talent for city myths and poetic language.

Kočičí noci (Feline Nights) by Blanka Jirušková
— A poetic visit to the atmospheric port of Darín, published in three books. A very promising debut by a new author.

Lota (Lota) by Petra Neomillnerová
— One of the Czech Republic's most prolific authors publishes one of her best creations: a short story collection revolving around the female witch Lota. Neomillnerova is a master at portraying intimate relations in a cynical and believable manner.

Vítr v piniích (The Wind in the Umbrella Pines) by Františka Vrbenská & Jakub D. Kočí
— Eastern fantasy in a secondary world setting, this novel takes place at the end of a great war between two empires. Several travelers take a dangerous journey for the good of the reconciliation of the two lands.

Strážcové Varadínu (Guardians of the Varadín) by Juraj Červenák
— This novel by a Slovak author is the start of the new series, a historical fantasy from the time of the attempted Turkish invasion of Europe.

Finland, recommended by editor/writer Jukka Halme

Tornit (Towers) by Jyrki Vainonen (Tammi)
— Finnish magical realism at its very best. After dismembering his dead (witch) mother, Henrik is taken by the great flood and carried into fantastical islands. Surrealistic fantasy about sex plants, dead witches and princesses with eyes on their backs. Vainonen dives ever deeper into the fantastical and weird, while coming up with trumps.

Karsta (Soot) by J. Pekka Mäkelä (LIKE)
— The fourth novel by the man who translates Philip K. Dick into Finnish, is a another quiet masterpiece of bystander-sf. Humanity has lost the interstellar war and aftermath means cleaning up the places. Mäkelä solidifies his place as an important sociopolitical-sf writer.

Valeikkuna (False Window) by Leena Krohn (Teos)
— In this future, the world is not plagued by overpopulation, but infertility. Many people live in virtual reality and take minute-long space travels. The barrier between dream and reality, possible and fantastical is blurred once more by the masterful language by Krohn.

France, recommended by writer Gio Clairval

Le Déchronologue by Stéphane Beauverger (La Volte)
— On seventeenth-century Caribbean seas, Captain Henri Villon and his crew struggle to defend their freedom in a world torn apart by merciless temporal fluctuations. Their weapon is called "The Dechronologue", a ship with cannons that shoot time. The latest novel by Stéphane Beauverger, an established Fantasy author, is carried by an epic feel.

Chien du Heaume by Justine Niogret (Mnemos)
— Chien (Dog) is a woman, ugly, short and brawny. No one swirls an ax as she does. Such ability comes in handy when you are a mercenary in high Middle Age and its never-ending winters. Chien is after her real name, identity and past. It's a short novel featuring characters of extraordinary presence. The best surprise among the new francophone Fantasy authors of 2009.

Outrage et Rébellion by Catherine Dufour (Denoel, Lune d'Encre)
— Marquis, a teenager guest of a Shanghais institution, challenges authority by creating a punk rock band whose popular success threatens the foundations of an entire society. After her acclaimed collection published by Bélial, Catherine Dufour signs the SF transfiguration of Please Kill Me (The Uncensored Oral History of Punk) by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain.

Germany, recommended by writer Jakob Schmidt

Vilm—der Regenplanet and Vilm—die Eingeborenen by Karsten Kruschel (Wurdack Verlag) is an episodic sf novel in two parts, chronicling the adventures of involuntary settlers on an inhospitable world. Thematically, it focuses on how environment and people change each other and, over the generations, combine into something new. Exploring this classic concept through vivid characters, Kruschels' novel is reminiscent of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, and it was actually written around the same time, at the beginning of the 90s. However, it was first published in 2009 by the dedicated small press sf publisher Wurdack.

Gebissen by Boris Koch (Heyne) was published in the wake of the Twilight vampire hype, but is very much its own animal. Koch's vampires are neither romantic nor mysterious — they are more akin to dangerous bullies, and their brutality and bloodthirst is just an amplified form of the violence ordinary people inflict on each other. Set in contemporary Berlin, Gebissen perfectly captures the scary side of the city — and it's also a highly readable page turner.

Sie Schläft by Dietmar Dath (kuk/edition phantasia) is, as most of Dath's books, hard to categorize. It's a mainstream novel with elements of surreal fantasy and has a few essayistic segments. Thematically, it deals with the absurdities of life as part of the "lumpenproletariat intelligentsia" and with the effort to generate meaning through love and art. If that sounds grandiose, it shouldn't. Sie Schläft is actually a pretty straightforward story, a touching and convincing anti-romance, narrated from the perspective of one very real quixotic fool and peopled by equally real and strange characters. It is easily Dath's most accessible book.

Israel, recommended by publisher/editor Rani Graff

Waiting in the Wings by Asaf Asheri (Zmora Bitan Publishing)
— A remarkable Fantasy and Horror novel by one of Israel's most promising young writers. Based on biblical mythology, this stunning page turner takes place in modern day Israel where a secret police unit headed by a charismatic young woman employs paranormal methods based on Jewish mysticism and Kabala is trying to solve the mysterious disappearance of young women all over Tel Aviv. The solution will take the characters into a dark and sinister upperworld where angelic and biblical characters are involved in a battle that will rattle the very fabric of existence as we know it. After reading this book you will never be able to read the bible in the same way.

To Be by Yoav Avni (Zmora Bitan Publishing)
— Set in a very near future Tel Aviv, this original funny and mesmerizing book is centered around Chong Levi, a young man who's the descendent of a Chinese worker and an Israeli handyman, who find himself in a crazy affair involving Mossad agents, Hi Tech gadgets, the Israeli Prime Minister and a mysterious object that might or might not change reality, while all he really wants is just to run his own trendy coffee shop in the heart of Tel Aviv. And there's a girl. The one who doesn't believe in Mathematics. Yoav Avni managed to achieve real emotion out of the loony SF and Fantasy elements that assemble the story, which makes it — in my mind — one of the best novels published in Israel during 2009.

With Both Feet on the Clouds: Fantasy in Hebrew Literature Edited by Danielle Gurevitch & Hagar Yanai (Graff Publishing)
— The new Hebrew literature, the one that has been written in Israel during the last 60+ years, produced some marvelous literary works. However, almost none of those contained fantastical elements, let alone true SF or Fantasy works. Only in the last decade, with the introduction of a new generation of young writers and editors Israel is witnessing a small renaissance of SF & F works. This collection of essays, written by twenty writers, editors, critics and academics, examines that very issue: How come that in a country that is based on a SF novel ("Altnoylend", by Herzl) there has been so few literary genre works of fiction. How come it that the Jewish culture which is so rich with fantastical and paranormal elements, was totally ignored by the writers of the new founded state? This collection of essays is also the first genre non-fiction related book ever to be published in Israel.

The Book of Creation by Sarah Blau (Zmora Bitan Publishing)
— The old legend of the Golem takes a whole new turn in this gloomy tale of a young Jewish orthodox woman who can't find a husband, a truly horrible thing in the super puritan society of the ultra orthodox community she belongs to. In her despair she creates the man of her dreams out of mud and clay. But dreams may turn into nightmares once they invade reality. Blau, who comes from an orthodox family herself, portrays an alien world of desperation and despair that exists only a few miles out of Tel Aviv, one of the most liberal cities in the world. It's not an easy read, but a well worth one.

Hydromania by Assaf Gavron (Zmora Bitan Publishing)
— Toward the end of the 21^st Century Israel is a very different country than the one we know today: The ongoing struggle with the Palestinians has taken its toll and now, after the fall of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and rest of the country into Palestinian hands, the only Israeli remaining cities are Caesarea and Tiberias. With a global water shortage, Chinese mega conglomerates controlling the world's water supply, and cloud wars breaking every once in a while in the region, one young woman finds that she may have the key to the region's water shortage. But before she does she's got to find her missing husband who may have been kidnapped in the underwater city of Caesarea while leaving her pregnant, helpless and with hardly any water, the new currency in a thirsty world. "Hydromania" is a fast paced political futuristic SF thriller written by one of Israel's promising next generation's writer. In my mind one of the best SF books I've read in 2009.

Italy, recommended by editor/publisher Armando Corridore

E un giorno a Siena l'Orco acchiappò la Mammifera (And one day in Siena the Orc grabbed the She-Mammal) by Ugo Malaguti (Elara )
— In a future very far from now the Walking-dreams are the last inhabitants of earth. They are artificially produced humans shaped to work in special secluded Towns where popular fables and stories are put to life to entertain normal humans. But Humans left earth may centuries ago and the walking-dreams have to find another reason to live. A posthuman Orc, a genetically enhanced pleasure girl named Snow-white and a Cardinal travel across a bizarre End-of-the -World Italy to reach Siena in order to find the She-Mammal, the last human on earth accordingly to an old Robot legend. She, maybe, knows all answers. After more than 30 years devoted only to editing Ugo Malaguti returns as a writer with a novel in which the many topoi of SF are masterly used to draw an ironic and bitter portrait of our times. The novel is included in the anthology "The mystery of the 8th floor" containing other interesting stories of modern Italian sf authors.

Japan, recommended by translator, publisher, and editor Yoshio Kobayashi

U Yuu Shi Tan (Whither This Tale Were) by Enjoh Toe (pronounced as en-joe toe)
— A hypertext novelette. Mr. Enjoh, a darling child of SF and Literature critics here, makes this brief novelette like a very interesting wikipedia entry. The protagonist is suffering from existential anxiety and becomes dissolved into a hole that falling ashes fill. A typical Kafkaesque absurdist story, yet it has a lot of multi-layered annotations, which are mostly whimsical musings of the author. It probably fits well into the tradition of writings like Pillow Book, Hojoki, and Tsurezuregusa. A very interesting and aesthetically beautiful story, which should have been published as an e-Book.

Bokuboku Sensei 3: Kocho No Nakushimono (Master PuPu: Lost Thing of Butterflies) by Hideyuki Niki
— The third book in a Chinese Historical Fantasy series featuring a Xian Taoist immortal sage, Master BokuBoku (PuPu) and a young apprentice Oben (Wang Bian). Oben is in love with his master who takes a form of a cute young girl, yet is a very powerful magus (Xian) and takes Oben on a whimsical journey. This time they are hunted by a group of assassins, Kocho (Butterflies) and have a fantastic adventure. As you might guess from Ryunosuke Akutagawa and Fuyumi Ono (or maybe even from the Dragonball), we have a very long tradition of fantastic literature that is set in (historical) China. The tone is very humorous and happy, a kind of coming of age story, yet features the magical Taoist mysticism. The second sequel to his Japan Fantasy Award winning novel, Bokubokusensei, and the series will continue.

Seitetsu Tenshi (Iron Angels) by Kazuki Sakuraba
— Again a remote sequel to the author's award winning novel Akakuchibaki No Densetsu (The Legend of Akakuchiba), but this time it's a YA-flavored magic realism fiction. Our protagonist is a very young girl, who inherits the supernatural ability to control every iron-made thing from her old iron mill family, and with that ability she forms an all-girl motorcycle gang to conquer the entire western Honshu Chugoku region all-girl gangs. Although written like a light novel (our manga-influenced popular YA genre), it's a very powerful magic realism novel.

(Kobayashi further notes: "As you might well guess, 2009 was a very bad year for book publishing in Japan. Although SF had a much-devoted audience, there were fewer titles and fewer good novels in the traditional SF genre, while YA "light novels" prospered. So my best list doesn't include a proper SF this year. Yet, in the slipstream fantastic literature, I saw many interesting trends... luckily each title represents particular trend.")

Netherlands, recommended by reviewer Floris Kleine, as facilitated by writer/editor Jetse de Vries

De Scrypturist by Paul Evanby (Mynx)
— A highly imaginative and relevant fantasy novel with excellent worldbuilding and strong characters. Debut novelist Evanby, who carries respectable short story credits already, brings his well-paced, multi-faceted, and riveting story to a breathless finale even as he unobtrusively slips in social commentary on issues as diverse as drug abuse, immigration law and cyberspace. In this case, the standard publishing practice of labeling any fantasy novel as volume I of a trilogy is reason for joy and cheer.

Een masker met een tong (A Mask with a Tongue) by Marcel Orie (Verschijnsel)
— A collection of ten linked stories revolving around the enigmatic figure of Cagliostro — alchemist, puppeteer, adventurer — ranging from Victorian London via Alice's Wonderland and pre-WWII Japan to Europe in 2026. Inspired by, among other things, Commedia dell'arte, westerns, manga, masked vigilantes and historical rumour, this ouroboric almost-but-not-quite-a novel proves Orie's talent as a teller of wildly imaginative tales that are as gripping as they are insightful.

New Zealand, recommended by writer Grant Stone

Voyagers, edited by Mark Pirie and Tim Jones (Interactive Publications)
— Science fiction poetry from some of New Zealand's finest. There's a very wide definition of science fiction used here, which results in a diverse collection including Fleur Adcock and Owen Marshall. An excellent and rewarding collection.

Philippines, recommended by blogger/writer Charles Tan

Philippine Speculative Fiction IV, edited by Dean Francis Alfar & Nikki Alfar (Kestrel IMC)
— An annual anthology that features short stories from the Philippines, the latest volume is the most daring to date and features a mixture of both old and new voices such as Andrew Drilon, Apol Lejano-Massebieau, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, and Eliza Victoria.

Poland, recommended by translator/writer Jan Żerański

Fantasy:

Trzeci swiat (The Third World) by Maciej Guzek (Agencja Wydawnicza Runa, paperback, 288pp) is a debut novel from a highly talented novelist, written in a form of a documentary, inspired by the works of Ryszard Kapuscinski, the great Polish essayist. The novel is set in a fantasy world, seen through the eyes of a Polish journalist trying to find out why Poles, after years of conquering the unknown land of The Legends (Poles are delivering magic to our dimension and gain power as well as wealth), are closing the whole experiment. To an intriguing form and narrative style, Guzek adds fascinating astrophysical and ethical mysteries. I think if Ryszard Kapuscinski had become a fantasy writer, he would have created something similar.

Letni deszcz. Sztylet (Summer rain: Dagger) by Anna Brzezinska (Agencja Wydawnicza Runa, paperback, 608 pp) is a long-awaited final volume of the tetralogy "Saga o zboju Twardokesku"/ "Twardokesek the Ruffian's Saga" from the Queen of Polish Fantasy. In four novels we see The Realms of the Interior Sea getting drowned in blood, war and plots, as one, mysterious warrior-woman named Szarka, not necessarily on purpose, becomes dri deonem which means — as people from The Realms say — being a lover and a protégé of the goddess Fea Flisyon. For the first time in history a woman takes over a position preserved for males only and then she commits an even greater blasphemy: she leaves the goddess alone and, having rescued the old ruffian Twardokesek, sets off with him on a journey which might change the world. But even if the first layer of the storyline sounds familiar and the world itself is quasi-medieval, the novels are truly original and full of ideas, with very realistic characters and beautiful language; if Sapkowski is the King of Fantasy, Brzezinska definitely is the Queen of the genre, tearing classical fantasy into scraps.

Opowiesci z Meekhanskiego Pogranicza: Polnoc-Poludnie (Tales from the Meekhan Borderland: North and South) by Robert M. Wegner (Powergraph, paperback, 576 pp) is another fantasy debut. Axe and rock are the treasures of the North, while heat and daggers are the treasures of the South. No matter where you live, whether you are a highlander or a desert warrior, honor and pride are sometimes the last that remain. The book is a wonderful short story collection written in a George R.R. Martin style, with magic hidden in the background, focused on characters and not necessarily a world-building, and I will be very surprised if it doesn't win any awards for 2009. The second collection set in the same world, entitled "Tales from the Meekhan Borderland: East and West", will be published by Powergraph in 2010, and the Czech edition (Laser Books) is forthcoming.

Horror:

Swiety Wroclaw (Holy Wroclaw) by Lukasz Orbitowski (Wydawnictwo Literackie, paperback, 300pp) is a short horror ballad about a district in the modern city of Wroclaw. One day, citizens discovers that inside the walls of their homes, under the layers of plaster, other walls appeared, black as obsidian and warm as hell itself, so they take out axes and hammers, start hitting the walls and can't stop doing that as if in a quasi-religious ecstasy... Nothing is more important than the block of darkness. What Mieville, Gaiman and Rowling did to London, changing the city into a place of wonders, after Marek Krajewski's noir crime stories Lukasz Orbitowski, one of the most talented Polish horror writer does to Breslau, telling us a story of madness, love and horror.

Cztery pory mroku (Four seasons of darkness) by Pawel Palinski (Fabryka Slow, paperback, 416 pp) is another debut short story collection. Palinski wrote his debut short story for the most prestigious speculative fiction magazine, "Nowa Fantastyka", and now provides us with more short stories and novelettes, inspired by American literature. Don't be mistaken, though, the author had not only read his mentor, Stephen King, but also classical modern American fiction: Updike, DeLillo or Roth. I would keep an eye of him, if I were a publisher.

Wroniec by Jacek Dukaj (Wydawnictwo Literackie, hardcover, 248pp) is a short horror novel about the trauma of the Martial Law in Poland during the communism in 1981. Dukaj, mostly recognized as a hard science fiction author, returns after two years of silence with a grim fairy tale for young adults, set in the times of Solidarity, with a storyline inspired by Lewis Caroll's "Alice in Wonderland". It's December 1981 and Solidarity is being crushed by the secret police of the communist regime, when a strange creature captures our protagonist's father. Little Adam is seven now and doesn't understand what's happening, why there's a military leader speaking on TV instead of the usual kids program, but he knows he has to rescue his father and get him back home. So Adam enters the night, the sad, gray, dark world full of psychedelic visions and fears. This outstanding work, with great illustrations and songs written by the author himself, has already been nominated to some mainstream awards and praised as a breakthrough in Polish speculative fiction.

Portugal, recommended by translator/editor Luis Rodrigues

Enciclopédia da Estória Universal, Afonso Cruz (Quetzal)

— This (all-too-short) collection of pithy vignettes, ironic aphorisms and quotes from "books that rarely exist" by writer, illustrator and musician Afonso Cruz is one of the best Portuguese-language books to have been released in 2009, a twisting maze of golems, giants, heretics, kabbalists, humble nabobs and the nature of opposites, determinism and DNA. While not exactly an original concept, Afonso Cruz braves this labyrinth without flinching in the shadow of his main influences, Jorge Luis Borges and Milorad Pavic, and I was happy to follow the trail of breadcrumbs he leaves behind.

Russia, recommended by translator Nikolai Karayev

Malaya Glusha by Maria Galina (EKSMO)
— Two interrelated magic realism novelettes set in Soviet era. The title novelette starts as a rural quest: a man and a woman go to the village Malaya Glusha (a place name like Little Backwoods) wishing to bring back the beloved dead. No border separates the reality and the mythological spacetime, the Styx is ubiquitous, and the road changes travellers irretrievably, may it be the troubled trail to Malaya Glusha or the life itself.

Tsifrovoy (The Digital) by Marina Dyachenko and Sergey Dyachenko (EKSMO)
— A technofantasy by two Ukrainian authors about a teenage Faust tempted by a cyber age Mephisto. While plunging in the online RPG, Arsen gets into some real trouble, is saved by an enigmatic man and only later realizes that his savior is a kind of an evil god, maybe even an alien (very Phildickian one, though much more friendly than Palmer Eldritch). This novel is a dark, tragic metaphor of becoming less human in the deceitful and illusive play-or-be-played world.

S nami bot (The bot with us) by Yevgeny Lukin (AST)
— An outstanding collection of one of the leading Russian SF writers is full of satire and irony. In the title novelette (which won several awards), a loser becomes voluntarily possessed by the analyzing device that generates simple verbal reactions. He immediately succeeds, as the society we live in (argues Lukin) is based mostly on the thoughtless speeches and mindless activities.

t by Victor Pelevin (EKSMO)
— A new novel of a famous fiction writer revolves around the adventures of Count T. who is recognizable as Leo Tolstoy in a strange, absurd setting. Before long Count becomes aware that he is merely a character in the commercial novel that is being composed by five bad writers. As always, Pelevin lets his character walk the path to enlightenment — and shows the strong contempt for the market-oriented art industry.

South Africa, recommended by writer Nick Wood

Remembering Green by Lesley Beake (Frances Lincoln Children's Books)
— A well written YA SF/F novel set in 2250 at the tip of an Africa ravaged by climate change involving a technological elite looking to harvest the last remaining resources of the continent, including a young captured girl for her ancestral knowledge. Beake's books are historically rich in African imagery and date back over twenty years with many garnered awards.

Moxyland by Lauren Beukes (Angry Robot)
— A strong debut SF novel segueing between characters under pressure in a near-future dystopian Cape Town, unravelling towards a moving climax. Beukes is definitely a writer to watch and is following up with a much anticipated but unrelated SF novel entitled 'Zoo City' in 2010.

The Book of the Dead by Kgebetli Moele (Kwela Books)
— A gripping tale tracing a man born in poverty but making a life for himself only to contract HIV; the virus itself finds a voice in the unfolding narrative. Moele follows up powerfully to his debut novel 'Room 207', which won the Herman Charles Bosman prize.

Jeff VanderMeer's reviews have recently appeared in The New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Miami Herald, and more. Forthcoming books include the story collection The Third Bear, The Steampunk Bible, the web comic "The Situation" (with Eric Orchard), and a hundred-year overview of short weird fiction co-edited with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, and The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals (written with Ann).

Howard Waldrop & Lawrence Person review Alice in Wonderland

2010-03-08T19:34:00.001-08:00

Both: This must have looked like a really good idea on paper.

Lawrence Person: Another week, another visually-impressive-but-thematically-empty remake. This is better than The Wolfman, but not as interesting as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. They tried to graft a standard Plot Coupon fantasy quest onto what was a surreal dreamscape lacking any narrative spine. Big mistake.

Howard Waldrop: The only problem is, it's Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, not Carroll's (of course, you could say the same thing about all versions, from the 1933 all-star one to Disney's 1951 animated feature.)

In this one, Alice's story has become tied to the quest to defeat the Jabberwock. There's a high-Victorian backstory that pokes some fun at 19th century expectations, and Alice is in her early 20s. This all adds nothing to the original going-to-sleep-on-a–picnic setup for a younger girl.

LP: The framing device is all kinds of wrong: 1) It's dull and slows the movie down; 2) Unlike The Wizard of Oz, there's no correspondence between real and dreamland characters; 3) It's a work of distinct moral cowardice. By holding up the mores of 19th century English high society for 21st century American audiences to feel smugly superior to, nothing in the film challenges its target audience's beliefs in even the slightest way. (Laugh while you can; some 120 years hence, you'll look every bit as stupid and prejudiced a rube as Lord Ascot the Younger looks here.)

HW: The visuals are of course pretty good. All the trappings of Alice's Adventure in Wonderland (and a little of Through the Looking Glass) are here. It reminded me in many ways of the Dennis Potter Dreamchild (1985), where the Alice story was used (both biography and fiction) to make some real observations about the nature of dreams.

The characters are here: the movie tries to make daylight sense out of what essentially is a dream-narrative, to not very great effect. Placing the Jabberwock quest over the Wonderland narrative makes things both clearer and more diffuse at the same time.

LP: Once it becomes your stand good-vs.-evil dynastic succession plot, the whole thing is on rails and the movie has no more surprises left up its sleeves. Alice dithers over picking up the vorpal sword, but no one over the age of 14 will have the slightest doubt what she'll choose in the end. (China Miéville's Un-Lun-Dun, in which a secondary character becomes incensed at being relegated to the Funny Sidekick role in the Grand Prophecy and short circuits the entire creaky machination, has more courage in its little finger than this has in the entire movie.)

And stripped of their dream-logic, many elements cease to be surreal and start becoming deeply stupid. Why can't Alice just chow down enough Eat Me to grow big enough to crush the Jabberwock like a bug? If the Cheshire Cat can materialize and dematerialize at will, why not let him retrieve the vorpal sword? Etc.

HW: Depp's role (the Mad Hatter) is ill-defined on the Wonderland level, but okay within Burton's narrative. He's not mad enough on one level, but over-the-top in others. It just doesn't go far enough to bring across the mercury-poisoned pathos of the book. (The Henson Workshop creature of Dreamchild did.)

LP: Depp's Hatter switches between a sort of High English Twee and a vaguely menacing Bobbie Burns-esque brogue. Like most of his non-realistic roles, his portrayal is an odd choice that he somehow makes work though his complete mastery of the character's exterior qualities.

HW: Helena Bonham Carter's Red Queen is a one-note storybook Evil Older Sister role (so's the book's Queen). I'm sure it's not all that easy to act when your head, like Betty Boop's, is wider than your shoulders (or so it seems).

LP: In many ways the relish with which Carter's Red Queen devours the virtual scenery is one of the best things about the film. She obviously had fun with the role, and there's something supremely satisfying about the line "Prepare the Jabberwock for war!" (Now if only she and the Knave of Hearts didn't keep reminding me of the video for Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi"...)

Sadly, Mia Wasikowska's Alice doesn't have the presence to carry the movie. She's not the main problem, but she doesn't come across as a particularly strong protagonist, and she lacks real chemistry with Depp's pseudo-love-interest Hatter.

HW: Christopher Lee voiced the Jabberwock's resident-evil lines, and Michael Gough's dodo's pretty good, and even has the cane right out of Tenniel's illustrations. (Must have seemed like Hammer Films in 1962 on the set.) The voices are mostly just right (although I miss Percy Helton's squeaking White Rabbit from the 1951 Disney movie).

LP: Any movie version of Alice in Wonderland sets itself up for a difficult task, namely to recapture the mixture of whimsy and menace a young reader has upon first encountering the book. (Which is why, on paper, a Tim Burton version must have looked like such a sure thing, as Beetle Juice and A Nightmare Before Christmas both come so close to the sort of balance a successful version would require.) All movie adaptations of it fail for one reason or another; Burton's Wonderland fails because the linear nature of the plot derails the head-long, out-of-control dream-logic of the original, the feeling of being plunged into a world where nothing makes any sense and things keep changing too fast to escape. It fails because it's ultimately entirely too predictable and safe. When you can make friends with the Bandersnatch, Wonderland has all the menace of a trip to Hot Topic.

HW: This reminded me of nothing so much as Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm, a movie I don't generally like. Stunning, in some cases, visuals (I saw it flat). [LP: I saw it in 3D IMAX, and wished I hadn't, as the 3D actually made it harder to focus on what was going on; the scene of her falling down the rabbit hole was particularly annoying. And for all the ballyhoo around the "new" 3D, it still looks more like receding lines of successive planes (like a Renaissance trompe l'oeil backdrop) than real life. Unless you're a fan of the technique, I don't think the extra money is worth it.] The wrong (but a similar) story with all the characters used in a revisionist way. It's not a mess, it's just not Lewis Carroll, either.

This is not the book: it's the book's little brother.

Howard Waldrop's latest books are Other Worlds, Better Lives: Selected Long Fiction, 1989 - 2003 and Things Will Never Be the Same: Selected Short Fiction 1980-2005, from Old Earth Books. Locus Magazine interviewed Waldrop in its November 2003 issue.

Lawrence Person is a science fiction writer living in Austin, Texas. His work has appeared in Asimov's, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, Postscripts, Jim Baen's Universe, Fear, National Review, Reason, Whole Earth Review, The Freeman, Science Fiction Eye, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and Slashdot.org, as well as several anthologies. He also edits the Hugo-nominated SF critical magazine Nova Express and runs Lame Excuse Books.

Directed by Tim Burton

Written by Linda Woolverton (screenplay)

Starring Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway, Crispin Glover, Matt Lucas, Stephen Fry, Michael Sheen, Alan Rickman, Barbara Windsor, Paul Whitehouse, Timothy Spall

Official Website: Alice in Wonderland: Characters

Lois Tilton reviews Short Fiction, #3

2010-03-08T08:24:00.000-08:00

Zines Reviewed

Asimov's, April/May 2010
Analog, May 2010
Clarkesworld, March 2010
Apex Magazine, March 2010
Electric Velocipede, Fall 2009

Asimov's, April/May 2010

An amazing total of three novellas in this double issue. Most of the stories are unambiguously science fiction.

"The Union of Soil and Sky" by Gregory Norman Bossert

Alien archeology. A familiar scenario: Humans have settled an alien world rich in minerals; archeologists race to document a site before mining operations begin, thwarted by the local human authorities, who deprecate the aliens and their culture and hate the Earth-based archeologists interfering in their business. When an important discovery is made, the bureaucrats shut down the dig, but the scientists are not so easily deterred.

What raises this one above the shopworn scenario are the detailed descriptions of the archeological process [although I'm doubtful than an archeologist would attempt to lift such a fragile cup from its matrix] and the uncovered artifacts:

In front of Winifred and Ant, the soil had miraculously parted. On the left, there was a perfect cross-section, layers of topsoil and clay, and then a long low arch of glass, thick and laced with fantastic, feathery buttresses of the same material. On the right, there was nothing; the ridge had collapsed in, a hole about three meters square, perfectly square, in fact, and sloping down into darkness.

The translations of the alien sign language are also well-done [the union of soil and sky means "glass"]. The characters of the archeologists are sympathetic, but the human settlers, seen only from the point of view of the diggers, are regrettably clichéd.

"Mindband" by Pamela Sargent

Chris Szekely was a TV reporter when she was caught up in a mob that collapsed a bridge with great loss of life; she was one of the few survivors. Ever since, she has suffered from flashbacks, the sense that she is hearing other people's voices inside her mind. Now she has determined that a company called MindData Associates was behind the tragedy, operating a transponder that can project one person's thoughts into another's mind. She wants them to pay for what they did, inciting the mob.

"You thought it was all over, that anybody who survived wouldn't know enough to come after you, would be too traumatized to want to do anything but forget. We'd think it was mass hysteria, picking up other people's thoughts like that. We'd blame ourselves for what happened, not you."

A story of characters, the people whose minds briefly touch each other's, working out release from the weight of their own depressions. From the moment we see the transponder aimed directly at the bed and breakfast across from the company headquarters, we know that Chris's suspicions are not groundless. The only question is whether she will succeed in confronting her demons.

"Jackie's-Boy" by Stephen Popkes

Post-apocalypse. This time it started with plagues and went downhill in a cascade of unintended consequences. "If I believed in God, I'd go out and kill a calf on a rock or something. We sure as hell pissed him off." Most people are dead and cannibalistic gangs rule the cities. Young Michael finds refuge in the zoo, then accompanies Jackie the talking elephant on her quest for other modified elephants like herself. Jackie isn't very fond of humans, but she and Michael need each other to survive.

This turns out to be a surprisingly positive adventure story, as Michael and Jackie encounter Komodo Dragons, crocodiles, and a helpful ferryboat captain. The dialogue is entertaining, the characters engaging.

"Alten Kameraden" by Barry B Longyear

In the closing weeks of WWI, sniper Kurt Wolff kills an enemy sniper before he could kill the runner from HQ.

Kurt turned from his position, bringing his rifle with him, as a baffling feeling of dread filled him. For a slice of existence it was as though all the world's dead mounted the edges of their graves at the same time and beckoned him. He couldn't catch his breath.

In the closing days of WWII, retired policeman and electrician Kurt Wolff is summoned to fix the ventilator fan in the bunker of the old comrade whose life he once saved, Adolph Hitler. But Hitler wants more from him now.

The harrowing settings here are meticulously detailed to the point where readers may almost feel themselves choking on the smoke and odors of decay. A story that seems to be alternate history turns into something else at the end. I only doubt that Hitler, at this point in his life, would have had such a sane and altruistic motive.

RECOMMENDED

"Unforeseen" by Molly Gloss

The narrator is an insurance investigator for a company offering remediation [revival] after sudden unexpected death. Their ad claims:

Don't make the mistake of thinking, as we did, that because your children are young, Remediable Death Insurance is unnecessary or an extravagance. We'd give anything to bring back our children. And if they'd been insured, they'd be with us right now.

But in fact, the company's policy is full of fine print excluding almost any possible cause of death, and the narrator's job is to find cause for denying claims. It's a job that inspires morbid thoughts.

A sharply bitter and cynical look at the business of profiting by raising false hopes. This is not a story about the future.

"Adrift" by Eugene Fischer

An interesting scenario: automated shipping containers make their own way across the oceans.

Millions of dots representing FloatNet nodes covered the Atlantic, bunched together in some areas and sparse in others, like a great flock of birds frozen in flight. Janet pointed out the rectilinear smudges representing Platform Beryl in the south and Platform Grouper in the north.

The world being what it is, smugglers have begun to use the net to transport illicit cargo such as drugs and refugees. When one young refugee family finds itself on Platform Beryl, the director is caught in a moral and legal quandary.

Neat SFnal premise, humane story.

"They Laughed at Me in Vienna and Again in Prague, and Then in Belfast, and Don't Forget Hanoi! But I'll Show them! I'll Show Them all, I Tell You!" by Tim McDaniel

A mad scientist don't get no respect. The fools!

"Malick Pan" by Sara Genge

A post-apocalyptic world in which the cities have sealed themselves off and feral clans scratch out an existence outside, hiding from the sun. Malick was a young child when he ran from the city, escaping a man we assume was a sexual predator. Ever since, the city has sent out clouds of nanobots, hoping to find him and bring him back. But Malick prefers the life outside where he has a friend, and has ordered the nanobots to keep his body small as a child's so he can fit into the hiding places where the big-hungries can't. Malick considers himself superior to the big-hungries, but he doesn't realize how much he relies on the nanners, what he would be without them.

Malick may think he's pretty smart, but he's not very wise.

"Pretty to Think So" by Robert Reed

A sudden emergency. The news reports that a comet is going to crash into the Earth. The presidential staff privately admits that this is only what they told the people to avert panic. Even the scientists aren't sure.

And really, nobody knows anything for certain. But people . . . you know how people are. We hear something that sounds a little familiar, and right away we jump to the easiest conclusion. I said, 'Life,' and he heard, 'Alien.' I talked about the runaway cascade, and he heard, 'Invasion.' "

As a psychological study of humanity under emergency conditions, this is interesting. More so than the explanation when it finally comes.

Analog, May 2010

A mix of science fiction stories, typical of this zine.

"Page Turner" by Rajnar Vajra

The narrator is trapped in the aftermath of an earthquake and losing hope of rescue.

I'm in trouble, real trouble, and can't do a blessed thing about it. And I'm hurting and tired and cold, and God knows I'm scared. So the game's name for me right now is SURVIVAL, which means I've got to invent distractions and more distractions to fight this urge I'm getting to—to just give up.

To divert herself, she begins to tell an imaginary listener the story of how things may have happened, centering on the appearance of a live flatfish at the doorstep of the bookstore where she works. She warns us at the outset that much of what she says will not be true and leaves us to guess which elements are false, from the insectoid leprechauns to the teleportation machine.

This is a clever premise, but for such a metafiction [metafiction in Analog?!] about the telling of effective stories, the author has followed up her hook with a long and tedious passage about the denizens of the bookstore that does a great deal to diminish reader interest. The narrator is owed a certain amount of slack considering her situation, but too much digression makes for less of a page turner.

"Hanging by a Thread" by Lee Goodloe

The ocean planet Teresa looks benignly Earthlike to Amy, but its acid ocean is deadly. The onworld floating station is connected to the space station by a space elevator, and when Matt the station commander tells Amy, twice, that the stalk had to be re-engineered for flexibility because of the waves, it is no surprise when it snaps as soon as a big storm comes along. Now the immediate task is to evacuate the injured back up to the space station.

Here is an urgent situation, an emergency calling for courage and skill. An ideal setting for a tense and exciting story, as suggested by the title. But by the time the emergency actually happens, the story is almost over. The author has wasted most of the text on bland and banal Amy, a character who generates no interest at all. When she asks, "Why is someone like that wasting time on someone like me, who doesn't even know why she's here?" I can only echo the question to the author.

"The Day the Music Died" by H.G. Stratmann

Terrorists have broadcast a piece of music that hijacks the brain of anyone who hears it. Millions have been incapacitated by "the most powerful earworm ever created." This one plays off the commercial use of music in manipulating the emotions.

"Farallon Woman" by Walter L. Kleine

The narrator is part of a secret group studying an alien spaceship discovered on the ocean floor. Then he meets Tara Farallon, an amnesiac woman who was reportedly rescued from a shipwreck. Astonishingly, it takes the narrator a long time to make the connection that is immediately obvious to any reader. Instead, he first falls in love with her. Jack spends a long time imagining her in the ship, imagining what she would say if he showed it to her, let her know that he knew.

I'd been through that conversation in my head a million times, fantasizing everything from, "I suppose it could be. I don't remember a thing," to, "You've got my ship? Let me help you make it fly again!" None of the fantasies, I was sure, would be real . . . but I kept hoping her response might be something in the direction of the latter.

This is a love story, an idyllic one, with the bond between these two people strongly evoked, yet not icky.

RECOMMENDED

"A Talent for Vanessa" by David W. Goldman

Marv Pennypacker is a Special Talent agent. Most of his clients are savants created through surgery; an operation that damages certain parts of the brain seems to release savant Talents. Sometimes. Occasionally rich young people want to have the operation, and surgeons hire Marv to try to talk them out of it. This is the case with ditzy Vanessa, who says she wants a Talent so people will invite her to more parties. But Marv smells something funny about her.

An improbable premise, too hard to take seriously.

"Fishing Hole" by Rick Cook

A paleontologist dining at a sushi restaurant in Seattle recognizes that the shellfish on his plate is an extinct trilobite. Shortly afterward, invertebrate specialist Tim Valdez is visited by an agent of the Fish and Wildlife Department, Sally Lund, who enlists his help tracking down whoever is illegally taking extinct shellfish and selling them to the restaurants.

The dumpster behind another restaurant on Sally's list contained a half-dozen ammonite shells and several clumps of cup-like shells Tim identified as belonging to an extinct oyster-like animal called a rudist. There were also the remains of a couple of very suspicious teleost fish (one served almondine, one in a tomato sauce).

An entertaining, cleverly-done scientific detective story with a particularly neat twist at the end.

RECOMMENDED

"Teaching the Pig to Sing" by David D. Levine

Edvard Roderick Zachary Sigmund von Regensberg, Defender of Humanity, Viceroy of Germany and Austria, and Royal Colonel of the European Army is part of a royal caste bred and brainwashed to rule the world. Revolutionaries have captured him and reversed his conditioning. Now, his mind free for the first time, he has to decide where his true loyalties are.

This one leaves the royal narrator on the sharp edges of a dilemma, where either option will exact a high price. Happily, the author doesn't go overboard with political lectures.

Clarkesworld #42 , March 2010

Both this month's stories are science fiction.

"Alone with Gandhari" by Gord Sellar
In a nearish future dominated by fattening fast food, Kenny is miserable in his obesity until he meets the Guru. Through VR therapy, he experiences union with the mother-cow goddess.

Heart swooning, he made his way to her rear, and as he did so, she steadied herself, bracing. Gently, and with the greatest of reverence, he stuck a hand into her, and then another. He pried her open, drew a deep breath, and slid headfirst into the peace of the divine mother-cow's womb.

When not thus engaged, he participates with other disciples in "Mac attack" raids on fast-food franchises, steadfastly ignoring the evidence that the Guru's motives may not be entirely pure.

Striking imagery. Apart from the VR sequences, this is a story about cults and their exploitation of the vulnerable. I'm not aware of any Hindu text in which Gandhari took the form of a cow, or in which the cow goddess had that name.

"The History Within Us" by Matthew Kressel

In a far future, humanity acquired great powers and used them to destroy most of the stars in the galaxy. Other species naturally resent this. They have built Eluder ships with which they hope to escape the dying universe on the collapsing wave of a dying star. Betsy has joined the aliens on an Eluder ship, thinking they don't know what she is. Betsy is one of a small group of humans set apart because they had a visual record of their ancestors coded into their DNA. Now Betsy carries the record on an ancient wrist computer and watches one or two scenes obsessively, trying to decide whether to carry this record of human depravity through into a new universe.

I can't find myself moved by this premise, which seems highly contrived. I don't care about Betsy's lost lover, I can't credit her obsession with a few old images, and definitely can't credit the aliens' interest in them.

Apex Magazine, March 2010

A special, all-Mary Robinette Kowal issue. It offers a novelette and an original short story from this author, and two reprints, both previously published by this zine.

"The Bride Replete"
The biology of the people in this story is patterned after honey ants, in whose nests there is a caste of repletes that keep their abdomens vast and full of nectar, with which they feed the rest of the nest. Pimi is an adolescent girl who is eager to have the full, round crop of a bride. Status in her country is displayed in the size of the belly.

[Mother] reclined on a couch accepting food from the hands of their deep-family. Pimi's cousins, aunts, uncles and siblings wore their Fest Day tunics. Red and orange scarves lay over their scalps and fluttered about their shoulders like fire, as they carried dishes to Mother. Her long, slender limbs lay in beautiful contrast to her speckled blue belly, which ballooned onto the floor.

But when her family moves overseas, they find that customs are different; only servants have distended crops, and the local aristocrats pride themselves on their narrow waists. Then Pimi and her mother are kidnapped by raiders who mean to force-feed them as replete slaves.

Kowal has created not only one fascinatingly alien society, but two, based on the same physiology. Pimi and her family don't quite seem human, but they are convincingly people, and not particularly ant-like.

RECOMMENDED

"Beyond the Garden Close"

Living on a generation ship, far from their destination, Lena and Phoebe are lovers. Phoebe yearns to have one of the few children allowed in each generation, but she carries a genetic flaw that can not be passed on. Lena, with no desire for a child of her own, is going through the tedious process of selection for her lover's sake.

The endless rituals of ship life touched every act. Sometimes she wondered if an OCD strain had gotten in, all unnoticed, and infected every line. But it was really just a way to pass the time until the next generation took over and then the generation after that, all biding time until they reached Planetfall.

Lena is more than a match for the testing scenario, but this very short story is supposed to be driven by her love for Phoebe, and we never see them together; we never see their love.

Electric Velocipede #19, Fall 2009

A belated review. This small press printzine comes out somewhat irregularly a few times a year. The prevailing mode of the fiction shades through weird to surreal; the current issue is in cyberpunk tones.

"The Lost Technique of Blackmail" by Mark Teppo

Max is the Security Theorist of InterCore Express [ICE], which sounds good but actually represents a kick up the corporate ladder to nowhere, his previous security function now deemed obsolete by progress. The tedium of his existence is broken when a package is delivered via an obsolete route, containing a term paper once plagiarized by the firm's CEO. Someone is blackmailing the boss; the route, however, means it is also a threat to Max.

A data-detective story, unusually long for this venue. The author has worked to create a strong sense of future strangeness by embedding the plotline in a thick matrix of jargon:

Depot 12-B4 was a half-shell unit—an electro-bonded extrusion of ceramic with a pneumatic receptor and a battered 4ts-mon. Archaic, by any standard. I had d/l'ed their Lifecycle Management Protocol during the drop to Emporium 31. They had been EOLed shortly after the SI & R, but some middle manager down-chain had modded the LMP to only remove them as they broke down, a decision which failed to consider the high QA standard for this early generation of pre-fab. They made them to last counterclockwise.

Some readers will find this impenetrable, to others [such as the usual readers of this zine], it will probably come as Added Value. The underlying plot is highly intricate and rewarding.

RECOMMENDED

"Frayed" by Jonathan Brandt

In a world where everyone can teleport with the aid of companion sheep, Henry is engaged to the President-elect, a woman with many political enemies. An assassin, missing her, has killed her daughter. Henry, as State Forensics Director, has reanimated the killer in order to prevent a repeat assassination attempt, but his plans are thwarted.

This plot summary might suggest a political thriller, but the tone and setting are absurd.

[Wade's] stately ewes, their jaws slackened, their eyes wild, collapsed. Claire bleated smugly at this, but she was interrupted by the urgent baying of the Booroola Merinos, who butted the high police officials as arrays of scanners and pagers strapped to their flanks squawked in unison.

The result is a piece that treats death and grief too lightly. Unsatisfying.

"Darkest Amber" by Erin Hoffman

Kali is a badass independent auto mechanic working mean streets ruled by gang bosses. Her partner is her illegal petroleum-burning car, JH, her only legacy from a beloved father. But there is a new boss on the streets now, and a new enforcer who wants to prove he's more badass than anyone else and picks Kali as his example.

Kali—was all the warning she had before an override signal followed by a priority-authorized disable command shattered the whole visualization, not only dissolving her setup but shutting down her plant entirely. In a quick reflex she activated the plant's backup, then turned from the sedan, eyes regaining focus on meatspace, fury growling eight-cylinder thunder under her skin.

A dark, cyberpunkish setting and characters to match.

"Life at the Edge of Nowhere" by Kjell Williams

Post-apocalypse. Warring corporations have used deadly biological weapons to destroy much of civilization. Now Jim is working with a survey team trying to restore what remains. What he finds is impossible:

A small house stood among the skeletal remains of the surrounding neighborhood. It looked weathered, but sturdy, with faded, yellow paint. Staring at the house like it was a rosebush on a battlefield full of corpses, he smiled at the light blooming through its windows.

But the house turns out to be a portal to Nowhere, another world, inhabited by people who couldn't exist. And the corporation he works for is determined to find their secret, one way or another.

A confusing scenario, with too much backstory hiding behind the immediate world of Nowhere. We grasp that there were evils and horrors, but never really see any of them close or clearly.

"The Boy Who Could Bend and Fall" be Ken Scholes

The other kids called him Slinky and liked to throw him down the stairs.

He went down making only a slight whooshing noise, then lay still at the bottom. The first few times, of course, he'd sprung to his feet with a bit of a flourish. But after that, when he realized that it was going to be an ongoing fete, he just laid there and waited for Ninja Bob and an ever-changing gang to scoop him up and haul him back to the top.

His ability was sometimes a problem but sometimes an advantage.

A rather strange little fantasy about a person we never really get to know.

"A Mouse Ran Up the Clock" by A.C. Wise

Historical fantasy. In a world where Hitler or someone like him is the Emperor, clockmaker Simon Shulewitz experiments by making cyborged mice. This comes to the attention of the head of the Emperor's secret police, who sets him to work with another craftsman named Bielski.

Then the mouse on the table twitched. There was a click and a whir, and its eyes flew open. Simon gasped. The eyes were blood red, and it took Simon a moment to realize they were colored glass or some kind of translucent stone. Simon watched in amazement as the mouse scurried forward and leapt nimbly off the edge of the table.

Their creations are technically successful, but Simon is appalled when he realizes how they are used to repress the other Jews in the ghetto where the Emperor has confined them.

Cyborged animals have become a commonplace in today's SF, but it is not clear that Simon's clockwork mice have any real advantage over natural ones; the spy-mice he helps Bielski create are essentially robotic. But what Bielski devises is a creature of fantasy and not ultimately convincing or original. In our history, Bielski was the name of a Jewish partisan group who fought the Nazis.

"Nightlight" by Celia Marsh

Adrian is a Sensitive. As a child, he had visions and visitations in his dreams.

"I liked the ghosts," Adrian said, following Jessie's plumed tail along the path. "I stopped telling you about them after that since you'd made them go away."

Now as an adult he is an apprentice exorcist, although he still dislikes banishing the ghosts. He encounters one particularly determined ghost, a young girl whose body turns out to be on lifesupport in the hospital, her parents not convinced she is really dead. But she resists the usual rites of exorcism.

Interesting speculation about the relationship of body and soul, the nature of death.

In the past, Lois Tilton's fiction has been nominated for the Nebula, Sturgeon and Sidewise Awards. Her short fiction reviews ran at The Internet Review of Science Fiction from December 2005 through February 2010.

Stefan Dziemianowicz reviews Peter Straub

2010-03-06T11:54:00.001-08:00

The publication of Peter Straub's The Skylark and A Dark Matter only a handful of months apart gives readers a unique opportunity to see how one of the most talented living writers of fantastic fiction cuts a rough diamond of a novel into a brilliant gem. The two are essentially the same book, save that The Skylark is an earlier draft that weighed in 200 manuscript pages heavier than the tale told in the final trade edition. In Straub's own words, it's "a much looser, sloppier, more wild-eyed version of the book." Straub did this dual publication trick once before with "Mrs. God", an homage to the strange stories of Robert Aickman's that anchored his collection House Without Doors in its novella form, and also appeared in its full short novel length from specialty publisher Donald M. Grant in 1990. Comparing the two versions of his latest, one gets a fascinating glimpse into the creative process, and perhaps an inkling of how Straub conceived the vast backstory for his Millhaven Mythos (referring to the fictional Wisconsin community where so many of his novels are set or begin) from which he periodically carves out novels.

A Dark Matter is not set in Millhaven, but in Madison, and it's primarily the narrative of Lee Harwood, a writer of the same stripe as Tim Underhill, who has figured prominently in (and/or been portrayed as the "author" of) most of Straub's novels since Koko (1988). Harwood achieved bestsellerdom with his thriller The Agents of Darkness, for which he fictionalized the adventures of four high school friends, including the woman who eventually became his wife. Years later, blocked on the writing of his latest novel, Harwood shifts abruptly to writing a memoir in which he hopes to finally divulge the truth about the experience that inspired his bestseller. In order to do this, he decides to reacquaint himself with a close-knit quartet whose circle he was, by choice, only on the periphery of, and hear from their own mouths what happened.

One fall day in 1966, under the influence of a charismatic Svengali named Spencer Mallon, these four friends — Donald "Dilly-O" Olson, Howard "Hootie" Bly, Jason "Boats" Boatman, and Harwood's wife-to-be Lee "The Eel" Truax — joined with three students at the local university in a quasi-occult ceremony in the school's agronomy meadow. Mallon, a shady shaman who had studied up on Cornelius Agrippa (AKA Paracelsus) and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, was of the opinion that through the ceremony they "just might change the world." They did, indeed, though not quite in the positive spiritual way they thought they might. Owing to missed timing (as is later revealed) and Mallon's corrupt motives and ineptness (as is largely suspected) something goes horribly wrong: one of the college students is torn to pieces, another vanishes from the face of the Earth, and the four high school friends are left with emotional and psychological scars that shaped the people whom they have become in their adult lives.

Stories in which friends reconvene as adults to come to terms with a terrifying shared traumatic experience from their youth have been a staple of modern horror fiction since Straub all but introduced the form in 1979 with Ghost Story (and which he acknowledges at one point in the novel with a reference to that tale's femme fatale, Alma Mobley). But instead of arriving at some version of consensual truth, the four friends in A Dark Matter find that they all saw and experienced something different that fateful day. Donald, who becomes Mallon's protégé, became aware of a phalanx of vaguely anthropomorphic doglike creatures who prowl on the periphery of our reality, helping to contain the kind of mischief that irresponsible occultists like Mallon unleash. Hootie, who has become so unbalanced that he is incapable of speaking in anything other passages quoted from novels (significantly The Scarlet Letter, and its ripe rhetoric on sin and evil), saw a dark and menacing otherworld intersect our own. Boats, who has spent much of his adult life working as a professional thief, saw a field stacked with the bloody corpses of young children. The Eel, who has slowly gone blind over the intervening years, ironically saw even more: her consciousness "rose," and from the height it attained she was able to observe the full panorama of horrifying marvels, including an extradimensional door that swallowed one student, and the emergence of hideous demonic entity that tore the other student apart. Straub's skillful juxtaposition and interweaving of each character's story in Rashomon-like fashion helps to suggest a horror so otherworldly and profound that any one person can only glimpse a facet or fragment of it. To try and understand it in its entirety would invite madness.

It's possible to read this rich and inventive novel on many levels, but two major interpretations emerge from Straub's deftly structured narrative. The events of 1966 unfold while the war in Vietnam is raging and student unrest is sparking protests on campus and brutal reprisals against them. Mallon's hope to transform the Earth involves the use of a "sacred violence" to end the violence of the war and the times. Keith Hayward, the student who is slaughtered, is a sociopath and sadist whom Mallon believes can help catalyze his cosmic scheme. But Mallon is neither up to the audacity of his actions nor prepared for the enormity of what he introduces into our world, and Straub implies that the disorder and chaos of the Vietnam era and its aftermath could be attributed to the forces that Mallon unleashed. A Dark Matter fits very comfortably on the same continuum that includes George R.R. Martin's The Armageddon Rag (1985), Stephen Wright's M31 (1989), Elizabeth Hand's Generation Loss (2008), and countless other novels concerned with the dark side of the sixties counterculture and the dreams of transcendence that curdled into nightmares.

Quite possibly, though, Straub is getting at something a little less momentous but a little more salient as regards the tale of modern horror. From her superior vantage point above the agronomy meadow, The Eel observes the rampaging demon inadvertently summoned by Mallon and sees it not as a being of insuperable supernatural Evil, but "the famous Noonday Demon... the savage demon of the second rate, the demon of everyday evil."

No one was ever supposed to see it as it made its way to and fro in the world, causing men to fall off ladders, and babies to stiffen and die, and corn crops to wither, women to lose unborn babies in a bloody flux, drunken drivers to steer into oncoming lanes, husbands to beat wives, women to roast their husbands alive in their beds like cockroaches, old friends to quarrel and separate. It moved through its boundless territory, bringing chaos and disorder, bringing despair.

Straub seems to be saying here that the worst consequences of the event in the agronomy meadow possibly were not the dismemberment of Keith Hayward and the disappearance of the other student — which could only be explained in terms of the supernatural Evil one finds in horror fiction — but the arousal of those indefinable and indistinguishable forces of personal fate that set the characters (like ordinary people) on the path to mediocre adult lives full of disappointment, disillusionment, and the inescapable sense that they live (as Straub eloquently phrases it in The Skylark) "in an empty world aggressively devoid of meaning."

Since the 1960s, the modern horror tale has increasingly shifted its focus from the supernatural menaces that defined the genre from the Gothic through the pulp eras to unsettling expressions of what might be called the dark side of everyday life. The generation of writers who came of age in the 1960s and '70s, among them Straub, gave us a whole new type of horror fiction rooted in the fears of people navigating a world that seemed chaotic, confusing, unpredictable, unrelenting, and full of unforeseeable drama. The body of work they created has largely redefined the iconic monsters and tropes that once summarized supernatural Evil (with a capital "E") in terms of the everyday evil Straub describes in A Dark Matter. His novel is a powerful and eloquent crystallization of the ambitions of the modern horror story.

As regards the differences between the two versions of the novel, The Skylark provides a more detailed linear account of events leading up to the event in the agronomy meadow, and fuller backstories for the characters. In particular, it develops the character of Keith Hayward, and his bond with an uncle who encourages his sociopathy and who himself is a serial killer whose murders inspire insightful discussions among the novel's other characters of the nature of evil. To craft the tale as A Dark Matter, Straub amplified the role played by Lee Harwood and shifted from an omniscient to a more first-person narrative voice. Each novel is very enjoyable on its own. The publication of the two together constitutes a major event in horror publishing this early in the 21st century.

Read more! This is one of many reviews from the March issue of Locus Magazine. To read more, go here to subscribe.

A Dark Matter

Peter Straub

(Doubleday 978-0-385-51638-9, $26.95, 352pp, hc) February 2010

The Skylark

Peter Straub

(Subterranean Press 978-1-59606-271-9, $50.00, 592pp, hc) November 2009

Faren Miller reviews N.K. Jemisin

2010-03-06T11:47:00.001-08:00

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin is a highly promising debut. It's the first of a trilogy set in a world whose three major gods went to war eons ago. That conflict almost fatally weakened the Nightlord who emerged first from chaos, when his sibling the Bright Lord (Skyfather) came to ascendance and crushed all opponents except for some forgotten minor gods. These godlings still exist as prisoners, slaves, or weapons capable of the occasional horrific act, and not just plagues: "Occasionally the population of an entire city will vanish overnight. Once, jagged steaming pits appeared where there had been mountains."

Between Darkness and Light lie the transitional states of dawn and dusk, various wise/trickster demigods who only pay lip service to Light, and the ostensibly pious mortal world. Over the centuries, they all have interacted to the point where no divinity is free from human traits, none stands aloof from the world. Even though the time of mortal/divine couplings is over, its "demon" offspring extinct, in this place atheism would be blind optimism — for the interplay goes on.

If this sounds complicated, it is, and so is the human politics of kingdoms and ruling families, but it can also be a lot of fun. Jemisin's heroine Yeine has been drawn from her "barbarian" homeland (whose female rule and respect for the land actually sound appealing) to the political heart of the kingdoms, the extraordinary city known as Sky. Though her mother had been a runaway princess from the ruling family, Yeine is shocked to be named the third heir of Sky's ailing king. Inheritance traditionally passes to the only survivor among the nominees, and she wants neither the fight (with a pair of nasty, if very different, opponents) nor the prize. But her mother died under mysterious circumstances, and this seems a likely place to track down the villain(s). Though she doesn't know it, the gods also have reason to take interest in her.

Blunt, smart, and socially inept, Yeine doesn't much resemble standard fantasy heroines who are just coming into their powers or busy kicking asses. After she learns just what part the gods played in her background, she tells it her own way, beginning with a struggle for words:

Once upon a time there was a
Once upon a time there was a
Once upon a time there was a
Stop this. It's undignified.

When she finds the tone she wants, it's irreverent and observant, a clear eye focused on the family life of immortal siblings.

A similar blend of inventiveness, irreverence, and sophistication — along with sensuality — brings vivid life to the setting and other characters: human or otherwise, "good" or "bad." In an interview Extra, Jemisin notes that the main thing missing from this royal drama is ordinary people, and they'll show up in Book Two of the Inheritance Trilogy. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms definitely leaves me wanting more of this delightful new writer.

Read more! This is one of many reviews from the March issue of Locus Magazine. To read more, go here to subscribe.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

N.K. Jemisin

(Orbit 978-0-316-04391-5, $13.99, 422pp, tp) February 2010

Lois Tilton reviews Short Fiction, #2

2010-03-01T18:19:00.001-08:00

Subterranean Online, Winter 2010

Stories posted on this site during February.

"The Heart of a Mouse" by K. J. Bishop

Post-apocalypse. This apocalypse being an unexplained event wherein everyone was transmogrified into something else. As the narrator calls it, "the big search and replace." The narrator is now a giant mouse and his son a sort of gopher thing he calls "the runt." As they wander the wilderness avoiding dangers, he is trying to bring up his son to be able to survive on his own, without much hope of success.

You think you have enough brains to sort bullshit from fact once you get them confused? What happens if you start believing bactyls are nice or that you can eat whatever you want? But I can see he isn’t taking it in. These ideas are too much for him.

It's impossible to read this without hearing overwhelming echoes of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a father and son trekking through a post-apocalyptic landscape. It is a slightly more humane, less desperate scenario, in that there actually is an economy of sorts and cannibalism is not the only food option, despite most of the creatures at large being predatory. There seems to be unexplained purpose at work. Still, while the author treats the narrator's mouseness seriously, the echoes of the more realistic work make this one less credible.

"Harboring Pearls: A Lucifer Jones Story" by Mike Resnick

An episode in an ongoing series featuring the title character, a wandering grifter whose intelligence is even lower than his morals. "If we ever see you on this continent again, we’ll tar and feather you, hang you from the highest tree, set fire to you, and chop up what’s left of you as fishbait.” Here, Jones washes up in Pearl Harbor, where he is soon recruited by a group of thieves whom he then tries to double-cross. I am not amused by the Charlie Chan parody detective.

"The Library of Babble" by Michael Bishop

A double tribute: to Borges' famous story and to the author's late son Jamie Bishop, on whose notes this piece is based. Fulgencio, an indulgent father, takes his son to the eponymous library, said to be the founder's response to the ubiquitous Silencio signs that plagued her childhood. The true and more fitting name of the institution is the Library of Inescapable Cacophony, for the building is filled with discordant noise, which severely pains Fulgencio.

This never-ending uproar occludes thought. It invades the aural cavities, flushing from them all reservoirs of coherency or peacefulness. One’s blood pressure soars. Migraines and a menacing sense of intellectual bankruptcy flood one’s being. The impulse to flee from such orchestrated cacophony–to press one’s skull between one’s palms and to scream like the anguished figure in the famous painting by Edvard Munch–assumes the weight of obligation and does not depart.

His son, on the other hand, is delighted with the place.

The charm of this tale is created primarily by the narrative voice and the setting in some fabulist otherwhere, but its greatest interest should be to readers familiar with Borges' classic.

Realms of Fantasy, April 2010

Bimonthly full-color printzine filled with reviews and articles as well as fiction.

"Just Another Word" by Carrie Vaughn

Suppose that Janis Joplin once had an encounter with the Queen of Elfland. How might that have gone?

"Hanuman's Bridge" by Euan Harvey

A near-future world in which tensions in Asia have gone nuclear and India has forcibly annexed Sri Lanka, building a bridge to connect the two land masses. Davis, who designed the bridge, is present for the official opening and falls into conversation with a local man who explains its connection to the epic Ramayana and the submerged natural causeway known as the Nala Sethu that once connected island and mainland.

This is a too-talky story, in which the narrator goes on at excessive length about Pakistan's nukes, and the mysterious Raban goes on even longer about the legends of the monkey god who built the ancient causeway. While it is possible that a bridge architect or engineer might not be familiar with ancient Sanskrit myths, it is inconceivable that he would be so unfamiliar with a 30-mile natural causeway paralleling the route of his bridge and affecting the currents in the vicinity.

"The Hag Queen's Curse" by M.K. Hobson

An alternate 1798, when the US Navy commissions warlocks to fight sorcerous piracy. But during Lt Rodgers' attempted arrest of one body-stealing pirate, he mistakenly spills the Sea Hag's ale, upon which she transports them both Elsewhere to 1986 Oregon, where the pirate takes over Jeff's body.

He's wearing a swirling black trenchcoat, a ruffled gold-lamé shirt unbuttoned to the navel, and a whole costume-jewelry box of glittering trinkets. Evil looks good on Jeff, Kat is surprised to realize.

Kat is determined to get her friend Jeff back. And because Kat loves him, although not in that way, she is inadvertently protecting the pirate in possession of Jeff's body from the force of Rodgers' spells.

This is fun, a lite adventure, but I fear that much of it may have been contrived to make use of a very dated cliché about girls who hang out with gay guys.

"A Close Personal Relationship" by Thomas Marcinko

The Second Coming may have pleased dominionist Christians, but Ted still retains his fondness for dinosaurs and other forbidden things. Thus he is nervous when it comes time for his own personal interview with Junior. The Message here is not particularly subtle.

"The Fortuitous Meeting of Gerard Van Oost and Oludara" by Christopher Kastensmidt

Gerard van Oost has come to colonial Brazil with the hope of joining a company of adventurers but discovers his Protestant religion makes him unwelcome. He has the good fortune, however, to meet a remarkable African hero, now enslaved.

"I alone held off thirty rival warriors armed with harquebuses for three days so that my people could escape. They came raiding for slaves to sell to the Portuguese. That is how I know of the inaccuracy of the harquebuses."

If Gerard can find forty thousand réis, he will be able to buy Oludara's freedom and start his own company. But Gerard is so penniless he is in danger of being imprisoned as a vagrant.

An entertaining mix of adventure and folklore in a fantastic world where monsters roam the forests of Brazil and Africa. Oludara in particular is an engaging character, and there is a bit of wry humor in the narrative voice. It would seem that the author intends to send these two on a series of continuing adventures.

RECOMMENDED

Tor.com

This is a more of a website/community blog than a conventional magazine, with various features other than fiction, much of which is serialized.

"Vilcabamba" by Harry Turtledove

Alien invasion. Humans lost. Now the hereditary US President, Harris Moffatt III, presides from Grand Junction, Colorado, over the remnant of the country that the Krolp didn't bother conquering. Until the Krolp discover a rich lode of silver.

This time, the echoes come from Turtledove's own extended Worldwar series, in which small incompetent aliens attempt to conquer Earth and humans resist with some success. But Turtledove subverts expectations. Here the aliens are near-omnipotent and resistance is truly futile; what the Krolp really want, they will take. The title refers to the last outpost of the Inca Empire after the Spanish conquest, in case readers are too dense to get the point. Some may find the outcome to be pessimistic or depressing; others, realistic. It might have been tragic, but the lightness of the narrative tone is too much at odds with the inevitable course of the story's events, too close to humor [aliens with names like Grelch are not conducive to a tragic mood].

"Tourists" by Sean Craven

Grandma converts the aliens to Christian Science, but something may have been lost in the translation. Something was definitely lost in the translation of Grandma when she went off with the aliens to spread the word – but maybe the narrator found something.

This one is unfortunately played mostly for laughs. Names like Mrs. Outerbridge-Horsie overwhelm the moments of poignancy that might otherwise be more strongly felt.

Strange Horizons, February 2010

A weekly ezine offering a new story every week, along with poetry, nonfiction and reviews. The fiction tends to be contemporary fantasy and light SF.

"Cory's Father" by Francesca Forrest

The narrator's mother is trapped on this mundane side of the fay/mundane border with far too many children from too many fathers, unable to return to the place where she was called Willow's Daughter.

She was watching the border between here and there rippling closer. The border comes rolling in like the shadow of a cloud moving across the land. It feels like the air before a thunderstorm, and it smells like sweet fern.

There is a story for each father, except for the narrator's and for Cory's, but the narrator knows the story of Cory's father; she was there at the time, a young child, watching.

A very short and rather depressing tale that leaves the reader both wanting to know more of the stories and thinking that someone ought to tell this woman about the Pill.

"After We Got Back the Lights" by Eric Del Carlo

SF. Post a minor apocalypse in which the town was cut off from the rest of the world for several years and the residents had to fend for themselves, which they did pretty well, considering. Corey took on the role of town lawman. Now the old normalities are being restored, but the shadows of things that happened still darken people's memories.

I knew where I was, of course. Knew the tall redwood that was the only tree here. This wasn't a restful place; but I felt a calming nonetheless, a sure reminder of my past purpose. I stared and stared at that tree.

A nice, humane story. The thoughts and feelings of the characters ring true.

"Doctor Diablo Goes Through the Motions" by Saladin Ahmed

Nobody loves to sit through office meetings, not even the members of the Society of Supercriminals. The boss is always a long-winded bore, and this includes Overlord. SH has a fondness for superhero angst stories, but it takes a lot these days to sell me on yet another one. This vignette doesn't go much beyond its premise.

"Sundowning" by Joanne Merriam

Vampires have taken over, and the "unblessed" are required to deliver a pint every week to the blood bank. This makes it harder for Rita to cope with her father, suffering from dementia. Essentially, this is a mundane story about coping with a parent with dementia, the vampire element grafted on.

Fantasy Magazine, February 2010

Another weekly ezine with short fiction and other features. The material is the fantastic, and the editor prefers prose on the literary side. This month's offerings are more SFnal than is usual for this venue.

"Stranger" by Patricia Russo

Roday is an old woman living with the Blue Heart band but not closely related to anyone. A distant cousin's family has always taken her into their shelter when the season of stinging rain comes, but this time, Roday gradually comes to realize that they do not intend to make the offer. She fears she will be left to die. It is different when a stranger comes.

A place would be found for the man. All of the circles would give a share from their stores to provide his food. The young folks tasked with hauling water from the covered wells would make a few extra trips.

This society, and the place of a solitary old woman within it, is well-portrayed. But I have trouble crediting the premise. If "Blue Heart people are true people," the sort of people who will take in a random stranger, I can't really believe they would leave a member of their band to certain death in the stinging rains.

"The Armature of Flight" by Sharon Mock

Leo is a scion of extreme wealth, living for the moment in a modest way until he inherits. William is a poseur, a hustler, looking for a rich hook-up. They become lovers, but Leo can not commit himself fully to the relationship and William wants what he won't or can't give.

William insisted he could find them somewhere nicer. But Leo couldn’t afford what William wanted, not on a junior manager’s salary. His inheritance was still in the future, predicated on the very things that would tear him away. A wife, an heir.

This is the story of a failed relationship in which money becomes an issue between the lovers when the real problem is commitment. The SFnal aspect is primarily metaphorical; William gets the wings, but they represent slavery, not freedom.

"Tenientes" by Nathaniel Williams

A revenge story. A woman returns from the death to avenge herself on a series of randomly-chosen men.

Since the night she died, she’s been called beautiful five thousand, two hundred and seven times by five thousand, two hundred and seven different tenientes. Each one has his own, peculiar stiffness as he clings to her, as his veneer of restraint chars and peels back like pages in a burning book.

The word teniente, or lieutenant, means one who takes the place of another, in this case, takes another man's punishment. The nameless ghost's victims may be innocent, but she, too, is trapped by the eternal cycle of revenge.

"A Stray" by Scott William Carter and Ray Vukcevich

Jim Delaney has more problems than possibly going blind.

[Claudia] was gone. His mother was gone. He’d be losing his job any day now. And he was spraying the windows black and feeding chicken noodle soup to a sometimes headless stray cat in the house where his father had killed himself. What else could go wrong?

For one thing, someone claiming to be the cat's owner is sending hostile notes attached to its collar. For another, that person may be Jim's dead father when he was a young man. For yet another, Jim may be hallucinating some of this, and his mother may be recruiting deprogrammers to save him from himself.

Intriguing story of a character on the blurring edge between insanity and the impossible.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies, February 2010

This ezine comes out every two weeks with two short stories and no additional content. The offerings are "literary adventure fantasy" set in secondary worlds.

"To Slay With a Thousand Kisses" by Rodello Santos

Tocho seems to be a sort of vampire, but he is actually the victim of a vengeful curse, bound to return every fifty years to the village of his dead mistress where he will take and kill another bride, conveniently staked out for him by the villagers. This time, however, instead of a maiden, he finds three young men bound to stakes awaiting death at the hands of an even more fearsome, more hungry monster, stronger than Tocho.

In amazement, I watched the ground catch her, then throw her back at me. I had barely gotten to my feet, and her new assault sent us tumbling, this time into the cornfield, crushing the dead stalks.

There are echoes here of an old fairy tale. But in fairy tales, the power to curse is mostly limited to the otherworldly. This seems to be a world in which seemingly-ordinary people can generate some seriously potent curses, all the way to immortality and quasi-divine powers, and other people seem to have uncanny knowledge of the way to break them. I find myself reluctant to credit all this. The curses are supposedly punishment or vengeance for some sin, but the real sufferers seem to be the innocents of the Blue Sparrow clan who are doomed to feed the hungers of the accursed.

"The Motor, the Mirror, the Mind" by T. F. Davenport

When brains are worlds. In this fantastic landscape, kingdoms occupy the heights and valleys of the cerebral world-god, corresponding to the regions of the human brain: the Motor Country, the Mirror Kingdom. And they fight wars. As this tale begins, the army of the Motor King is just about the conquer the Mirror Kingdom, while the selfish young Mirror Queen urges his own troops to fight to the death. Her court cerebromancer, Daniel, helps her to escape, but he soon begins his own journey of discovery.

A lot of fascinating stuff is packed into this narrative. As a cerebromancer, Daniel predicts the future by what he sees in the mirrors manufactured in the sector; the cerebromancers of the Motor region interpret the lines of electroencephalographs. For most of the story, these cerebral aspects of the setting fade into the background of a tale of war, rebellion and conspiracy. The Mirror Kingdom manufactures mirrors of glass and silver; the Motor Kingdom produces ball bearings and machinery in vast factories where "rank upon rank of men and women worked in synchronous motion, welding components, lowering presses, riveting, oiling, cutting, drilling." Yet from time to time, the true nature of the world breaks through, as when Daniel reaches the summit of the gyrus and sees for the first time the sky, complete with a sun and clouds.

Above them, most magnificent of all, turned another world. The roofs of its gyri, glass and metal, flared in the sunlight. The sulci, narrow dark canyons, wrinkled the globe like an ancient face. An alien god tumbled through the sky, about as large as my fist at arm’s length.

At the end, though, the cerebral elements emerge into the foreground, as we learn the importance of the mirror neurons' connection to the motor cortex and the function of the individual cells in the mental activities of the Great Being, the system on which the entire world is run, and against which Daniel now rebels.

This is a first-rate fantastic idea, a fully-extended metaphor that comes vividly to life as a fantasy world. It seems to be considerably longer than the typical piece appearing at this site, and I am happy to see that the editor has not split it into parts.

RECOMMENDED

"A Skirt of Many Colors" by Catherine Mintz

The narrator is a girl at the edge of womanhood, living near a volcanic mountain where the inhabitants are unaware of its dangerous past, although sometimes sensing the presence of ghosts. It is at first a quotidian tale in which the narrator goes about the routines of her life, saying farewell to her childhood and looking forward to putting on the skirt that will mark her as a woman; readers will not be so oblivious to the imminent danger, to the spectres of Pompeii being evoked by the author.

The setting suggests the Aegean [the name of the mountain is Leukothea, but this does not seem to be the sea goddess from the myths we know] but not the ancient world of our history. The author places a great symbolic weight on the color of the woman's skirt, but the story doesn't really deliver on it. Indeed, I find the whole skirt thing a distraction from the sulfurous ghosts.

"Pale" by Kathryn Allen

Old West Archetypes. The narrator was once a living man but is now trapped in the eternal role of a Deputy. Someone has summoned revenge, so the story has to be played out to the end. But this time it is the Deputy who encounters the woman, and the story changes; the narrator acquires a name and a new role.

"Scars.” She traces the lines with one finger. The slashes of knives, the dots and stars of bullet holes, the ragged seam of an amputation: pale silver marks that aren’t true scars but the ghosts of my wounds. Death upon death recorded on my skin. Her hand drifts up, to the circle of the hangman’s noose.

Readers will probably find something familiar in this scenario, perhaps the role of non-player characters in gaming or the mythagos of the late Robert Holdstock's fiction. I am particularly reminded of the denizens of the Commons in the stories of Matthew Hughes. Allen shows us the tragic side of the scenario at the same time that she holds out a faint hope for the possibility of escaping the eternal story loop. The shift of storylines is nicely done.

Lois Tilton reviews Short Fiction, #1

2010-02-21T19:22:00.000-08:00

Subterranean Online, Winter 2010

This site posts fiction and other stuff on a rather random schedule.

"Second Journey of the Magus" by Ian R. MacLeod

Balthasar the doubter, this time alone, repeats his journey to Jerusalem, more than thirty years after he brought a gift of myrrh to the god he had never expected to find. Now he discovers that the god Jesus has established his kingdom on Earth.

The first angel Balthasar witnessed was standing at a crossroads, and he took it at first to be tall golden statute until he realized that it wasn’t standing at all. The creature hovered two or three spans in the air above the fine-set paving on four conjoined wings flashing with many glittering eyes, and it had four faces pointing in each of the roadway’s four directions, which were the faces of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle.

The conquering Christian armies are spreading across the world, and not even the might of Rome can stand against them.

While Balthasar feels unease at the sight of the heavenly Jerusalem, the reader is aware that Jesus, in this version of the tale, had accepted the invitation of the Tempter, had cast himself as if to certain death before the gathering crowds, only for the sky to rent from horizon to horizon as many varieties of angels flew down to bear him up. What concerns Balthasar is his own responsibility for what has come to pass. What had he wrought, so long ago, when he brought a gift of myrrh, the incense of death, to the newborn god?

With this powerfully disturbing tale of faith and doubt, MacLeod joins a notable list of authors who have reimagined the temptations of Christ. It is not really an alternate history; Jesus' choice has taken the story entirely out of history into eschatology. This vision of Jerusalem transformed by a Satanic Christ is strongly unsettling in its resemblance to the heavenly city of so many pious imaginations. But the conclusion may leave the reader puzzled as Balthasar finally makes his own choice, which the author leaves us to imagine.

RECOMMENDED

"The Bohemian Astrobleme" by Kage Baker

Continuing a series of historical SF adventures featuring the Gentlemen's Speculative Society, a mysterious group whose members are scientifically far in advance of their times. In this case, the time is 1845 and the Gentlemen are in Bohemia to track down the source of a rare meteoric gemstone that produces an electric charge in combination with acetic acid. The locals are not forthcoming with information, but prostitute-spy Lady Beatrice easily overcomes their reticence.

Baker's work tends to be connected, and this series represents an earlier stage in the development of the time-traveling Company featured in many of her novels. It also partakes of the currently-popular steampunk spirit, which adds an entertaining interest to the detective-thriller plot with such delightful anachronisms as the Ascending Room. But the key to the mystery is found through plain scientific reasoning, in a manner that suggests a premature Sherlock Holmes. A lot of fun, intelligently crafted.

As I write this, news comes that Kage Baker has left this life after a struggle against cancer. For readers who did not know her personally, perhaps the saddest fact of her death is that she will write no more of these stories. But a writer leaves a legacy to us all: her work, and hers has been a rich gift.

"At the Store" by Neal Barrett, Jr.

Billy and Bob have perfected a business plan suited for their world.

Isn’t a smell that can get away from Bob. Hog hearts dog parts lemon tarts and shit. Dust mites crotch bites parasites and pricks. Bob gets them all, drops ‘em in a sack, brings them back to me.

The smells undergo further refinement and processing until the final product is ready. Essentially, this is a complex, elaborate and improbable fart joke, as gross as one might expect. What the author neglects to mention is how the boys are paid for their efforts, and in what coin.

"Flu Season" by Barbara Roden

Caroline has taken a week off work and seems to have nothing to do but visit her dying mother in the hospital every evening. She spends the entire day ignoring the faint and ignorable signs that there may be something wrong.

She finished her coffee–which was now lukewarm–and contemplated going outside to pick up the newspapers; it appeared unlikely that anyone else would do it. There were few houses on her street, and no one seemed to be about; certainly she had heard no cars, and there was no sign of movement anywhere.

This one could be considered horror, except the horror comes so late in the story that it is anticlimactic and disappointing. The reader, having been frustrated by so much tedious mundanity as Caroline somnambulates obliviously through the day, has the right to expect something more original when the revelation finally comes.

Jim Baen's Universe, February 2010

As this ezine winds down to its penultimate issue, there is less original short fiction. The best stories this time reveal the downside of extremely extended life.

"Tiny Elephants" by Gregory Benford

A vignette in which Arctic surveyors come across a surviving herd of pygmy mammoths. It is unlikely that this revelation would have come as a surprise to any readers, even if the opening illustration did not clearly portray them.

"The Hunt" by Shauna Roberts

This is one of those generic fantasies that call themselves science fiction by virtue of switching caravanserais to spaceports, privileged nobles to privileged traders named "Domeni", wizards to "transmuters." The plot is a sufficiently complex knot to engage reader attention: Valuable jewels have been stolen from the Domeni ship Bold Falcon, then stolen again from the fence. Thadow the Transmuter has been assigned to retrieve them. In the meantime, spoiled Domeni teenagers are causing havoc in the market with their thefts in a scavenger hunt game. In the end, justice is done, but unevenly.

"Shuffle Up and Deal" by Denise McCune

Aliens have come to Earth and their leader wants to play in the World Series of Poker. Fred the alien proves to be very good at poker and ends up at the final table, facing the narrator.

People at the tables around Fred started singing the Imperial Death March when a new player and his chip stack got moved to Fred's table, because chances were good those chips would be in Fred's hands within the hour. It made us cranky. Very cranky.

But it seems that there are problems with the translation and the humans haven't correctly understood the stakes. Pretty standard punchline.

"The Thrill of the Hunt" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

A long time ago, there was war among Europe's magic-users, and the black wizard called The Great Wulf wiped out most of his enemies. Hilda is one of the few survivors, who has become an assassin to take revenge. She has finally tracked down Wulf.

She wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t seen it for herself. She tracked him here, watched him enter that ruined building. He looked like so many German exiles in this part of Argentina, back bowed, too thin, defeated.

While Hilda lies in wait for her target to show himself, she spins out a [too] lengthy backstory of her life, contrasting with the vividly immediate description of the Argentinean setting.

The author has purposely linked this tale of revenge with the activities of the Nazi-hunters after WWII. This causes some initial confusion before the backstory kicks in. Wulf is clearly established as evil as any Nazi, but it seems odd and wrong that Hilda is more obsessed with her own personal losses than with the devastation of all Europe in successive wars. This does not make her a sympathetic character, but maybe that's just how it is for sortof-immortals.

"The Vessel Never Asks for More Wine" by Sandra M. Odell

One day, Eileen almost steps into the path of a bus, but a stranger pulls her back to the curb. She seeks out the man to thank him and finds him strange indeed, with the strange name of Borgio Yilmaz.

The only remarkable feature in an otherwise plain face were his eyes, almond shaped, the right slightly larger than the left, and the caramel gold that edged a desert dune at sunrise. Ashes and the shadows of memories lingered in the creases around those eyes, unexpected in a man his age.

Eileen soon comes to suspect he has been stalking her, but the reason is not what she supposed.

Here is a poignant tale about the tragedy of immortality, strongly colored by loss. The title is very appropriate.

RECOMMENDED

Clarkesworld #41, February 2010

If there are two authors that regular readers of ezines will encounter pretty constantly these days, they are likely to be Jay Lake and Lavie Tidhar. Here, we have both together in the same issue of this zine, which regularly offers superior fiction.

"Torquing Vacuum" by Jay Lake"

SF. Spanich is a drive technician, a working stiff on Estacada Orbital.

Spanich had been up three shifts straight working on a drive alignment issue aboard ICV Mare Ibrium {13 pairs}. She was a charter — a rare thing, in a starship, which signified pockets deeper than planetary budgets — and the passengers reportedly wanted to lift out, but her pilot wasn't lighting up without the alignment problem being solved.

Afterwards, he meets up with that new hot kid who's been hanging around the station. Too soon, he discovers that neither the kid nor the ship are what they seem, and he's in Big Trouble.

Nice story with some grit on its edges, carried effectively by Spanich, a character capable of realistically assessing himself and his chances of both luck and survival.

RECOMMENDED

"The Language of the Whirlwind" by Lavie Tidhar

Post-apocalypse. Tel Aviv, and presumably the rest of the world, has been destroyed in a storm of whirlwinds and suddenly-risen mountains where powerful entities now dwell. The few survivors cope however they can, raising rats for their meat and asking no question about their kosher status. But the man now known as the priest believes he has witnessed a divine visitation, that there must be some meaning in it all. He is founding his own religion.

The Holy Book currently filled half an A4 notepad that he had originally found in an abandoned stationary shop. His disciples were not many, but when they gathered, in the place that had once been a pharmacy and was now a slaughterhouse and a church, he read to them passages from the book, and they repeated the words, so they could spread them.

A story of the human impulse to create religions, to create meaning from the inaccessible and inexplicable. This is not a tale of hope; there may be powerful entities up on the mountain, but no Messiahs are going to arrive.

Abyss & Apex 33, First Quarter 2010

Despite the Abyss in this zine's title, the contents tends to be soft SF and fantasy, not horror.

"How We Fly" by Lisa A. Koosis

A love story. Jamie meets Jeannette in the Ward of Hopeless Cases, where they share the same disease, but Jeannette's case is more advanced. Together, they try a new visualization therapy, which works well for Jamie.

Sometimes the Phoenix particles are dragons, dark-scaled and fanged like the ones I paint, and my white blood cells are knights on tall steeds, lances at the ready. I come to look forward to each session, to the new techniques and imageries.

But Jeannette fails at the visualization; she is going to die. Jamie's love is so strong that he volunteers to be reinfected with the disease so he can visualize for her.

As a story of the extreme measures that people will take for love, this one is a strong example. As a case of medical ethics, it seems Highly Dubious. As a matter of prose, I wish that the author, having hit upon a felicitous simile in describing the skin of the dying as like vellum, had not been so pleased with the phrase that she kept repeating it throughout the text.

"The Tortuous Path" by Bud Sparhawk

Alessandro is an acolyte in a monastic order of eunuchs whose special mission is the distortion of space that allows interstellar travel. But the order no longer has a monopoly on this function, and the Brothers of the Order fear becoming obsolete. Alessandro, however, is fascinated.

A machine that could twist space meant that there would be no need for him to memorize vast tracts of the Epiphedra, no need to endure the raging headaches that came with twisting, and especially not have that damned Vulture dogging his every move or Caffarelli questioning his every thought.

All of which meant that a ship that could twist space was a marvelous idea.

The practice of gelding the acolytes is a twist on the classic fantasy trope of virgins possessing magical powers. Alessandro is an engaging character who faces a difficult decision.

"Deutoroi" by Samantha Henderson

Merea was born to be a Thessa, an essential part of the Hunt ritual that makes a king in Cambria. Only a Thessa can track the Deutoroi, the White Stag of the Narcos Wade, but the Hunt brings insanity, which Merea both fears and craves.

The horror of losing herself in the wind that lashed the tops of the trees, or giving in to the voice that called her from the west, from the Narcos Wade. The horror and delight of it.

She has hidden a long time –too long—from her destiny, but now a would-be king has tracked her down.

The heart of this tale is powerfully mythic, evoking familiar ancient images yet original enough not to seem derivative. The descriptions of the Hunt are thrilling, with the voices of the trees aiding in the chase, the confrontation with the stag, the shocking revelation of its true nature. I really wish a good copyeditor had worked on the text to eliminate a host of irritating small errors and infelicitous name choices, such as the Steward –- is he Korinth [a Greek city?] or Korish? The story starts out by dumping a confusing number of capitalized names on the reader, several of them ("Narcos" and "Hebrai") just as jarring. While I believe I have figured out that "Deutoroi" refers to the stag's dual nature, I'm not sure why it can't just be called a stag. These are minor, nit-picky annoyances, but it's frustrating to see such an otherwise strong story so marred.

"Night of the Manticore" by Tony Pi

Academic rivalry results in disaster. On the eve of the Great Exhibition of Lyonesse, Professors Voss and Mason dispute the nature of the extinct manticore. Mason plans to triumph over his longterm rival by reviving a mummified specimen.

Now that it had nearly returned to full life, I confirmed Mason's assessment of its sex: the distinctive dark ruff to its jawline might confuse a casual observer into thinking it was a male's mane, but in fact the creature was anatomically female. She began prowling around the isle, and whilst in motion her furred forepaws resembled the pincer-shaped pedipalps of a scorpion.

But Mason has miscalculated.

Pi starts this one out slowly, with faux-pedantic disputes that are, like genuine pedantic disputes, boring. Action picks up once we get the manticore rehydrated.

"The Wishing Stone" by Edward Greaves

Arrod is a master at cutting charms into gemstones, but he is plagued by powerful and discontented noble ladies demanding love charms. When a young woman comes for a charm to cure her brother she changes Arrod's life, bringing him new customers, commoners who are grateful that he can help them.

The details of gemstones gives this one some interest, but it is otherwise a fairly typical problem story with a heartwarming ending.

"Anything Chocolate" by Caryn Gussoff

The narrator's elderly father belongs to the last generation that will die, the generation before nanobots. The narrator copes as well as she can, loving her father with the knowledge of his eventual death always in her mind.

"When White Roses Freeze" by Amy Power Jansen

A dysfunctional family, the adjectives that describe their personalities, e.g. frigid, literalized.

Apex Magazine, February 2010

A small ezine with the motto: Where Science Fiction and Horror Collide. It prints two original short stories every month.

"p.a. chic" by Tobias Amadon Bengelsdorf

post. apocalypse. Possibly the last man still alive counts down his remaining pills every day as he tries to find the cool in it all, recording his most clever insights: Dystopia is best viewed from a distance.

The art of dying. Not as annoying as it appeared at first glance.

"The Lady or the Tiger" by J.M. McDermott

Simsa, as a boy of ten, has to make a hard choice after a crash on Io kills a woman he loves as a mother and his brother is injured. The choice is complicated by his knowledge of his brother's guilty secret. The story is complicated by a backstory about terrorists who turned into tigers and live on the backs of giant lizards. Simsa identifies his brother with the terrorist, but he seems to end up taking the terrorist's place on the lizard. I don't find this very clear. There seem to be two separate, potentially interesting, stories going on at the same time and I don't think they have knitted together very well.

Adrienne Martini reviews Connie Willis

2010-02-16T21:42:00.001-08:00

When Blackout landed in my hands, I did, in fact, do a little dance of joy. The nearly six years between Connie Willis novels has been about five years too long. While I understand that her process takes time, I still craved a deliciously immersive Connie Willis book. To hell with the writer, I want her work now.

I know this is wrong. As many have reiterated online: the writer is not my bitch. Noted. I did my best to wait as patiently as a Willis-fan could.

Six years is a long time to build up expectations, however. I was ready to have my socks blown plum off by Blackout, which is why I was so let down by the first one-fifth of the book. Nearly nothing could have stood up to that level of anticipation.

Blackout opens like one of Willis's wonderful takes on the classic screwball comedy. Set in the same milieu as 1999's To Say Nothing of the Dog and 1993's Doomsday Book (my desert island title), Blackout starts with the same madcap energy. Three historians in 2060 are preparing to go back in time to do research on the "contemps," the folks who are actually living through that patch of time.

As seems usual, the time travel lab at Oxford, run still by Mr. Dunworthy, is one small breeze away from chaos. Historians keep having their assignments changed at the last minute, like Michael Davies, who prepared for Pearl Harbor but instead is sent to Dunkirk. The academic bureaucracy keeps historian Merope Ward, who is working in the countryside with kids evacuated from London during WWII, from learning how to drive, which is crucial to her completing her research. And Polly Churchill, who plans to work as a shopgirl during the Blitz, can't get the wardrobe department to give her a black skirt, without which she'll be unable to find employment.

Their issues – and all of the running about that they do to overcome these obstacles – is fun. Willis is a master at lighthearted dashing about, which she uses to poke gentle fun at academia and the people who work in its protected towers. Still, for such an anticipated book, I wanted more than a 1940s set Doomsday Book.

To cut to the chase, I got much more, despite my worries that I wouldn't.

Willis works in hints that all might not be well with the "net," the device that allows the historians to be sent back in time without altering the history that they're studying. Mr. Dunworthy, who remains offstage for all of Blackout, keeps turning up in third-party conversations and phone calls. The historians sense that he's concerned about something – so much so that he keeps re-arranging schedules and pestering the technicians – but we never get a clear picture of what's wrong. We're able to brush off his worries until unpredictable things (which I won't mention, natch) start to happen to Churchill, Ward, and Davies. And it's at that point when the light screwball ends.

In addition to her deft comedic touch, Willis is also a master at fully immersing the reader in her worlds without resorting to clunky informational dumps. Her 1940s Britain is richly textured, perhaps because she is so keen at focusing her attentions on her characters and how they respond to the time they are experiencing, rather than painting vast canvases for them to walk across. The difference is subtle, yes, but important.

What she's also able to do is to play her reader like a newly tuned piano. Scenes that could be milked for every last mawkish drop somehow get around your defenses and wring out your heart. Moments that you think you know how they'll feel because you've seen them played out so many times – like when a historian is caught outside during an air raid and shells are falling near her – don't feel routine here. Willis makes them immediate and new, so that you feel them even more keenly.

Which has always been a problem when it comes to time travel in Willis's world. The historians can always fall back on their status as mere visitors:

Not knowing. It was the one thing historians could never understand. They could observe the contemps, live with them, try to put themselves in their place, but they couldn't truly experience what they were experiencing. Because I know what's going to happen. I know Hitler didn't invade England, that he didn't use poison gas or destroy St. Paul's. Or London. Or the world. That he lost the war.

And still Willis writes passages that make you hold your breath until you learn that everyone emerges OK.

Which they don't always do – but part of the joy of this ride is the discovery of how it all falls apart.

What's missing, of course, is the part of the story where it all comes back together again. The second half of Blackout, All Clear, won't be published until July. All Clear is not a sequel; it's simply the second half of the story started in Blackout, which ends with all of the characters dangling over a figurative cliff, waiting to see what form of rescue will come, if it comes at all. It's a curious choice by Spectra to hack the book up. But it's a small inconvenience to endure in order to read this story. It's easier to wait six months than six years.

Read more! This is one of many reviews from the February issue of Locus Magazine. To read more, go here to subscribe.

Blackout

Connie Willis

(Spectra 055-3-803-190, $26.00, 512pp, hc) February 2010

Howard Waldrop & Lawrence Person review The Wolfman

2010-02-15T19:56:00.000-08:00

Howard Waldrop: Poor Curt Siodmak (who made it to 102). To have your 1941 screenplay (which gave us most of the cinematic werewolf tropes we have) have every bit of the poetry and life sucked out of it by two screenwriters and a director. (Maybe they thought the soulfulness in Benicio del Toro's eyes would make up for it.)

Lawrence Person: The Wolfman is a gorgeously art-directed mediocrity, combining the look and pace of a lush costume drama with the clichés and gore of a modern horror film. It's professional enough to hold your attention while in the theater, but the plodding, by-the-numbers nature of the beast (the film itself, not its titular character) is enough to make you regret the time spent there.

HW: To the original setup (long-gone American-raised son — here, the second and younger one, an actor to boot — receives a letter from his brother's fiancée, to return to the ancestral pile — the brother's disappeared and things are afoot) they've added nothing, only mixed things around to no good purpose. In the approximate Claude Raines role is Anthony Hopkins. There's Art Malik as a wrinkled old Singh retainer (not in the original) who 40 years ago would have been played by Christopher Lee or Michael Ripper.

There's the fiancée (Emily Blunt) in the Evylyn Ankers role. It's not bad casting — it's just wrong — Maleva the gypsy is played by Geraldine Chaplin. (I have never missed Maria Ouspenskaya more, since she died after a fire in 1949, smoking a cigar in bed.) Her (Siodmak) folk-poetry piece "Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night..." is used as prologue to the movie. It's the only minute of poetry here.

LP: Director Joe Johnston seems to have gone to the Zack Snyder School of Unsubtle Direction, with a graduate work in The Institute for Horror Move Clichés. Music cues herald every impending werewolf attack with all the subtlety of a Mexican soccer announcer. And something like 90% of those attacks have the exact same visual characteristics: character pauses for lingering shot, only to have werewolf leap onto them from outside the frame, carrying them (or at least significant body parts) off the other side of the frame. Even the boo-shock jump scares (including, yet again, the "character wakes up from the nightmare only to find he's still in it" cliché) are painfully predictable. Pick any random minute from the last thirty of Peter Jackson's Dead Alive and you'll find more imaginative gore than is on display in this entire movie.

Even potentially interesting scenes, like Talbot's grim hydro- and electroshock treatment sessions in a Victorian insane asylum, are marred by thuddingly unsubtle direction. The assistant orderly is a grinning sadist (complete with evil giggle) while the Head Professor Doktor Shrink (Antony Sher) comes across like a caricature of Sigmund Freud as penned by Julius Streicher.

Del Toro (a very effective actor in the right role, as witnessed by Traffic or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) looks like Lawrence Talbot, but he wears the role like an uncomfortable and ill-fitting suit. He doesn't have the bearing and presence you would expect of a leading stage actor. Except for the transformation and asylum sequences, his acting runs the gamut from A to C, the change from his brooding anguish over his brother's death to his guilty anguish over his lycanthropic crimes having all the dramatic arc of a stubby pencil. Sometimes he comes alive; his anguish during the hydrotherapy scenes are entirely convincing. (Then again, plunge me into a tank of ice-cold water, and I guarantee you I wouldn't need my Drama degree to make my screams convincing.) If the script ever lets him crack a smile, I must have missed it.

It's amazing how little Anthony Hopkins elevates the material. He does fine, but as one of the best in the business, you expect him to give you more than the distant, icy superiority he offers up here. Contrast this with the splendid work he did in The Edge (another mediocre movie), where he not only acts Alec Baldwin under the table, but steals his wallet, car keys and shoes to boot.

Emily Blunt is fine in a criminally underwritten role. It's not that she completely lacks chemistry with Del Toro, but their characters are each so sunk in their respective miseries that what chemistry they do have is on the order of "Hey, once we're both less depressed, maybe we should consider going out for coffee."

Surprisingly, the actor who far and away comes off best is Hugo Weaving, who can be very uneven (his one-note portrayal of Elrond was probably the weakest major character in The Lord of the Rings). But here his droll, intelligent Scotland Yard inspector steals the show, as well as breathing much-needed life into every one of his scenes.

HW: There are a tiny couple of redemptions (too late) here. Prosthetics have been berry, berry good to lycanthropy since An American Werewolf in London. They've only gotten better, and part of the audience (who'd evidently never seen this stuff before) gasped. And the idea of one werewolf, stalking another, with a double-barreled shotgun loaded with silver bullets, seems to be a first.

But the whole thing seems in the end unnecessary. It's not as big a waste of celluloid as the Nicolas Cage remake of Wicker Man was, but then nothing is, is it?

LP: If you have a hankering for a werewolf film, well, this is a werewolf film. And it has some gorgeous art direction (which was Joe Johnston's role in Hollywood before he took up directing). But there are a lot better werewolf films out there. Neil Marshall's Dog Soldiers, a tale of British soldiers running into a pack of werewolves while on maneuvers in the Scottish highlands, probably had about 1/50th of the budget for this film and was at least ten times as good.

HW: There are so many ways to lose all the poetry in a classic screenplay that this one seems destined to be taught in Screenwriting 101 under the heading "Missing the Boat."

Directed by Joe Johnston

Written by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self (based on Curt Siodmak's original screenplay)

Starring Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt, Hugo Weaving, Art Malik, Geraldine Chaplin, Antony Sher

Official Website: The Wolfman Movie - Now Playing - Official Movie Site...

Jeff VanderMeer on The Best of 2009

2010-02-11T20:46:00.000-08:00

Books are, at their heart, labors of love — including those from commercial houses — and the past couple of years have reminded us of that fact, given the vagaries of the economy and the uncertainties about the future of the book industry. In that context, I can sincerely say that I think 2009 was a transitional year marked by highly individual, highly talented voices creating interesting and unique books, and that although not everything worked, writers were taking chances, and, despite uncertainties, largely feeling optimistic about the future of the written word. Independent presses also continued to thrive in this environment and helped immensely in reflecting the depth and diversity of genre fiction.

With the field now being so wide and deep, I have focused on a particular version of the best of 2009 that emphasizes adult novels, anthologies, nonfiction, and some short story collections. My reading tastes skew toward fantasy, but I did also read science fiction. Young adult and urban fantasy are beyond my purview, and I hope someone who read widely in those areas has the time to post their own year's best. (And, still, even with the narrowed focus it was impossible to read everything.)

In the interests of full disclosure, I had a fantasy novel published in 2009, Finch, which appeared on several year's best lists, co-edited two anthologies with my wife Ann (Best American Fantasy 2 and Last Drink Bird Head) and I also contributed to the following books mentioned below: the Vance tribute anthology, the Straub-edited tales of the fantastic, and the special issue of Conjunctions. Finally, major thanks to Ellen Datlow for providing a list of story collections from 2009 for cross-checking purposes.

Novels

My favorite genre novels of 2009 were Caitlin R. Kiernan's The Red Tree and Catherynne M. Valente's Palimpsest. Both, unfortunately, remain underrated and under-reviewed; both deserve your attention.

Kiernan has long been one of our best stylists at the short length, and I've enjoyed several of her novels. However, in The Red Tree she's created a fascinating multi-layered narrative that trumps her prior efforts in the long form. It partakes equally of traditional dark fantasy and horror while including innovation that echoes such seminal works as Danielewski's House of Leaves. The novel feels both intimately personal and large-scale. The characterization is merciless and real, inviting comparisons to some of the best portraits offered up by writers like Elizabeth Hand.

If Kiernan is one of our best from her generation, then Valente has clearly become one of the best writers of hers. In the past, I've sometimes found her brand of lyricism too relentlessly baroque at the longer lengths, but as she has created a substantial body of work with a swiftness remarkable for its accompanying overall quality of both writing and imagination, Valente has also begun to vary her effects. Palimpsest is a fearless deep dive into worlds of fantasy and of sex, with travelers into the unknown who can only get to an imaginary world through the most intimate acts and fetishes. It reads at times like Borges by way of Angela Carter. Valente manages to both embrace and reject the fantastical in this genre-defying novel. It's a novel that both confounds and rewards reader expectations through its use of traditional and avant garde fantasy elements.

Adam Roberts' Yellow Blue Tibia also struck me as an unqualified success, with its cheeky subtitle of "Konstantin Skvorecky's memoir of the alien invasion of 1986" and its wonderful ability to be utterly modern and yet remind one, at times, of such masterpieces of Russian satire as The Master and Margarita. As a student of Russian fiction, I found the book utterly enthralling in its tale of a science fiction writer tasked by Stalin with concocting an alien-invasion hoax and then told to forget the whole thing, on pain of death. I found myself chuckling throughout at particularly clever turns of phrase, sometimes laughing out loud, and yet Roberts' novel always seems firmly grounded in something real.

Another favorite, The Other City by Michal Ajvaz (from Dalkey Archive Press) repopulates the city of Kafka with ghosts, eccentrics, talking animals, and impossible statues. As the jacket copy reads, the novel serves as a kind of "guidebook to this invisible 'other Prague,' overlapping the workaday world: a place where libraries can turn into jungles, secret passages yawn beneath our feet, and waves lap at our bedspreads." A book, naturally, triggers the adventure embarked upon by our nameless narrator, a book that shows that "The frontier of our world is not far away; it doesn't run along the horizon or in the depths. It glimmers faintly close by, in the twilight of our nearest surroundings; out of the corner of our eye we can always glimpse another world, without realizing it." Strange scenes involving bizarre fish and other monstrosities evoke the great Czech filmmaker Svankmajer, with a hint of Dali in their nimbleness.

Marcel Theroux's Far North, meanwhile, has flaws — the plot devices at times struck me as coincidental and unnecessary — but there's undeniable power to this post-apocalyptic novel set in Siberia. Most of that power comes from the hard-won victories of Makepeace, Theroux's remarkable narrator. Far North 's enduring achievement is to feature a character that lives up to Makepeace's own claim that "a person is always better than a book." She is the single most compelling protagonist from any of the novels I'm recommending, among the best portraits I've ever read of a person coping with extreme situations.

Several other worthy novels suggest groupings. In the category of "Quirky and Eccentric" but not gonzo, Jesse Bullington's The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, Mark von Schlegell's Mercury Station, Brian Evenson's Last Days, and Sebastien Doubinsky's The Babylonian Trilogy take top honors. Bullington's first novel is a bloody, darkly humorous, take-no-prisoners Medieval romp about two unrepentant murderers. Schlegell's second novel also evokes Medieval times with its surprising tale of time travel and ancient space travel, while evoking the trippy qualities of books like The Troika and Moonshadow. Evenson's chilling noir of cults, chopped off limbs, and, ultimately, Grand Guignol, never blinks in its depiction of horrors of the mind and the body. Doubinsky's mosaic novel evokes a transformed city of Babylon through a series of fascinating vignettes.

In a category loosely called "This Isn't Your Grandmother's Heroic Fantasy," Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold, David Anthony Durham's The Other Lands, and Richard K. Morgan's The Steel Remains all pushed boundaries in different ways. Abercrombie blended Machiavelli and Tarantino while reveling in the ruthlessness of his protagonist, the mercenary Monza Murcatto. Durham continued to bring a much-needed non-Anglo point of view to fantasy while constructing a complex, multi-layered world and populating it with interesting characters. Morgan, meanwhile, decided that not only was he going to create a realistic gay protagonist engaging in explicit sex for his noirish epic, but also gleefully subvert most of heroic fantasy's tropes in much the same way as Sherman "subverted" Atlanta during the American Civil War.

Among "Steampunk" titles, the most entertaining were Soulless by first-time novelist Gail Carriger and Boneshaker by Cherie Priest. Soulless is a great take on the novel of manners with vampires, werewolves, madcap adventure, and love combined to excellent effect; the sense of timing and the technical execution necessary to make this kind of book a success shouldn't be dismissed just because Soulless isn't a Big Concept Novel. Priest's Boneshaker, meanwhile, reimagines the history of Seattle (okay, destroys the city) and combines Steampunk with zombies. It's an energetic, chaotic, sometimes messy book, full of interesting ideas and characters.

"Little Books with Big Hearts" of particular interest included Peter M. Ball's Horn, Kage Baker's The Hotel Under the Sand, Laird Hunt's Ray of the Star, Gert Jonke's The System of Vienna, Elizabeth Bear's Bone and Jewel Creatures, and John Grant's The City in These Pages. Ball's novella-in-book-form from my new favorite indie press, Twelfth Planet, combines noir and faery in a hardboiled structure that plays knowingly with the tropes of both subgenres; he is without a doubt one of the best of the up-and-coming writers in the field. Baker's delightful children's tale about a mythical hotel invites comparison to such authors as Tove Jansson, while Hunt's compressed gem of magic realism tells of a visit to an imaginary city where visitors can walk with the dead. Jonke's Calvino-esque series of adventures includes such marvelous characters as a paranoid fish seller who believes he controls Austrian politics from his stall. Bear brings painstaking jeweler's precision to her tale of strange creations and enchanters. Grant, an often underrated writer, combines elements of the police procedural with SF and fantasy to interesting effect.

In the admittedly catch-all category of "Three Books That Could Not Be More Different," Bernardine Evaristo's Blonde Roots, James Braziel's Snakeskin Road, and Steven Barnes' Shadow Valley all provided provocative and evocative reading experiences. Evaristo effectively reimagines the history of the slave trade, reversing it so Africans have enslaved Europeans. Braziel postulates a convincingly grim future of human trafficking following a climate change disaster. Barnes' lyrical take on writing about prehistoric people contains genuinely moving situations and fascinating characters.

Other novels that I found interesting included Jay Lake's Madness of Flowers, Jeremy C. Shipp's Cursed, Jo Graham's Hand of Isis, Mark Charan Newton's Nights of Villajamur, Kage Baker's The Empress of Mars, Marie Brennan's In Ashes Lie, and Lane Robins' Kings and Assassins. Of these, I'd like to single out the Robins, because it seemed to get no attention anywhere. In the novel, Robins makes the gutsy decision to use Janus, one of the ostensible villains of her prior novel, Maledicte, as the viewpoint character. The result? Often brutal political drama in a fantasy setting. Robins clearly doesn't believe in escapism, and the novel is better for it. Readers who initially may bridle at the choice of Janus will quickly be won over.

Finally, two Big Concept Novels fell just short of being successful for me, despite trying for much more than some of the books listed above. They are definitely worth your attention, and both of them appear on other people's year's best lists.

China Mieville's The City & The City contains a perfect evocation of an imaginary Eastern European city. Culturally and texturally, Mieville's novel worked well for me, and the writing is to die for. However, as the book progresses the unwieldiness of the central conceit — overlapping cities — and the idea of "unseeing" works less and less well. Mieville's ever more laborious efforts to explain things slow the book down, especially toward the middle, and underscore the somewhat thin characterization. (For an interesting reading experience, pair Mieville's novel with the excellent Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould and Mieville and the recent issue of the scholarly journal Extrapolations devoted to exploring Mieville's fiction.)

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi also features some stunning writing — as in his short stories, he has a knack for full-on description that reads like a tactile, sensual report from the future. This is also a relevant novel in the sense that it seems to move fully beyond the idea of cyberpunk or the New Wave in its approach to science fiction. The concepts of calorie companies, bioengineered plagues, and a vision that extends beyond our oil-based economies — these are all amazing ideas, fleshed out in fascinating ways. However, the characters seem overwhelmed by the setting and the plot never really came together for me. That Bacigalupi will write a great novel, given his skills, seems almost certain, but this is not that novel.

Short Story Collections

I thought it was a frustrating year in terms of short story collections. Many of them were good, but few were in any sense of the word daring — and this despite many writers having taken chances in the short form in magazines and anthologies. Perhaps next year. (The best collection of any kind was J.G. Ballard's The Collected Stories of J.G. Ballard, but its North American publication in 2009 had been preceded by publication in the British Commonwealth in a prior year.)

In that context, my favorite short story collections of the year were, in no particular order, Centuries Ago and Very Fast by Rebecca Ore, Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler, Fugue State by Brian Evenson, The Word Book by Mieko Kanai, and Rachel Pollack's The Tarot of Perfection.

Centuries Ago and Very Fast by Rebecca Ore (from the truly amazing Aqueduct Press) has a kinetic energy and hard-to-define originality that held me captivated from first word to last. Profane — scandalous? — the book wraps stories around stories, combines the surreal with the mundane and every-day. A story like "Acid and Stoned Reindeer" that I thought was either genius or chaos when published by Clarkesworld works much better in the context of the other stories. I'm not really sure how to describe a book that includes lines like "We'd run out of mammoths. The ponies looked nervous.", but I tend to come down on the side of finding it fascinating, although I know many readers will find this collection difficult.

Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler (from another excellent publisher, Featherproof) is composed of a series of stunningly surreal stories, many of them seeming to chronicle a strange post-apocalyptic world. Sections include "In the Year of Cyst and Tumor" and "In the Year of Worm & Wilting." The writing is sharp, alien, and utterly captivating. There's a definite sense of a deconstructed J.G. Ballard in the many scenes of flooding and other devastation.

Fugue State by Brian Evenson is the first collection by this American original since the stunning The Wavering Knife. Combining the best traits of writers who trend toward the grotesque, Evenson writes like a modern-day Kafka. Each story, from "Mudder Tongue" to "The Adjudicator" pulls the reader into Evenson's view of the world, to the extent that even stories in which nothing fantastical happens feel strange and surreal.

The Word Book by Mieko Kanai quivers on the edge of fantasy and reality, allowing readers to enter a world of mysterious encounters and silences and sudden corpses. A child running errands for his mother discovers he's suddenly an adult and his mother is dead. Kanai's prose is as precise and matter-of-fact as her subject matter is surreal and shifting.

The Tarot of Perfection by Rachel Pollack from Prague's Magic Realist Press was a fun, well-written collection of stories presented in a beautifully designed format; the best tales, like the title story, are truly classic. A couple of more contemporary stories suffer by comparison, but I still found the collection more cohesive and interesting than many others.

Among collections by relatively new writers, I found Deborah Biancotti's A Book of Endings, Eugie Foster's Returning My Sister's Face, and Cat Rambo's Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight the most compelling. None of these collections were perfect, but each was lively and willing to take chances.

Juggernauts and behemoths also released extremely worthy collections in 2009 that cannot be overlooked — including Gene Wolfe, Ramsey Campbell, Gwyneth Jones, Joe R. Lansdale, Peter S. Beagle, and Lewis Shiner. The Best of Gene Wolfe seems somehow not as revelatory given the existence of several prior collections, and because Wolfe's later short fiction sits uneasily with the earlier material; his strengths in the latter part of his career manifest best at novel length. Ramsey Campbell's best-of from PS Publishing, Just Behind You is first-rate, but also at times repetitive in mood and subject matter. Lewis Shiner's Collected Stories includes many excellent stories, but is perhaps too complete. Beagle's We Never Talk About My Brother contained some very good stories, but despite the excellence of his writing I feel, with all due respect, that he's begun to coast through familiar territory for awhile now. Faring better, perhaps because they're leaner, The Best of Joe R. Lansdale serves up a potent sampling of the author's Southern-tinged dual gonzo and horror impulses while Grazing the Long Acre nicely showcases Gwyneth Jones' diverse strengths, which range from outright science fiction to genre-defying character explorations. (My wife Ann and I helped edit a collection by another behemoth, The Best of Michael Moorcock, which I also believe deserves your consideration.)

Anthologies

Several original anthologies from 2009 contained good to excellent stories, although nothing seemed truly groundbreaking or innovative. (I am largely leaving out reprint anthologies because of space considerations, but would note that John Joseph Adams edited a couple of excellent ones this past year.)

Eclipse 3 edited by Jonathan Strahan had an absolutely stellar lineup that included Karen Joy Fowler, Molly Gloss, Jeffrey Ford, Ellen Kushner, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Nicola Griffith, Daniel Abraham, and Nnedi Okorafor. The content was wide-ranging and ran the gamut from relatively traditional fantasy to out-and-out science fiction. Although the anthology has won an Aurealis Award, it has received very little review attention in the United States. It's also a shame that those who criticized Strahan for gender imbalances in the second volume have largely ignored this third volume.

Interfictions 2 edited by Delia Sherman & Christopher Barzak was a significant step up in quality from the first volume. Contributors included Lavie Tidhar, Brian Francis Slattery, Peter M. Ball, Alan DeNiro, M. Rickert, and Theodora Goss. Intended to showcase interstitial fiction, this volume also featured some of the most experimental and formally daring genre fiction of the year. In this respect, Interfictions 2 not only did a fine job of presenting interesting stories, it filled the gap left by the erratic publishing schedule of the Polyphony anthology series, while also seeming more focused and accessible. In a generally conservative publishing environment, the Interfictions series now serves as an important bastion for new writers, both as an anthology with an open reading period and for its encouragement, like such online venues as Strange Horizons and Clarkesworld, of risk-taking. Such safe harbors are essential.

In first Poe and then Lovecraft Unbound, editor Ellen Datlow proved that two tradition-encrusted icons of genre fiction could be the catalyst for interesting new interpretations by modern writers. The Poe anthology contained fine work by, among others, Delia Sherman, Kaaron Warren, and Lucius Shepard. The Lovecraft anthology featured great fiction by Dale Bailey & Nathan Ballingrud, Michael Cisco, Sarah Monette, Elizabeth Bear, and many others.

Four other original anthologies provided an entertaining read. Songs of the Dying Earth edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois collected twenty-two stories in honor of Jack Vance's iconic series. The overall quality of the writing is strong despite a surprising clunker from Neil Gaiman, with contributors ranging from Martin himself to Kage Baker and Dan Simmons, but the stories tend to blur together in one's memory. Phantom, edited by Paul Tremblay & Sean Wallace was a short, sharp, intelligent collection of fourteen "literary horror" stories from the likes of Michael Cisco, F. Brett Cox, Steve Rasnic Tem, and Karen Hueler. Dreaming Again edited by Jack Dann is a doorstopper of an anthology containing thirty-five new stories by Australian writers. It's a consistently energetic if sometimes uneven book with work by, among others, Garth Nix, Angela Slatter, Kim Wilkins, Peter M, Ball, and Terry Dowling. New Ceres Nights, another Australian creation, edited by Alisa Krasnostein & Tehani Wessly, comes to readers from the excellent Twelfth Planet Press, and might be the sleeper anthology of the year. It's consistently lively and interesting in developing its shared setting. Contributors include Stephen Dedman, Kaaron Warren, Aliette de Bodard, Angela Slatter, and Dirk Flinthart.

Basically an anthology in magazine form, Conjunctions 52: Betwixt the Between (Impossible Realism) may not have been as flashy as a prior special issue, The New Wave Fabulists, but it adhered to its theme more rigorously and with fewer rationalizations. Uncharacteristically weak contributions from writers like Elizabeth Hand were offset by interesting fantasy experiments by Stephen Wright, Ben Marcus, Julia Elliott, Jedediah Berry, Karen Russell, Shelley Jackson, and rising star Micaela Morrissette. Conjunctions 52 might not appeal to all genre readers, but like Interfictions 2 it helped to push the boundaries of what was possible in non-realist fiction. (Conjunctions 53: Not Even Past; Hybrid Histories also contained many thought-provoking stories recognizable to readers as fantasy.)

Another type of diversity came in the form of The Apex Book of World SF, edited by Lavie Tidhar. Primarily composed of reprints, Tidhar's anthology featured the work of S.P. Somtow, Zoran Zivkovic, Jamil Nasir, Dean Francis Alfar, Han Song, Anil Menon, and Melanie Fazi. It's an excellent first step in creating an annual showcase for world speculative fiction, with stories of consistently good quality. However, The Apex Book of World SF also proves — just like the James and Kathy Morrow European showcase anthology from 2008 — that publishing writers from a variety of countries doesn't imply or guarantee originality of story. Many of the plots and situations readers will encounter are not markedly different from those in magazines or anthologies that primarily feature writers from the United Kingdom or the United States; indeed, several of these stories were first published in Anglo markets. That said, Apex deserves extraordinary credit for publishing an anthology with few marketable names therein, and the series appears to be set to only become stronger and more diverse with each installment. I highly recommend you purchase a copy to reward this initiative.

The Black Mirror & Other Stories: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Germany & Austria, edited by Franz Rottensteiner, provides a fascinating overview of German speculative fiction from the 1870s to the present-day. It's at times of purely historical interest, but many stories stand on their own merits. The "Short History of Science Fiction in German" is excellent, and the differences between East German and West German writers instructional. (In terms of European SF, also consider picking up the sampler Crossing the Boundaries: French Fantasy from Bragelonne, a solid volume published in 2009.)

Finally, Peter Straub's Library of America two-volume American Fantastic Tales (Poe to the Pulps and 1940s to Now) deserves a mention as a potentially landmark anthology. Even with a few omissions — Jeffrey Ford, Nalo Hopkinson, and Lucius Shepard come to mind — and a somewhat safe approach to other selections, this two-volume set provides a vital bridge between genre and mainstream. It also features some amazing stories.

Nonfiction

My two favorite nonfiction books were Starting Point: 1979-1996 by filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki and The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms by Helen Merrick. In both cases, the authors manage to convey complex ideas in clear, effective prose.

Starting Point is nothing less than a peek at the inspirations of perhaps our most important fantasists, a man whose movies — from Nausicaa to Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro to Princess Mononoke — are among the classics. Sections titled "Creating Animation," "Planning Notes," and "On the Periphery of the Work not only illuminate Miyazaki's process but contain general insights of interest to anyone who loves fantasy.

The Secret Feminist Cabal provides a context for many of the recent online discussions about gender and the politics of gender. The book is brilliant in how it fills in a potentially lost history of the genre, detailing the involvement of female fans in the genre community from the early days, the birth of feminist SF and criticism, and also the many arguments back and forth between male and female writers in the 1970s and 1980s. I may be unaware of similar books on this subject, but for me it was fascinating to read Merrick's documentation of discussions between writers like Joanna Russ and Michael G. Coney. Better yet, Merrick's excellent prose makes The Secret Feminist Cabal a compulsive reading experience. (For an even more complete reading experience, read the Merrick in conjunction with another excellent nonfiction book from 2009, the Farah Mendelsohn-edited On Joanna Russ; it contains a variety of perspectives on Russ and her work from, among others, Gary K. Wolfe, Samuel R. Delany, Graham Sleight, and Merrick herself.)

Other nonfiction I particularly enjoyed included Conversations with Samuel R. Delany, edited by Carl Freedman, Gwyneth Jones' Imagination/Space: Essays and Talks on Fiction, Feminism, Technology, and Politics, The WisCon Chronicles: Vol. 3, Carnival of Feminist SF edited by Liz Henry, Paul T. Riddell's Greasing the Pan, a series of provocative (sometimes profane) essays on science fiction and the genre community, Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction edited by Mark Bould and China Mieville, and the third of a lovely series by John Grant, Bogus Science (or, Some People Really Believe These Things).

Russell Letson reviews Alexander Jablokov

2010-01-25T22:22:00.001-08:00

Alexander Jablokov's Brain Thief is what you might call a quirky book. It's not just the wonderfully pulpy title or even the opening line — "For Bernal, the message in the cowboy boot finally confirmed that something was wrong" — or the fact that the message consists of "three foil-wrapped chocolates, bittersweet, and a 3x5 index card" with a note from Bernal's boss, Muriel Inglis. Muriel is sixtyish, rich, eccentric, a snappy dresser, a shoe enthusiast, a collector of tchotkes, and a backer of oddball schemes of all sorts, such as one to introduce genetically reconstructed mammoths to the depopulated plains of South Dakota. Bernal Haydon-Rumi is her only employee, a fixer-of-all-problems, particularly those requiring people skills, such as explaining the mastodon project to Dakotans:

Over the past year he'd spent a lot of time shivering on bleachers above floodlit high school football fields, packing in hot dishes in church basements, hunting prairie dogs on the rez with angry young Oglala Sioux, handing down tools while politically significant people ranted at him from under pickup trucks with transmission problems.

But now Muriel has vanished while looking into another of her pet schemes, the building of an experimental AI-based space exploration robot called Hesketh. Bernal spends the rest of the book chasing after her (and Hesketh), proceeding in the time-honored private-investigator mode, bouncing from source to source, getting lied to, or pointed toward a dead end, or punched, or whacked on the head with a cast-iron Borzoi, or locked in a pitch-dark wine cellar, or hoisted 20 feet in the air inside a mobile home and then chased by demented automated golf carts.

The mean streets through which Bernal pursues his McGuffin(s) owe more to Thomas Pynchon or Neal Stephenson than to Raymond Chandler. The business and organization names alone signal this, from the mild (Fleurs du Mall, Memory Lanes — florist and bowling alley respectively) to the wild: Ignacio's Devices and Desires (towing, salvage, and stolen-tech fencing), Enigmatic Ascent (midwestern space enthusiasts and launch-chasers), Near Earth Orbit (diner and unofficial storage facility for stolen goods), and Social Protection ("DELAYING THE SINGULARITY SINCE 2005" — we'll come back to that one).

As he works his way through leads and dead ends and strangely named businesses, Bernal encounters all manner of oddballs, dropouts, crooks, con artists, thieves, fences, fanatics, paranoids, and miscellaneous misfits. This is a secret-history/underground-world of traffickers in illicit refrigerants, space-launch chasers, art-specialist cat-burglars, and at least one serial killer (who puts severed heads in bowling-ball bags — thus The Bowler). By these standards, Norman Spillvagen seems pretty bland. His business card reads "Personality Enhancement," but the nebbishy suburbanite with the junk-filled garage and disaffected kids is also the proprietor of Long Voyage, a "cut-rate cryobank" immortality outfit. Spillvagen has lost track of some of his clients and is being hounded by the litigious Yolanda, who wants to know the whereabouts and condition of her Uncle Solly, or at least of his frozen head.

Bernal's path keeps crossing Spillvagen's and Yolanda's, and that of Patricia, a damaged and damaging waif who works for the thuggish Ignacio. He keeps returning to the Near Earth Orbit diner, with its giant cowgirl-on-a-rocket sign and its conspiracy-theorist waiter Bob, who also offers monitory comments on the bill of fare. ("Stay away from the paella.... I think it has squid in it. Those things evolved too long ago to be edible.") Bernal's most frequent companion and eventual ally is Charis Fen, a beefy but womanly ex-cop now representing the anti-AI outfit Social Protection. Charis is, to put it mildly, resistant to the lure of a miraculous future.

[T]hey keep promising... stuff. Things going on. Great advances. Constantly increasing speed, infinite power, all knowledge and cognition sliding down into an expanding Singularity that will suck everything up and remake the universe. And what do I actually get? The ability to learn the uninformed opinions of everyone in the world through round-cornered communications devices my fat fingers are too big to use.

Bernal, pinballing among these crooks and looneys, can barely figure out where he's going to wind up next — like the famously convoluted plot of the film version of The Big Sleep, this one spins us all around so thoroughly (often with a bucket over our heads) that by the time it's all sorted out it's hard to tell whether it all made sense. (I think it does, just don't make me explain how in detail.) But the chase is perhaps less important than the set-pieces with which it is studded, such as the aforementioned sequence that starts with our hero dodging bullets in a suspended mobile home and winds up with him dodging falling engine blocks at the bottom of a junk pit. On second thought, it would probably be a mistake to minimize the McGuffin-chase, since McGuffins don't usually chase back, which in turn means that this really is a science fiction story after all — just one that's set on the other side of the rabbit hole, which is always an entertaining place to visit, no matter which genre provides the excuse for the expedition.

Read more! This is one of many reviews from the January issue of Locus Magazine. To read more, go here to subscribe.

Brain Thief

Alexander Jablokov

(Tor 978-0-7653-2200-5, $24.99, 383pp, hc) January 2010

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

2010-01-10T20:57:00.001-08:00

by Howard Waldrop & Lawrence Person

Lawrence Person: If you liked The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, you'll like The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. It's the most Terry Gilliam film that Terry Gilliam has done in the last two decades. That's a good thing. Mostly.

Howard Waldrop: A wonder-show movie (the Alamo Drafthouse ran the trailer for The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao beforehand) that harks back to Ray Bradbury's Dark Carnival and Something Wicked This Way Comes, only this one is like a road-show version of a cross between King Lear and Mother Courage and Her Children.

There's an immortal Dr. Parnassus, his daughter, a little-person factotum, also a helper who loves the daughter, who plays Mercury in the presentation. There's a deal with the devil (Tom Waits, dressed like Walter Houston in All That Money Can Buy, AKA The Devil and Daniel Webster) and a Hanged Man who is important to the plot. (There's lots of Tarot imagery (and practice) in this, as in The Fisher King.)

Parnassus' wonder-wagon, like Li'l Abner's refrigerator, has more room on the inside than the outside (it's a 3-story, 50 ton caravan, pulled by one horse). There's a magic mirror (played by aluminum foil in a frame) that people go through, like in Cocteau's Blood of a Poet. The cheesiness is intentional.

LP: Parnassus and company attempt to play for indifferent, hostile, drunken crowds of modern Britons, the vast majority of whom have no desire to step through the proffered magic mirror, and those that do tend to choose the path of the Devil (in the form of various incarnations of instant sinful gratification) than Parnassus' path of enlightenment. The mirror seems to lead to the inside of Parnassus' mind, and functions as an external manifestation of the person's internal state; watching it brought back a line from Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie: "This is what it looked like inside Salvador Dali's head." Things begin to change when they come across the hanged man (Heath Ledger, in his last role), who turns out to be not entirely dead, possibly thanks to a special flute he had lowered into his windpipe. (Which is strange, because usually a magic coin is the instrument of resurrection...)

HW: This is probably Gilliam's best-integrated movie since Brazil. There are great scenes (a gondola on a lagoon filled with giant shoes is one) but the contrast between the set pieces and story aren't so great they cheese you off, as they did in The Brothers Grimm.

LP: This is much better than The Brothers Grimm, mainly because its flaws tends to be those in most of Gilliam's films (a rambling plot, an out-of-control quality to some scenes, set pieces that overwhelm the actors playing against them, etc.), which is infinitely preferable to the standard Hollywood bullshit that ruined The Brothers Grimm.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is almost a checklist not only of Munchausen, but of all Gilliam's tropes. Fantastic and amazing otherworldly landscapes? Check. (There's a monastery here every bit as imposing and unlikely as The Fortress of Ultimate Evil in Time Bandits.) Intermixture of fantasy and reality? Check. Colorful but shabby stage facades? Check. Midget? Check. (I had forgotten that Verne Troyer had a part in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, predating his Mini-Me fame.) There's even Lily Cole as a redhead every bit as young and hot as Uma Thurman was in Munchausen, and a policemen-in-pantyhose song-and-dance number that could have come straight out of his Monty Python days.

I'm with Howard to a point, but I don't think it works as well as The Fisher King, and maybe not even as well as Twelve Monkeys, which was a solid film, but not one that blew me away. (Much the same as my reaction to this one, though for largely different reasons.)

HW: Christopher Plummer is Dr. Parnassus — thinking about him 45 years ago in The Sound of Music gives you cognitive dissonance. It's his best acting in years. (Now he could play Lear.) The performances are fine throughout.

It's not a great movie, but it's fairly controlled (as controlled as any Gilliam movie can be) and there are some great set pieces (one's set in a landscape half Monty Python and half Grant Wood). There are bits of other movies, references to paintings, and in general good cultural fun. I sure didn't want my money back, which I did after The Brothers Grimm.

LP: Of all the films we've seen semi-recently, the one this most resembles is MirrorMask, right down to the externalized internal landscape, the traveling carnival atmosphere, and even the Commedia dell'arte masks. It's a shame Gilliam and Neil Gaiman have never collaborated on a movie, as they share some of the same central concerns, such as the primal role of Story in underpinning the world, and the vital necessity of fantasy. And I like to think that a Gilliam-helmed Sandman movie would be something to behold.

This is a good film that's just too uneven to be great (the rambling nature of the plot, the murky mystical underpinnings of the Parnassus' particular form of salvation (be happy, give up your material wealth, and... that's it?), and an ending that just doesn't quite come together as well as you would hope). And sometimes the sheer randomness puzzles you. Sure, having Tom Waits as the Devil pop of the head of a giant steam-powered babushka mother is sort of cool, but what exactly does it mean?

Make no mistake: This is definitely better than any movie we reviewed last year. But I can't help thinking that I've seen all of these moves before. Gilliam's films are still spanking fresh compared to Extruded Hollywood Movie Product, but they do tend to reiterate a fairly limited range of topics, and maybe he should try something (ahem) completely different for a change. Not that I'm saying he should make, say, a straight crime drama, and Martin Scorsese should make a Gilliamesque fantasy. (No wait, strike that. Even as failures, both of those would probably be all kinds of awesome.) But I would like to see something different from him. Still, I'm starting to wonder if my varying degrees of disappointment with each new Gilliam film is the fault of Gilliam, or my own longing for him to recapture the wonder of Brazil. How can you blame a man for never again equaling one of the greatest films ever made?

In a way, it's hard not to see Dr. Parnassus' traveling caravan as an unkind and deeply unfair metaphor for Gilliam's career (especially the way studios manage to turn each of his critical successes into a commercial failure). It's a shabby, broken-down, shambling remnant of what was once a glamorous conveyance, a permanently poverty-stricken sideshow tottering from one patchy, indifferent audience to another. But, whispers the showman, if you'd just ignore the tattered banners and bailing wire of the exterior, and step into the Imaginarium itself, oh, what amazing wonders and glories still await you...

HW: The movie's slowly creeping into theaters a city at a time (so far, LA, NYC, Boston and now Austin. It's coming to one near YOU, sometime in YOUR future.

Directed by Terry Gilliam

Written by Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown

Starring Christopher Plummer, Andrew Garfield, Lily Cole, Heath Ledger, Verne Troyer, Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Colin Farrell

Official Website: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus - Official Site

Faren Miller reviews Kit Whitfield

2009-12-28T17:11:00.000-08:00

Reviewing Kit Whitfield's first novel Benighted, I called her a promising newcomer, even if her introduction of lycanthropic activities as an important element in modern life (with a long history) didn't quite manage to convince me. But now she follows it with In Great Waters, a superb fantasy that substitutes merfolk for werewolves and employs both historic figures and her own variations on the mindsets of late-medieval England to great effect.

In his first five years, the merboy later known as Henry (it used to be "a sound best rendered by the word Whistle," reflecting a dolphin-like form of communication) is the runt of his tribe, a poor swimmer with his bifurcated tail and frequent need to surface for oxygen. Other youngsters mob him and call him "stranger," his mother has to rescue him from situations where the others would be safe, and eventually even she seems to tire of him — taking Whistle up to the shoreline and leaving him there to fend for himself.

Small and grayish but intelligent and possessed of an inhuman strength, this lad has some things in common with Pratchett's Nutt, and retaining his early memories only makes him more miserable. On land, he manages to survive for a couple of days by eating mollusks, but then he seeks human help. He gets more than he bargained for, passing into the hands of a man with long-range plans for using him as a political tool. England's royalty consists of "deepfolk"/"landfolk" hybrids and the latest dynasty seems weak, with an aging king, foreign queen, incompetent crown prince, and daughters regarded as no more than marriage fodder. There's room for someone new.

At first, Henry can only struggle in what seems like a wholly alien world. Early attempts to dress him lead to hysterics, and even after he's accepted the inevitable he doesn't like it, for "in the sea it was always cold, and his garments were a blindfold for his body. Shoes were even worse... flexible traps...." Despite these woes, he develops an interest in the true forms of landfolk: "Flat-chested men and swollen-chested women, as with the tribe, but the jellyfish-skirted women concealed under their clothes two plain legs like the men." He knows he's not one of them, but gradually (during a period of harsh training laced with a little covert sympathy) learns to cope and even finds one potential human friend of about his own age.

In Book Two the attention shifts to Anne, a princess. She's young herself, still trying to understand the ways of court, the differing natures of her remote parents, and what her role might come to be in a world dominated by wars fought mostly on land, amid a welter of treaties and betrayals. Crippled with the "flexible legs" that run in her family, and with the added weirdness of a slightly luminous blue face, she should feel more at home in the sea. But her first official encounter with the court of their kin out in the bay — "thirty, forty, a whole choir" — is unsettling:

They were massive, larger even than her father, and as they approached, one of them swam out of the dark and stared straight into her face. There were black eyes, tiny sharp teeth, a small, flattened nose, and Anne leaped in the water, too shocked to react.... Sharp-nailed fingers reached out, and she heard the deepsman cry out: Face, deep face.

(Her facial type is an adaptive trait, in the lower depths.)

Before their plot threads intersect, we follow Henry and Anne through several years where both struggle against circumstance but with very different views of the landsmen's religion. At first the whole story behind the image of Christ crucified confuses and disturbs Henry, particularly when it's linked to the notion of sin: "Having done his best not to be stupid for as long as he could remember, Henry could not see any reason why a dead landsman who looked nothing like him should be accusing him of doing bad things." He'll remain a skeptic. Born into a more troubled world, Anne swiftly takes to the concept of a Prince of Peace, and she finds personal joy in some aspects of the faith: "Christ had said to man, You are the salt of the earth, and Anne had listened. When she prayed, she could taste it: God, the flavour of every thread and scrap of the world."

While Whitfield's strong sense of character gives life and complexity even to the schemers, arrogant power-mongers, and borderline maniacs who collectively make life for Henry, Anne and other relative innocents more dangerous than any ocean current swarming with sharks, her two young protagonists stand at the heart of the book. Still it's not just their tale. She interweaves the story of their trials and maturation into a mixture of real and imagined political and cultural history (both English and in a larger European sphere) that manages to be thoroughly compelling, even without the drama of those later revolutions.

Read more! This is one of many reviews from the December issue of Locus Magazine. To read more, go here to subscribe.

In Great Waters

Kit Whitfield

(Jonathan Cape 978-0-224-07924-2, £12.99, 352pp, hc) March 2009. Del Rey 978-0-345-49165-7, $15.00, 402pp, tp) November 2009.

Yesterday's Tomorrows: Brian Aldiss

2009-12-22T21:17:00.001-08:00

by Graham Sleight

Most of the time when I write this column, it's clear enough what to write about and where to start. With Alfred Bester, you need to talk about The Stars My Destination; with Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness; and so on. With Brian Aldiss, surely an SF writer of comparable stature, there are so many books to choose from — and, in particular, so many kinds of books to choose from — that there are dozens of different selections of his works that could be discussed. With regret, I've passed over his many mimetic novels such as Life in the West (1980), his seminal history of SF, Billion Year Spree (1973), and the brilliant memoirs such as Bury My Heart at W.H. Smith's (1990). I'm concentrating instead on books that are SF of one kind or another — although those are still stunningly various.

I started reading, in fact, in a slightly out-of-the-way place: the collection of linked stories Galaxies Like Grains of Sand (1960), also published (with slightly different contents) as The Canopy of Time (1959). In either form, the book contains several of Aldiss's most famous stories, like "Who Can Replace a Man?" and "Poor Little Warrior", but Galaxies Like Grains of Sand also contains linking passages that attempt to knit the stories into a future history covering many millions of years. These linking passages owe a lot to Wells and, more particularly, to Stapledon:

The machines understood each other. The machines evolved. For millennia, they took on complexity, created new genera and phyla, developing sensibilities, capacities, blindnesses, such as the world has never dreamed of. They increased in size; they verged on the infinitesimal.
One phylum became parasitical on others, its species developing special talents for draining molecular power from larger machines. The parasites rapidly introduced themselves into every kind of moving object, eventually to render them without function, or to goad them to madness, as the gadfly used to goad summer cattle.

But Aldiss is doing something more than just depicting a cosmos-scale view of future history. He intersperses these passages with the strivings and dilemmas of individual humans (or robots or aliens), and so never lets you forget that for every abstract noun in the linking passages, there are a thousand individual stories. Take as an example the second story here, "All the World's Tears" (1957). It begins by following "J. Smithlao, psychodynamician," as he flies out "to administer a hate-brace" to Charles Gunpat. Gunpat, we assume, is an immensely wealthy man. His estate stands alone in a landscape otherwise devoid of humans; but, as Smithlao comes into land, he sees a human figure approaching it on foot. He assumes it must be a "wild man". There turn out to be two threads to the story: Smithlao's appointment with Gunpat, and the wild man's encounter with Gunpat's daughter Ployploy. Ployploy is thought of as "mad" by most of society — a society that runs on logic and order. She and the wild man meet and seem to have something in common; but, because she is not permitted to mate, his touch kills her. In some respects, it's a story done many times in SF — order and conformity versus individualism — but it's elevated by several things. Firstly, Aldiss's writing is so much better than what we're used to in SF. He knows enough about the way literature has depicted this kind of romance in the past to give Ployploy and the wild man's encounter a kind of archetypal nobility. Second, his use of Smithlao as viewpoint character and ironic commenter on the Ployploy story makes it much less simplistic than it would otherwise be. (The last line of the story, after Smithlao has thought of a smart riposte about the whole saga, is "It would be a wonderful point with which to rile Charles Gunpat the next time he needed a hate-brace." Smithlao and Gunpat's world will continue and Ployploy's will be forgotten. Smithlao's response to Ployploy's story is detached and ironic; as readers, we have to ask ourselves what we think of that detached irony.

Other stories in the book offer similar layers of irony and revelation. In "Who Can Replace a Man?" (1958), human-created robots argue (in a very funny robotish way) about how best to serve humans in a world now almost devoid of them: I at least was strongly reminded of a lot of the best bits of WALL-E (2008). Aldiss wants to use fiction as a vehicle for talking about grand, abstract ideas, but he also wants to tell the stories of individuals. It's in the gap between these two that the irony so characteristic of his work is generated; if you have both the omniscient and the human-scale picture, the latter is always going to have less information about the true state of the world than the former. The struggles of Aldiss's protagonists are often made more poignant by our knowledge as readers of how much bigger the frame story is.

Both of these tendencies are visible in Aldiss's first great SF novel, Non-Stop (1958). It's prefaced by a brief note saying, among other things:

An idea, which is man-conceived, unlike most of the myriad effects which comprise our universe, is seldom perfectly balanced. Inevitably, it bears the imprint of man's own frailty; it may fluctuate from the meagre to the grandiose. This is the story of a grandiose idea.

To the community, it was more than an idea: it became existence itself. For the idea, as ideas will, had gone wrong and gobbled up their real lives.

The idea, in this case, is an SF staple: the generation starship, a huge vehicle that has taken so long to travel between stars that those on board at the end of the voyage no longer remember its original purpose. Again, it's not the idea itself but its execution that shows Aldiss's originality. His protagonist, Roy Complain, starts off as a hunter in the "Greene tribe," which knows little about its environment. Gradually, he discovers more about the true nature of the world — through the process Peter Nicholls has labelled as conceptual breakthrough. It seems especially important to me that, in Non-Stop, that knowledge isn't comforting. Complain might well have been happier without knowing all the things he learns about his position in the universe. Aldiss's universe always has those, like Gunpat, who live by comforting lies.

I don't want to make Non-Stop sound dry or abstract, though. The bulk of it is taken up with an adventure story, and an exciting and suspenseful one at that. Complain's odyssey through the ship is grimly realistic and costly. One feature of Non-Stop especially worth noting is its final pages. Aldiss has always had an instinct — rarer and rarer as bloat has set into SF over the last few decades — that a story should keep revealing itself right up to the end. So the last dozen or so pages of Non-Stop are filled with revelation and explanation. In other circumstances, this might be dismissable as "infodump"; but here, because so many bizarre parts of the story are rendered explicable, the reader is grateful for it. And then, on the very last page, comes one of the most memorable images in the whole of SF, a logical culmination of what has gone before and also a demonstration that what's happened in this story is irrevocable.

Much of Non-Stop takes place in the jungle-like environment of the overgrown "ponics" infesting the ship. It's not too outlandish to suggest that Aldiss's fascination with this kind of environment comes from his time as a soldier in Burma, or that these experiences find even more intense expression in Hothouse (1962) (expanded from The Long Afternoon of Earth: lots of Aldiss books have variant titles). It's set on a far-future Earth locked into facing the sun: the lit side is dominated by a single huge tree, inhabited by human descendants who scramble around its bark to survive.

More than any other book, this is the one that showcases Aldiss's protean inventiveness. The creatures and entities of his world keep coming: traversers, burnurns, berrywhisks, termights. Each has its place in the elaborately imagined world, and each contributes to its unique atmosphere: the "green light" we're everywhere reminded of, and the humid stink of the jungle. The story itself is another young man's quest that winds up revealing the nature of the world, and includes a memorably fraught sea-voyage. But in this case, Aldiss finds himself subverting SF expectations even more than in Non-Stop. His protagonist, Gren, doesn't use the knowledge he's gained to transcend his world or make it a better place. He refuses the stars and stays home instead: a far more human ending than the usual SF-hero-who-earns-being-a-godling.

That said, there is at least talk of godlings in the next book on my list. Aldiss was one of the central figures in the ferment of experimentation around the Michael Moorcock-edited New Worlds in the 1960s, and several of his novels from around that time show how much he found the magazine's concerns in tune with his own. Representative of this phase of his work is Barefoot in the Head: A European Fantasia (1969), a book that reads now more than most Aldiss as a response to its times. (In this respect, it has something in common with HARM (2007), with its scathing commentary on Guantanamo Bay.) The book's epigraph is General Curtis LeMay's famous quotation about bombing Vietnam back to the Stone Age; its premise is that near-future Europe has suffered a bombing of hallucinogens that renders a once familiar landscape unstable.

The book follows a man named Colin Charteris through this disintegrating world; he becomes a kind of messiah to some. As if to enact his fragmenting consciousness, the narrative of the book is broken up too by typographical games and poems. These poems aren't merely to crystallise a particular mood or moment; they also offer alternative perspectives on some of the book's characters and events. An obvious parallel in many ways is Delany's Dhalgren (1974), with its own formal games and its marginalia commenting on the main text. But Aldiss goes further than Delany, both into Joycean wordplay and into making parallels between his imagined world and the hallucinatory experiences that were so important for so many people then. Barefoot in the Head reads now as an epitaph on the '60s and a scorning of the powers (especially the military-industrial ones) that corroded those years.

Aldiss's shorter work, as collected in the career retrospective Best SF Stories (1988, reprinted 1989 as Man in His Time), shares with Barefoot in the Head a kind of playfulness not always present in the novels. For instance, "Confluence", a story largely told through a dictionary of an alien civilisation, is hard to imagine working at anything more than its eight-page length. "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" is a perfect little vignette of a robot boy failing to grasp his lack of humanity, subsequently made famous by the Kubrick/Spielberg film A.I. (2001). "The Saliva Tree" is an exuberant extended homage to Wells and the scientific romance tradition. "My Country 'Tis Not Only of Thee" is, like Barefoot in the Head, a blistering response to the Vietnam war that asks how we'd feel if it really were happening in our backyards. There are a dozen other stories as good and as different here.

Aldiss spent much of the 1970s engaged in fields other than SF, producing books like A Soldier Erect (1971) and A Rude Awakening (1978). But he returned to science fiction with the Helliconia trilogy, comprising Helliconia Spring (1982), Helliconia Summer (1983), and Helliconia Winter (1985), and subsequently assembled as an omnibus. At this point, a confession is necessary. Normally, my reading for this column gets spread out over weeks or more, and so I have the chance to digest each book before moving on to the rest. But I read the Aldiss books listed above over the course of ten days or so while stuck in bed recovering from a broken leg. Reading the Helliconia books back-to-back in this way was a very different experience from my first encounter with them, where I had a year or more's break between each volume: more concentrated, and making clearer the implacable architecture of Aldiss's vision. The planet Helliconia has a complex orbit around two stars that gives it a "Great Year" of 2,592 Earth years. As the planet becomes warmer, it becomes more congenial to the human population; but during the long winter, the alien phagors are in the ascendant.

Each of the three novels has a very different atmosphere. Spring begins with the wintry story of Yuli, another of Aldiss's young men out to make sense of the world, in this case against the depredations of the phagors. Only slowly do the effects of the planet's warming become apparent. Summer is lush, elaborate, filled with court intrigue and the renaissance of humanity. Winter, inevitably, is grim, but with human defiance (in the shape of the hero Luterin's story) burning bright. Throughout, the planet is watched over by the Earth-crewed space station Avernus, providing again the kind of omniscient perspective that recurs again and again in Aldiss:

[The scientists on Avernus] charted not only the movement of human populations, but also those of the phagorian populations, both white and black. Every advance or retreat was transformed into an an impulse which would eventually make its way across the light-years to the globe and computers back in the Helliconian Centronics Institute on Earth.

From the window of the station, the team could observe the planet below, and the progress of the eclipse, as it spread a grey narcosis over the oceans and the tropical continent.

But beneath this all-seeing eye are a set of stories of, again, individual survival and continuity. In conversation, Gary Wolfe suggested that the texture of Helliconia owed a great deal to the family sagas of Thomas Hardy, and I think this is right, both in the specific case, and in making the more general point that Aldiss always lets his wide reading outside the field leak into his SF. He begins and ends the trilogy with quotations from Lucretius's De Rerum Natura on the inescapable nature of change. Aldiss's central concern may be change: how it happens, how humans affect and are affected by it; how difficult it is to perceive fully when you're in the middle of it; what it means to live a good or full life in the middle of change. Helliconia is Aldiss's fullest and most thoroughly worked-out exploration of these ideas.

The final thing to say about Aldiss is that the books I've discussed here are very far from being the end of the story. Looking just at SF and fantasy, I could just as easily have talked about Greybeard (1964), Frankenstein Unbound (1973), The Malacia Tapestry (1976), or HARM (2007). There's the sense, even after such a long career, that he may still have something astonishing left to say.

This is one of many reviews from the December 2009 issue of Locus Magazine. To read more, go here to subscribe.

Galaxies Like Grains of Sand, Brian Aldiss (Signet, 144pp, pb) 1960.

Non-Stop, Brian W. Aldiss (Faber and Faber, 252pp, hc) 1958. Cover by Peter Curl.

Hothouse, Brian W. Aldiss (Faber and Faber, 253pp, hc) 1962.

Barefoot in the Head: A European Fantasia Brian W. Aldiss (Faber and Faber, 282pp, hc) 1969. Cover by Erró.

Best SF Stories, Brian W. Aldiss (Gollancz 0-575-04210-9, 328pp, hc) 1988.

Helliconia, Brian Aldiss (Voyager 0-00-648223-6, xvi + 1070pp, pb) 1996. Cover by Peter Goodfellow.

This review was first published in the December 2009 issue of Locus Magazine.

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All Energy Is Borrowed: A Review of Avatar

2009-12-20T16:44:00.000-08:00

by Gary Westfahl

All right; the special effects in James Cameron's Avatar are indeed dazzling, and one can regard the film as ground-breaking in demonstrating, more so than any other recent film I know of, that computer animation can not only hold its own against live-action film but might actually replace it. Yes, 500 million dollars invested in the latest technology does enable a filmmaker to make twelve-foot-high, blue-skinned aliens generated through performance capture just as sympathetic and involving as skilled actors filmed in the ordinary fashion. Still, after filmgoers have emotionally experienced those aliens' agonies of defeat and thrills of victory, some will feel compelled to actually think about the story that has enthralled them for almost three hours, and they are the ones who will feel less inclined to celebrate Cameron's achievement.

Prior to the film's release, the internet buzz was that Avatar was a ripoff of Poul Anderson's classic novelette "Call Me Joe" (1957), and admittedly there are some significant similarities: both stories involve paraplegic men who assume mental control of artificially created alien beings designed to survive on harsh alien planets, decide that they prefer being active aliens to being handicapped humans, and eventually choose to be aliens all of the time. But Anderson's novelette took place on Jupiter, not a distant world named Pandora, and featured a newly created sort of intelligent being introduced to an environment without intelligent life, not an enormous humanoid crafted to resemble, and mingle with, members of an indigenous intelligent species. Thus, even if its basic concept is not entirely original, the film does take it in a different direction. Yet the film also recalls Anderson's work in a broader fashion: one of that author's many talents was filling his alien worlds with memorably distinctive flora and fauna, as indicated by one evocative passage from "The Queen of Air and Darkness" (1971): "Blossoms opened, flamboyance on firethorn trees, steel-flowers rising blue from the brok and rainplant that cloaked all hills, shy whiteness of kiss-me-never down in the dales. Flitteries darted among them on iridescent wings; a crownbuck shook his horns and bugled." Here, although the larger, dinosaur-like creatures that inhabit Pandora are mostly things that we have all seen before, Cameron additionally provides his world with many smaller and subtler forms of bizarre alien life — such as tiny purple lizards, floating fluorescent wisps, and spiraling plants that contract into a bulb when touched — that represent precisely the sorts of extraterrestrial life that Anderson might have envisioned and described.

Anderson is not the only science fiction writer that this film brings to mind: its larger-than-life warsuits, manipulated by soldiers inside of them, are reminiscent of predecessors ranging from the fighting suits of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers (1959) to those in the Gundam Mobile Suit anime series (1979-1980), and a key subplot, depicting how members of the Pandoran race, the Na'vi, form a lifelong mental bond with large flying creatures that they then ride upon, seems lifted right out of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight (1968) and its many sequels. Still, the science fiction story that most closely resembles Avatar has to be Ursula K. Le Guin's novella "The Word for World Is Forest" (1972), another epic about a benevolent race of alien beings who happily inhabit dense forests while living in harmony with nature until they are attacked and slaughtered by invading human soldiers who believe that the only good gook is a dead gook. In sum, recalling the old Hollywood axiom that stealing from one source is plagiarism while stealing from several sources is research, one can say that James Cameron's Avatar is well researched. Or, as Cameron might defend himself, quoting one of his platitude-spouting Na'vi, "All energy is borrowed, and someday you have to give it back."

When you follow in the footsteps of giants, though, you may also replicate their mistakes, and this enormous exercise in borrowing-and-giving-it-back is particularly striking in the ways that it echoes both the virtues of Le Guin's story — a richly developed alien ecosystem and culture — and its major flaw — a one-dimensional portrait of an implacably evil military commander which engenders a one-dimensional and unpersuasive message about saintly savages being oppressed by scientifically advanced warriors. The problematic and uncharacteristic didacticism of her story was recognized by Le Guin herself in the "Afterword" she wrote for its original appearance in Harlan Ellison's Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), wherein she complained that in creating the story she had been forced by her muse to "moralize," even though "I am not very fond of moralistic tales." Of course, while Le Guin was writing, the still-raging Vietnam War was very much on her mind, and "The Word for World Is Forest," like Avatar itself, invites consideration as a parable about that conflict. Yet emotions that were appropriate in 1972 can seem anachronistic in 2009, and while one might posit that all filmmakers who matured during the Vietnam War must someday deal with that subject in their work, Cameron is entering the game rather late in his career, which makes his state-of-the-art film seem curiously old-fashioned in one respect. Bluntly, a character like Cameron's Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who calls the natives "roaches" and is eventually observed grinning in glee as he kills yet another alien, might have been acceptable thirty years ago, but he must be regarded today as nothing more than an outdated and offensive stereotype; Vietnam was one thing, but whatever else occurred in Iraq, there were no psychopathic American colonels fiercely dedicated to the genocidal slaughter of its citizens. (And a brief reference to "shock and awe" tactics cannot conceal the fact that this film is all about Vietnam and has nothing to do with the Middle East.) One might posit, perhaps, that this film was intended as Cameron's belated apology for Aliens (1986), a film that appeared to glorify all-out war against beings that didn't look like you — which might explain why he summoned Sigourney Weaver, the chief alien-killer in that film, to here play Dr. Grace Augustine (whose very name announces graciousness and nobility), a compassionate scientist who opposes military action against the aliens on this world.

As another similarity, Le Guin's story, like Avatar, is moralistic about not only the oppression of native peoples, but thoughtless destruction of the environment as well. In this case, the violent elimination of the aliens on Pandora is primarily motivated by a desire to gain access to rich deposits of a valuable gravity-defying metal (and hey, if you want to demonstrate your complete contempt for scientific plausibility, you might as well call this impossible, McGuffin-like substance "unobtainium"). We are told that in the twenty-second century, humans have already despoiled their own planet — "there is no green there" because "they killed their mother" — and Earth is later described as a "dying world." The hoped-for happy ending to Avatar is that the human race might be stopped before they can utterly ruin a second planet. If these environmental concerns seem more contemporary than condemnations of the Vietnam War, they are ultimately just as clichéd, and the best commentary on the merits of this theme is provided by Cameron himself: when the alien-inhabiting Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is first being instructed by Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) in the wise ways of her people so as to earn acceptance into her tribe, he responds to one of her lectures by thinking, "I hope this tree-hugger crap isn't on the final." Soon, however, Sully has swallowed all of her tree-hugger crap hook, line, and sinker, and knowing that "the wealth of the world is all around us," and that there is a "network of energy that flows through all living things," Sully is properly indignant that the human settlers on Pandora would strive to destroy the Na'vi's sacred tree to do some mining, and he joins his adopted people in resisting their efforts.

If these stale sentiments do not seem as offensive as those in the 2008 The Day the Earth Stood Still (review here), that may simply reflect the fact that Cameron has placed them in a more intriguing setting and chosen actors more talented than Keanu Reeves to deliver them. What is disturbing is that Avatar marries its argument against ravaging one's environment to an argument against scientific progress itself. The film's position could not be clearer: Living off the land in a forest is good; living in a protective metallic shelter filled with scientific devices is bad. Killing animals with a bow and arrow is good; killing them with machine guns is bad. Riding through the air on the backs of pterodactyl-like creatures is good; riding through the air in futuristic helicopters is bad. Using scientific methods to turn you into an alien is bad; hoping that a magical goddess in a tree can perform the same trick is good. The only value of machinery is that, in a pinch, natives are allowed to temporarily employ guns and grenades in order to destroy the people who brought them and restore the planet's preindustrial tranquility. And this has to represent the ultimate irony of Avatar: James Cameron has spent half a billion dollars on the most advanced technology available in order to argue that we all need to abandon advanced technology and return to the simple lifestyles of ancient Native Americans and other noble savages. Well, if that's the way you feel, Mr. Cameron, why don't you abandon filmmaking and go live with the natives in Papua New Guinea, where you could assist them in staging the rituals that help to make their simple lives so much more satisfying than ours?

Cameron also conspicuously stacks the deck in arguing for the benefits of living naturally: when Sully first enters the Pandoran forest, the film acknowledges that nature is filled with both wonderful and terrible things when Sully is almost killed by two gigantic predators and by smaller dog-like animals. However, once the Na'vi resolve to teach Sully about their idyllic lives and benign philosophy, these dangerous animals completely vanish from sight, the forest is re-envisioned as a lush paradise, and the only perils involve the Pandoran habits of running madly along narrow tree branches and leaping across chasms (which would logically result in most natives dying from fatal falls well before they reached adulthood, but hey, this is a movie, and having them move with more reasonable caution would be much less exciting). Then, just when you have entirely forgotten that this wondrous forest was ever home to horrible monsters, all of them abruptly reappear — because it's revenge-of-nature time, and now they are the good guys since they are trying to kill humans instead of aliens.

A related irony is that the philosophy being espoused in this movie — give up your scientific devices, simplify your lifestyle, find happiness in everything that is natural — was once epitomized in the phrase, "Small is beautiful." Yet in Avatar, more often than not, large is beautiful. As if convinced that audiences would only feel they were getting their money's worth if everything was big, big, big, Cameron has focused his creative energies on one enormous construct after another: huge warplanes, towering fighting suits, twelve-foot-high aliens, monstrous trees, dinosaur wannabes, an immense waterfall, huge floating mountains . . . . After a while, your mind becomes numb, these objects no longer impress, and you long for more of the aforementioned little touches of the outré that were observed earlier in the film. Frankly, Cameron should have spent more time on rainplant and flitteries instead of flying tanks and thundering triceratops. (Yet this tendency toward gigantism may also be a subconscious byproduct of undertaking to make an incredibly expensive film that surely represents one of the most mammoth projects in the history of cinema; indeed, so many people contributed to this production that, for the first time I can recall, the closing credits did not place every name on its own line, but crammed related names together into paragraphs. Clearly, it would have taken much too long to list them all in the usual fashion.)

If there is a theme in Avatar which is not entirely threadbare, it lies in the notion that it will someday not only be possible, but even desirable, to give up one's natural identity and assume an artificial identity. Traditional narratives often argue that people should accept who they really are and should not try to be something they are not, as illustrated by stories like the Twilight Zone episode "The Trade-Ins" (1962) and the film Seconds (1966). But here, Jake Sully comes to reject his real life as a partially paralyzed soldier and embraces a new unreal existence as an athletic alien: mentally returning from one experience in the forest to his human base, he says that "Everything is backwards now. Outside is the real world; back here is the dream." Crafting and inhabiting a dream world, then, is being celebrated, not chastised. It might have been more interesting if Avatar had posited that all of the Na'vi, not just a few agents like Jake Sully, were originally created by human scientists as convenient devices to explore a hostile alien world, although they soon went entirely native and were inspired by the new environment to develop their own distinctive culture and beliefs; this would have made the entire race the embodiment of a human dream and might have made the unlikely pleasures of the Pandorans' lives, and their evident mimicking of the practices of pre-technological humans, a bit more palatable.

In addition, the process of profitably reinventing oneself undoubtedly had personal relevance to James Cameron, since Avatar represents his return to feature film directing after a twelve-year hiatus, and there is evidence that he regarded the task as his own rebirth as a new kind of film director. Prior to being formally accepted as a member of the tribe, Jake comments that "Every person is born twice. The second time is when you earn a place among the People." I wasn't keeping track of every single date in the small print at the bottom of Jake's video reports, but I believe that Jake's initiation and second "birthday" was exactly, or almost exactly, the two-hundredth anniversary of Cameron's own birthdate of August 16, 1954. And while I would not be enthusiastic about seeing another film like Avatar, Cameron's record as a director indicates that he rarely chooses to repeat himself, and he may be capable of next producing a film that would blend the technological breakthroughs of this one with a more original and meaningful story — that is, if Avatar is successful enough to earn him another 500 million dollars to play with.

Gary Westfahl's works include the Hugo-nominated Science Fiction Quotations: From the Inner Mind to the Outer Limits (2005) and The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy (2005); samples from these and his other works are available at his World of Westfahl website. His recent books include two collections of essays -- Science Fiction and the Two Cultures, co-edited with George Slusser, by various hands, and The Science of Fiction and the Fiction of Science, by the late Frank McConnell -- the Second Edition of Islands in the Sky: The Space Station Theme in Science Fiction Literature, and its companion text The Other Side of the Sky: An Annotated Bibliography of Space Stations in Science Fiction, 1869-1993.

Directed by James Cameron

Written by James Cameron

Starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribisi, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Wes Studi, Laz Alonzo, and Dileep Rao

Official Website: Avatar Official Movie Website

Gary K. Wolfe reviews Daryl Gregory

2009-12-13T21:26:00.000-08:00

Daryl Gregory continues to be amongst the most interesting of the newer writers to emerge in the past decade, and he's rapidly becoming one of the most unpredictable. His early short fiction, which someone (I think David Hartwell) described as "neurological hard SF" was often stunning in how it could seamlessly make SF concepts a function of character, but it wasn't long before stories like "Unpossible" and "The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm" began revealing a broad engagement with influences ranging from superhero comics to children's books. By his own account, Gregory's first novel Pandemonium was something of a mash-up of his favorite icons from the last half-century of pop culture, from O.J. Simpson to Philip K. Dick, and his second novel The Devil's Alphabet is something of a mash-up as well, but of a completely different sort. To be sure, some of the pop culture allusions remain — the working title of the novel was Oh, You Pretty Things, from the David Bowie song whose vaguely Nietzschean lyrics offer some foreshadowing of one of the novel's themes — but the mash-up here is mostly a matter of form and genre. On the one hand, the novel hovers around the sort of evolutionary hard SF of novels like Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio, complete with theories of intron expression and retroviruses, invoked here to explain a sudden outbreak of radical somatic transformations that overtook the residents of a small Tennessee town a decade ago (like Pandemonium, the novel is set in a kind of alternate present, taking place in the summer of this year). On the other, it returns to an earlier kind of evolutionary SF that we'd seen in novels from van Vogt's Slan to Sturgeon's More Than Human, in which the focus is more on the pariah status of the victims than on the biological puzzle, and on the inability of the larger society to cope meaningfully with the implications of the event. But then again, it's also a homecoming tale about a young man (unaffected by "the Changes") who has escaped his rural origins for a life in Chicago, but who is drawn deeply back into his childhood community, and his family, by a tragedy. Finally — and this is what drives the novel's main plot — it's a small-town southern Gothic murder mystery. No one can accuse Gregory of being a one-note author.

The tragedy that draws Paxton Martin back to his hometown of Switchcreek, Tennessee, is the apparent suicide of his closest childhood friend Jo. Like most of the town's residents, Jo had been transformed by the earlier outbreak, which has since been labeled Transcription Divergence Syndrome or TDS, although never adequately explained. A quarter of the town's population died, and the survivors began undergoing a succession of bizarre alterations: argos, whose bones lengthened until they grew to enormous height; betas, whose skin developed a wine-colored, seal-like texture; and charlies, who grew grotesquely obese to the point of near-immobility. Jo had become a beta, and Paxton's father Harlan, a preacher from whom he has long since been estranged, had become a charlie. A few, like Paxton, were unaffected. Initially, Paxton merely plans to attend Jo's funeral, but soon he grows suspicious that the suicide may have in fact been a murder, and he's forced to come to terms with his own past when the local residents, including his friend Deke and the town's shrewd but manipulative mayor Aunt Rhonda, persuade him to pay a visit to his ailing but immense father. Complicating matters further is that his father, like some of the other aging charlies, has begun producing, through rather grotesque boils in their skin, a strange secretion called the vintage, which seems to function as a kind of empathy drug for Paxton — who finds he can't bring himself to abandon his father again — and as a super-pheromone for the younger charlies, some of whom want to harvest it for the drug trade. Furthermore, reports appear that TDS has begun to reappear in other parts of the world, which draws the unwelcome attention of the government back to Switchcreek, largely left alone as an isolated curiosity until now. With a murder to solve, a father turned into a kind of living meth lab, most of his friends transformed into monsters, and the feds closing in, Paxton has his work cut out for him.

And so, to an extent, does the reader. While Gregory does an impressive job of keeping all these plates spinning without losing his narrative's coherence, there is still a sense that a bit much is going on all at once, and that some of those plates are starting to wobble. The SF theme, for example, seems to veer from questions of epidemiology (though it's supposedly non-contagious) to ideas apparently borrowed from George Gaylord Simpson's theory of quantum evolution, but then late in the narrative a suggestion is introduced that evolutionary paths from alternate universes may be involved as well. It's probably a wise decision on Gregory's part to avoid introducing a brilliant scientist who figures all this out, but as soon as our curiosity is piqued about these questions, his plot requires that he draw our attention back to the murder mystery (which does get solved), or to the rather complex and touching relationship between Paxton and his father, or to the dangers of a local drug trade, or even to the small-town politics of the town's self-appointed godmother Aunt Rhonda. The larger question, of what eventually might become of these evolutionary exiles as they move into second and third generations, seems to move us back into Theodore Sturgeon territory, and it's fortunately a territory that Gregory has mastered well. The novel's quiet ending, in a snowbound South Dakota winter, is haunting.

Read more! This is one of many reviews from the December issue of Locus Magazine. To read more, go here to subscribe.

The Devil's Alphabet

Daryl Gregory
(Del Rey 978-0-345-50117-2, $15.00, 384pp, tp) December 2009. Cover by David Stevenson.

The End of Civilization and Its Discontents:A Review of The Road

2009-11-29T19:57:00.000-08:00

by Gary Westfahl

Privy to no inside information, I cannot be sure why John Hillcoat's The Road, originally scheduled for release in December, 2008, has been repeatedly held back before finally appearing in late November, 2009 (just in time to ruin the Westfahl family Thanksgiving); certainly, there is no evidence of last-minute rewrites or hastily added scenes in a film that is, for the most part, a remarkably faithful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. But one factor may have been current events: at a time when the world seemed on the brink of an economic meltdown, executives may have reasoned, filmgoers might not have been in the mood for a depressing vision of the total collapse of global civilization in the near future. Now that the economic news is finally getting a little better, perhaps the producers thought audiences would be more willing to endure two hours of artistically crafted gloom and doom.

Be that as it may, it remains the case that, whether you are feeling poor or prosperous, The Road is a film that stretches the definition of "entertainment": in a world devastated by an unspecified catastrophe, a man (Viggo Mortensen) and his son (Kodi Smit-McGhee) wander through a bleak, lifeless environment desperately searching for food, like other scattered survivors, and the one thing separating the "good guys" from the "bad guys," it seems, is that the good guys are unwilling to resort to cannibalism. The only glimpses of bright color come in the Mortensen character's vivid dreams of a happier past, and there is one — precisely one — line in the film that will provoke laughter (strategically occurring during the film's modestly uplifting concluding scene). Everything else is grim: since no food is available, everyone must constantly wander in search of food and thus become homeless people, so the Mortensen character carries his and his son's belongings in the iconic device of the homeless, a shopping cart; they walk past money and jewelry lying on the ground since such things have no value in a world without food; and with gasoline no longer available, abandoned cars are nothing more than convenient shelters on cold and rainy nights. And this may be another reason why this film was originally planned, and ended up, as an end-of-the-year release: to lure people to a film that so conspicuously fails to match conventional expectations of what audiences like, the most viable strategy may be to launch it during awards season and hope that it garners, say, a few Golden Globe or Academy Award nominations to feature in advertisements.

Readers and filmgoers familiar with science fiction, of course, have visited post-holocaust societies many times in the past, and they will be intrigued by the ways in which this film, and the novel it is based upon, are in dialogue with previous depictions of future worlds driven back to primitivism. Oddly enough, though, the first science fiction film that The Road brought to my mind was 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), obviously not part of the post-holocaust subgenre. But its opening scenes also depicted thin, hungry representatives of humanity whose lives are a constant struggle to find enough food and avoid deadly predators. What saved Moon-Watcher and his tribe from threatened extinction was an alien monolith that taught them how to use tools that could kill animals (and would subsequently help them plant crops) to provide ample food, a boon emphasized in the film's numerous later scenes of people eating healthy meals. Their civilization may have many sources of discontentment, as Sigmund Freud noted, but widespread hunger isn't one of them. What has ruined the lives of the film's father and son is that, in a world without animals or plants, their ability to use tools is no longer helpful in obtaining food — except on rare occasions when a shovel can smash the lock to an underground chamber that might contain an unlooted cache of canned goods to temporarily stave off starvation. Both films, then, share a central point: the basis of human civilization is simply having sufficient food to eat, and when there isn't enough food, a civilization can't be built or maintained. One telling image in the film is the piano, a traditional icon of a frontier becoming civilized in American westerns: in the flashbacks showing the Mortensen character and his late wife (Charlize Theron), who committed suicide rather than carry on the struggle for survival, we see them playing a piano in their house, and the wife is described as an excellent player. Later, while rummaging through yet another house in search of food, the man lifts up a cloth and finds a piano; he stares at it, plays a few measures, and then covers it up again and walks away. Clearly, he is now living in a world that has no place for pianos (which may be why it is also a world where his music-loving wife could no longer bear to keep living).

Other science fiction stories about post-holocaust societies may include similar remnants of a happier, more civilized past — Walter Van Tilburg Clark's "The Portable Phonograph" (1941) also uses music, recorded on a vinyl disk, to represent the beauties that humanity had lost — but reminders of yesterday typically evoke other emotions as well: regret about the folly that drove people to destroy everything they had built, anger at the specific persons responsible for the disaster, and a determination to begin the process of reconstructing their vanished technological society. These stories manifest a desire, in other words, to impose a narrative of progress onto a narrative of apparent regression: mistakes have been made, lessons have been learned, and humanity now can again start moving forward toward a glorious future. McCarthy's novel, and this film, have no intimations of this kind. McCarthy refuses to say anything at all about what caused his world to fall apart; the film includes scenes of ongoing earthquakes and firestorms vaguely suggesting that it might have been a purely natural disaster but otherwise is also silent about exactly what happened. Thus, there are no fools or villains to condemn for humanity's sufferings who would logically inspire the hope that wiser, better people could do better in the future. There is in addition no suggestion that anybody is planning, or dreaming about, a restoration of civilization; the Mortensen character abandons the piano and throws away a picture of his wife and his wedding ring, essentially rejecting his and humanity's history as irrelevant to his current situation. When he says to his son, born after the catastrophe, that "You think I come from another world," he also seems to acknowledge that it is a world he can never return to.

The Road might be said, then, to recall George R. Stewart's Earth Abides (1949), a classic novel wherein most of humanity is wiped out and the survivors first prove unable, and eventually unwilling, to rebuild their vanished civilization. Yet Stewart's hero Ish is at least able to gradually assemble a community of like-minded people that evolves into a happy tribe, living off a still-verdant land using primitive tools like a bow and arrow. In contrast, the Mortensen character resolutely refuses to expand his two-person team. A telling moment comes when he and his son encounter an old man (Robert Duvall) who clearly represents a good-hearted soul and a third set of eyes and hands that might have proved useful to the pair of travelers; but instead of inviting him to join their family, the father grudgingly lets him share one meal, at the insistence of his son, and then sends him on his way, probably to die. Thus, the most heartening aspect of the film's conclusion may be that we encounter another small family which is, unlike the father, more than willing to take in additional members and will perhaps continue expanding to become a community like Ish's.

The question then becomes: why is the Mortensen character so unrelentingly hostile to people like the old man and, later, a principled thief (Michael Kenneth Williams) who might have become his helpful companions? One answer would be the issue of severe deprivation, which not only eliminates civilization but may even impel people to resist bonding with others as they fight to keep themselves alive. Ish, after all, found himself in a bountiful world where he never had to miss a meal and hence had no reason to feel competitive when encountering others. So, to explain why the other family was more open to strangers, one might seize upon the film's one sign of a coming revival of life, even though it is not a flourishing green plant (like the one which signaled Earth's rebirth in Wall▪E [review here]) or a soaring eagle, but rather a tiny beetle that flies from an empty tin can up into the sky. True, one might describe this image as a deliberately feeble and far from inspirational indication that the environment might be recovering from disaster, but it does offer modest hope that conditions may be changing so as to again allow people to stop fearing and fighting others and start befriending them.

But there is another possible explanation, one which may have been on the minds of the people who voted to give McCarthy's novel the Pulitzer Prize. Arguably, the Mortensen character is simply acting in the way that increasing numbers of people in contemporary Western society are acting: while perhaps fiercely protective of family members and close friends, they otherwise live solitary and cloistered lives, "cocooning" by themselves and regarding strangers with indifference or hostility. They certainly aren't starving, but they are, one could say, emotionally deprived. Following this line of thinking, then, the dreary, miserable world that the Mortensen character finds himself in is a metaphor for the sad, empty lives that isolated individuals in our own world are now experiencing; and his tragic fate represents a warning to such people that they need to change their ways and start behaving more like the adults in the other family who survive.

The only problem with these interpretations of the story is that all the communities that we do observe in this film are evil: a roving band of gun-toting looters, another band that hunts down and captures a fleeing woman, and a house filled with cannibals and their intended victims. Could it be, then, that the film is actually arguing that staying isolated is beneficial while forming communities is dangerous? If the Mortensen character had indeed invited others to join his little group, would they all have ended up bonding with each other by becoming well-fed cannibals? Are audiences, like the son is initially, supposed to be suspicious of the motives of that other family and see their apparent benevolence as nothing more than a flimsy disguise for their sinister plans? Such ideas seem counterintuitive, to say the least, but it appears possible to argue that, according to the visible logic of this film, individuals or small groups can generally remain good (although they may, like the protagonist, feel compelled to do cruel things in order to survive), whereas larger organizations invariably become wicked, which would make the Mortensen character a role model, not a cautionary tale.

It is also possible, admittedly, to downplay its posited broad arguments about civilization and human behavior and maintain that The Road is a simple story about a father's overpowering love for a son, which compels him to continue his journey and do everything he can to keep his son alive in a world where he would otherwise, like his late wife, prefer to die. However, while this theme is manifestly central to McCarthy's novel, it is the aspect of the film that I find least persuasive, which might account for the fact that, as my wife noted, the whole story is somehow less emotionally involving than one would expect. Despite a remarkable performance by Kodi Smit-McPhee, the son is not really a believable character; as anyone who has spent time with boys will attest, he is too patient, too stoic, too gosh-darn good to be true. When his father describes him as an "angel" and a "god," it signals that the character is more a symbol of all the values that the father wishes to cling to against all odds than a living, breathing person. Indeed, while I would never say this about the novel, it is possible to imagine the film concluding with a plot twist not unlike those in The Other (1972) or Fight Club (1999), with the boy revealed to be nothing but an illusion created by the father as a device to motivate him to maintain his struggle for survival.

In stark contrast to all of the portentous ideas that might emerge from pondering The Road, there are subtle signs that someone involved in the making of this film had a strange sense of humor, although the references are of a nature that will not immediately amuse filmgoers and thus spoil the film's mood; rather, one has to remember and think about them. Consider: soon after the son gets his father to affirm that they are indeed the "good guys" who are "carrying the fire" of civilized ethics, the son blows out a small torch they were using for illumination, putting out the fire. At one point, for no particular reason, the father takes his son to the house where he grew up and starts pointing out where his family put the Christmas tree and the Christmas stockings; thus, however marginally, The Road can be considered a Christmas film, befitting its holiday season release, even though it is otherwise the complete antithesis of everything associated with that subgenre. Like the novel, the film is deliberately vague about precisely where in America the man and son are traveling south, but in one scene the father shows his son a fragment of a map to indicate their progress toward the coast, and we see that they are approaching a coastal city named Outland. Because I can locate no evidence that such a coastal city actually exists, this may be a reference to Berkeley Breathed's sardonic comic strip about small-town America, Outland (1989-1995), to the 1981 film Outland (a version of High Noon in outer space featuring a lonely hero surrounded by villains), or to the World of Warcraft game's "extradimensional realm" Outland, constructed out of the shattered remains of an orc planet. And buried within the typically interminable credits is a line crediting the film's "Cranes" to one "Ichabod Crane"; and since no one of that name can be found in the Internet Movie Database, this must be a reference to the protagonist of Washington Irving's 1820 story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," another solitary traveler beset by evil forces.

Overall, in both large and small ways, The Road may not be an enjoyable film to watch — it will be quite a while before I will want to see it again — but it is a very pleasurable film to talk about and think about after you have watched it. In the milieu of contemporary Hollywood filmmaking, then, it definitely represents the road less traveled.

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Please note: a correspondent has pointed out that the credit for "Ichabod Crane" probably actually refers to a company, Ichabod Crane, Inc., which provides films with equipment. — Gary Westfahl

Gary Westfahl's works include the Hugo-nominated Science Fiction Quotations: From the Inner Mind to the Outer Limits (2005) and The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy (2005); samples from these and his other works are available at his World of Westfahl website. His recent books include two collections of essays -- Science Fiction and the Two Cultures, co-edited with George Slusser, by various hands, and The Science of Fiction and the Fiction of Science, by the late Frank McConnell -- the Second Edition of Islands in the Sky: The Space Station Theme in Science Fiction Literature, and its companion text The Other Side of the Sky: An Annotated Bibliography of Space Stations in Science Fiction, 1869-1993.

Directed by John Hillcoat

Written by Joe Penhall, based on the novel by Cormac Mccarthy

Starring Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McGhee, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, Molly Parker, Michael Kenneth Williams, and Charlize Theron

Official Website: The Road - In Theaters November 25

Paul Witcover reviews The Secret History of Science Fiction

2009-11-28T15:23:00.001-08:00

The seeds of James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel's ambitious, provocatively titled new anthology, The Secret History of Science Fiction, were sown in 1998, when Jonathan Lethem's controversial essay "Close Encounters: The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction" appeared in the Village Voice. Lethem asked readers to imagine an alternate history in which Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow won the 1973 Nebula Award — for which, by the way, it was nominated (Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama was the winner). In that alternate reality, the literary potential of science fiction was recognized and embraced both within and without the genre, with the result that the walls enclosing the ghetto of SF crumbled at long last. Obviously, that didn't happen.

Or did it? Kelly & Kessel have selected stories from inside and outside the genre to demonstrate that, despite the continued reliance of publishers on such marketing labels as science fiction and fantasy, "the divide between mainstream and science fiction is more apparent than real," and that "outside of the public eye," writers on both sides of the supposed divide have been producing work that, on the one hand, has the ambition and sophistication of literary fiction, and, on the other, makes use of the tropes of speculative fiction, though not necessarily labeled as such by writers, critics, or readers. This is the secret history to which the title refers.

It's a bold assertion, and I have a lot of sympathy for it. In fact, before I read this anthology, I was inclined to agree with it. But as I read these stories, I began to doubt it more and more, and finally I became convinced that Kelly & Kessel are wrong in a centrally important way, and that there really are substantial differences between genre speculative fiction of literary ambition and what is written outside the genre, even if it contains speculative elements. And I think these stories prove it: that is the secret history of The Secret History.

First off, these are wonderful stories, every one. And I applaud unreservedly any project that is likely to take readers outside their normal comfort zones — though I wonder, in this case, how many mainstream readers are going to pick up a book with this title; SF readers, on the other hand, will be drawn to it by that same title. This is a small but telling indication of the narrow yet deep fissure that really does separate speculative fiction from mainstream literary fiction.

It's worth giving the entire list of contributors in order to demonstrate how Kessel & Kelly have, for the most part, made selections that would seem sure to buttress their thesis: Margaret Atwood, T.C. Boyle, Michael Chabon, Don DeLillo, Thomas M. Disch, Karen Joy Fowler, Molly Gloss, James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jonathan Lethem, Maureen F. McHugh, Steven Millhauser, George Saunders, Carter Scholz, Lucius Shepard, Kate Wilhelm, Connie Willis, and Gene Wolfe. (I note in passing that the editors have included stories of their own: worthy stories, to be sure, yet I wish editors would refrain from doing this, especially in an anthology that, like this one, has a polemical purpose — even the whiff of self-interest detracts from one's argument.)

That's a pretty even split between writers mainly associated with speculative fiction, those with a primarily mainstream reputation, and those, like Lethem, Chabon, and Fowler, who slip back and forth between both camps with relative ease, regardless of where they started. The stories are presented mostly in chronological order, from Tom Disch's classic "Angouleme", which appeared in 1971, to Steven Millhauser's "The Wizard of West Orange", of 2008; I suppose the editors decided to begin in 1971 in order to include Disch's story; it's hard to see another reason why that date, rather than any other, was chosen as the starting point: indeed, the logic of their thesis would seem to argue for a starting date of 1972 or 1973, when stories nominated for the 1973 Nebula would have been published.

I did wonder at the absence from this list of such writers as J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Samuel R. Delany, Elizabeth Hand, Jeffrey Ford, Nalo Hopkinson, and James Tiptree, Jr., just to throw out some names from the SF side off the top of my head, each of whom would seem like a poster-child for the editors' thesis. Even stranger is the fact that, with the exception of the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, all the writers here are Americans. It seems ironic that a secret history of science fiction dedicated to the proposition that genre boundaries don't truly exist should attempt to prove that assertion from behind geographical boundaries. Also notable is the absence of writers of color. Shouldn't a secret history attempt to take minorities into account?

As I said, the stories are all strong — many of them are award winners, and at least one is so well known that it seems out of place. There is nothing secret about Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas". It is a widely anthologized story, taught in many high schools, and as such is probably as well known outside the genre as inside it; unless its inclusion here casts it in a new light, making a convincing argument for a fresh interpretation, which I don't believe is the case, I don't see why some other, less well known Le Guin story couldn't have been chosen. Yet interestingly, "Omelas" is the one story here from the speculative fiction camp that I think could have been written by a mainstream writer. It's a postmodern fable, not a piece of speculative fiction.

I'm going to attempt a definition here, or at least an explanation. Speculative fiction writers are apt to treat the subjects of their speculations as if they were real, no matter how outlandish and unlikely; thus, speculative fiction of the highest quality often has a unique reality to it. It employs the tools of mimetic fiction to ground and particularize its flights of fancy, whether they be technological or magical. It takes them literally. It concretizes metaphors. But when mainstream writers venture into speculative fiction, it's all too often either a day at the playground, during which they feel free to cast aside the mimetic conventions they normally hold to in regard to plot, character, setting, etc., or a trip to the Olde Curiosity Shoppe, where they can pick and choose among exotic settings, objects, atmospheres, etc., to use as symbols and such in their own stories, which remain highly mimetic in a traditional sense. I don't mean to suggest that this distinction holds for every story published by a mainstream or speculative fiction writer, only that it expresses something true and important about the unique quality of speculative fiction. Put another way, when mainstream literary writers or readers venture into what they perceive as the realms of speculative fiction, they follow the tedious bromide of the suspension of disbelief. When speculative fiction writers and readers do their thing, they engage the engines of belief. This is a distinction borne out again and again in the stories of this anthology. Let me give some examples.

Don DeLillo is a writer that many in the SF community regard as "one of us," or at any rate a second cousin once removed. And I wouldn't dispute that; his novel Ratner's Star shows a genuine affinity for science fictional ambience, and I think he's had a strong and salutary influence on many speculative fiction writers, myself included. But his story here, "Human Moments in World War III" (1983), merely drapes itself in the trappings of science fiction, beginning with that vaguely Ballardian title. The story takes place in a space station on which two astronauts go through their routines as, below them, an apocalyptic war breaks out. But really, there is no central reason for the story to take place in space. It could just as well be set on a submarine, or in a nuclear missile silo. Even the war is secondary: or, rather, symbolic. DeLillo is following the second course set forth above: he's made a trip to the Curiosity Shoppe. Perhaps that's too harsh; what I mean is that DeLillo doesn't take any of it literally; the settings in space and in the future are not important to him in themselves but only as vehicles to transmit that certain feeling of anomie and absurd estrangement so central to all his work. This is true of Ballard as well. But here's the difference. For DeLillo, the present is like something out of science fiction. For Ballard, the present already is science fiction, only most of us don't recognize it yet. For DeLillo, it's a simile. For Ballard, reality.

In "Descent of Man" (1977), T.C. Boyle follows the first course: a trip to the playground. In this antic, satirical romp, he skewers the conventional story of marital estrangement with savage zeal, setting up a romantic triangle between the nameless narrator, his wife Jane, a primatologist, and an ape, Konrad. The story makes no pretence at verisimilitude: it is hyperbolic by intent, full of clever allusions to other works of science and of fiction, with ironic hat-tips to Darwin and Edgar Rice Burroughs, among others. Boyle's magpie approach is textbook postmodernism. Readers are not supposed to take the characters or the setting of the story any more seriously than Boyle himself does; which is to say, not at all. The point is the author's cleverness, his wit and humor and jaded sophistication, which extends even to featuring an African-American character who speaks in the kind of blackface dialect that would normally, if we weren't all so cool and beyond that, be, well, kind of offensive, especially coming from a white author. The story is a performance meant to shock yet also to be applauded. And I do applaud it, though I don't shock as easily as all that. But I will insist that, whatever heart is beating beneath its shaggy hide, it's not the heart of speculative fiction.

Now let's look at two representative stories from speculative fiction writers. If Kessel & Kelly are correct, then there should be no difference between these fictions and those of Boyle and DeLillo beyond the superficial. There should be no way that an intelligent reader of Boyle and DeLillo, familiar with their work, could misread these stories in any fundamental way, even if coming to them for the very first time. We shall see if that's the case, or if, rather, some very specialized reading skills are not required — skills that readers learn from reading speculative fiction, because speculative fiction is written in a certain way, and demands to be read in a certain way.

Karen Joy Fowler's "Standing Room Only" (1997) is a remarkable story. Grounded in the most minute details of the quotidian mundane, which Fowler presents with the cool yet sympathetic exactitude of a Flaubert, it follows the day of a young girl in Washington DC — a girl who happens to be Anna Surratt, the daughter of Mary Surratt, whose boarding house was a meeting place for conspirators in the assassination of Lincoln, which took place on Good Friday 1865, the very day of Fowler's story. Little by little, the author, with exquisite control, introduces jarring elements into her account, elements that are inexplicable to Anna yet, to the sensitive reader, gradually add up to the realization that Lincoln's assassination has become a popular destination for time-traveling rubberneckers. Nowhere, however, is this stated explicitly. And so dependent is the realization upon an openness in the reader to the consideration of speculative fictional possibilities, that otherwise intelligent and acute readers, whose experience is limited to realistic, mainstream fiction, could potentially miss the climax and leave the story in a state of dissatisfied confusion. Rather than experiencing the exhilaration of reading a small masterpiece, the final revelation of which unlocks the story in emotionally moving and intellectually stimulating ways, such readers would feel they have instead read a pointless and failed story. Even if they do understand the time-travel aspect, they are likely to feel it trivializes the historic moment by taking it into woo-woo territory, reneging on what had seemed to be the promise of some small yet savory epiphany in a young girl's life. If this seems far-fetched, consider the number of mainstream readers and reviewers who did not recognize that Fowler's novel Sarah Canary might have been more accurately titled The Woman Who Fell to Earth. Fowler applies the imagination of a speculative fiction writer to Lincoln's assassination, and it doesn't result in a visit to the playground or to the Olde Curiosity Shoppe — it results in a visit to Washington DC on Good Friday 1865: yet also — and this is indispensable, because a writer of historical fiction could also take us there — to some distant, unknown, but not wholly unknowable, future. Because through the hints that Fowler drops in the story, readers can deduce certain facts about the future — our future — from which the time travelers have come: it's an integral part of what Fowler is up to, yet it's almost certain to be lost in its entirety upon a mainstream reader. The misreading is not because of Fowler's clumsiness or the reader's stupidity: it's due instead to a difference in the very DNA of speculative fiction and literary fiction, a difference that Kelly & Kessel want to gloss over. But to gloss over this distinction is really to sandpaper away the bumps and sharp edges, the grainy specificity of a particular application of the imagination that makes speculative fiction unique and vital.

Gene Wolfe's "The Ziggurat" (1995) is another time-travel story, though a very different one in aim and execution. But it, too, presents serious difficulties to a mainstream reader. The full complexity and ingenuity — not to mention the horror — of this bravura exercise in unreliable narration may be lost on those who are unfamiliar with the history of speculative fiction and its evolution as a literary form. The plot is too complicated to recapitulate here, but suffice it to say that Wolfe presents readers with a main character, Emery Bainbridge, whose view of the world, and women in particular, is atavistic, bordering on, if not crossing into, the misogynistic. He is at the very least suicidal, and perhaps murderous: the stereotypical angry white man who shocks everyone when he goes postal. In Bainbridge, Wolfe provides a devastating deadpan satire, yet also a poignant portrait, of that SFnal archetype, the omnicompetent man: a man out of his time in the modern world, chivalric, capable, a man of action and of logic, yet also, in the right circumstances, a monster. Wolfe sticks like glue to Bainbridge's point of view, yet he also allows us to see that Bainbridge's self-perception and account of the events that take place at a remote mountain cabin during a snowstorm are not to be trusted. At the end of the novella, readers are left with three possibilities: (1) Bainbridge is crazy and has just murdered his son, his second wife, and one of his two adolescent or even preadolescent stepdaughters, taking the other as his new wife, all while under the delusion that he is responding to an incursion of time-traveling females from a future devoid of men; (2) Bainbridge is perfectly sane and, with ruthless, cold-blooded efficiency, has avenged his son's murder, protected his wife and stepdaughters, and successfully — indeed, with admirable ingenuity and resourcefulness — met the challenge of an incursion from the future... met it and turned it to his own advantage by murdering some of the invaders, stealing their advanced technology, and keeping one woman as what amounts to a sex slave; or (3) some mix of (1) and (2). I find it hard to imagine a mainstream writer even conceiving of this story, let alone executing it. And I believe its subtleties, complexities, and ambiguities — to say nothing of the dialogue Wolfe is engaging in with genre writers from Heinlein to Joanna Russ — are likely to be lost on mainstream readers. They will understand that Bainbridge is not to be trusted in his explanations and rationalizations, but in doing so, they will either dismiss the time-traveling females as delusions, evidence of Bainbridge's insanity, or they will accept the time-travel aspect of the story but search for a symbolic or metaphorical meaning without grasping the truly horrifying implications that arise when it is accepted as a brutal fact: among which is the possibility that Bainbridge, the omnicompetent man, is ensuring not only his own extinction, but that of his entire gender, not just because of what he does but because of who he is. Bainbridge, as much as the women of the future, is trapped in a time that is alien to him, the circumstances of which conspire to make him monstrous. He is the real ziggurat of the title, not the spaceship to which that term is applied in the text. Here, again, the speculative fiction writer takes seriously, as something real, what in a mainstream story would be unreal: either a delusion on the part of a character, or a bit of literary artifice inserted by the author as a symbol or metaphor, an objective correlative standing in for the "real" reality of the story.

Could the editors have made their point with stories from other authors? Perhaps they could have done a better job of it. Steven Millhauser's "The Wizard of West Orange", about the unsettling effects of a prototypical invention being developed in Edison's laboratory in 1889, is one story by a literary mainstream writer that actually enters into the realm of speculative fiction in the way I've outlined above: it takes its premise absolutely seriously. And yet, there will always be individual mainstream writers who "get" speculative fiction. Michael Chabon is another example: he's written, and written about, speculative fiction before, and his story here, "The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance", is a wonderful bit of steampunk — but only because Chabon understands and respects the special qualities of speculative fiction, not because there is no such thing, really, as speculative fiction. It's important to stress commonalities among writers across genre lines, but after having read this provocative anthology, I feel more convinced than ever that those lines, at least in the case of speculative fiction — I'm not qualified to speak to other genres — reflect more than simple marketing categories. They, too, are real.

Read more! This is one of many reviews from the November issue of Locus Magazine. To read more, go here to subscribe.

The Secret History of Science Fiction

James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel, eds.
(Tachyon 978-1-892391-93-3, $14.95, 382pp, tp) November 2009.

Russell Letson reviews Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner

2009-11-22T22:09:00.000-08:00

With Destroyer of Worlds, Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner continue the Ringworld prequel/Known Space fill-in series begun in Fleet of Worlds and Juggler of Worlds. Set two centuries before the events of Ringworld, these novels reveal the background of some of the classic Known Space stories while also showing how the secretive, manipulative, hypercautious aliens humans call Puppeteers live on their mobile home system (as distinct from a mobile-home system), which is, as the first book's title has it, a fleet of planets accelerating away from the wave front of the all-sterilizing detonation of novas in the galactic core.

Once again the paranoid ex-cop Sigmund Ausfaller is the principle human protagonist, but this time his puppeteer opposite number is not the atypically adventurous, politically ambitious (and now very high-ranking) Nessus but the voluntarily exiled engineer Baedeker. This odd couple is joined by an even odder collaborator and companion, Ol'tr'o, a "16-plex group mind" of the starfishy-aquatic Gw'oth (a species introduced in Fleet), most often represented by one of its individual components, E'ro. Playing for the other side is one of the most formidable opponents one could have in Niven's universe: a Pak protector, the adult stage of the genetic great-granddaddies of humankind. Thssthfok, fleeing the Core explosion as part of an uneasy alliance of Pak refugees, gets separated from his clan and the breeders whose welfare is his reason for living, but even marooned on a primitive world or imprisoned naked in a bare cell he is a one-creature army of literally superhuman strength, intelligence, and subtlety.

The crucial problem is that the Puppeteers are not the only ones running away from the core explosion. The Pak homeworld was much closer (and in fact must now be sterilized), and there are waves of Pak ramscoop starships heading outward, destroying any possible threat or rival along their courses. One such is pointed at the Fleet of Worlds, and Sigmund finds himself in the role of protector of his new home among the liberated humans who once served the Puppeteers.

Probably the crucial Nivenian given here (yes, it's a collaboration, but it's Larry's playground and Larry's rules) is that of evolutionary forces as the primary determiners of species character/nature/behavior (and thus moral conduct). Protectors can't help being genocidal; Puppeteers can't help being extremely risk-averse (and curiosity-averse, and occasionally genocidal); kzinti are natural slave-holders and sometimes slave-eaters; and so on. As usual, the story is driven by the conflicting motivational systems and behavioral repertories of creatures inhabiting the same neighborhood – everyone wants to survive and breed, but each species take a different approach, and the resulting cross-species negotiations can get very, um, interesting. In the course of a dialogue with Sigmund, Thssthfok reflects on the differences between breeder (which includes Earth-human) and protector social protocols.

[He] remembered his life as a breeder, remembered giving favors and expecting favors in turn. He remembered the vague sense... that such social obligations somehow helped everyone.

With maturity came clarity and wisdom. You protected your family and your clan. You took what you could, and all that you could, to benefit your bloodline, but never more than you could defend. Nothing else mattered.

To seek allies exposed weakness and desperation. When you allied, you did so knowing the other side would betray you the moment the cost became acceptable. As the other side expected from you...

Just to keep things interesting, in the course of conflict (and in response to the urge for individual, as distinct from species, survival), characters manage to expand their repertories, introducing modulations, variations, and stretching of the limits of the core sets of drives and strategies. For example, without breeders to look after, a normal Pak protector will lose the will to live – lose appetite and starve to death. But some breederless protectors have learned to transfer their loyalties from their own bloodline to some other entity, generally the species as a whole. Thus do the Pak librarians, who preserve technical and cultural information across the periodic collapses of Pak civilization (and whose activities triggered yet another global war), and Thssthfok, who, having lost contact with his clan, manages to discover a cause that will keep him going.

Niven's stories are like games with increasingly complex rules and constraints and possibilities, in this case rooted in the interactions of five sets of aliens. The central problem of how to counter the threat of a completely ruthless, powerful, and (by human standards) treacherous enemy is counterpointed by the situation of the rapidly advancing Gw'oth, who face threats not only from the protector hordes but from their Puppeteer allies (who eliminate even the faintest threat as ruthlessly as any Pak, though more sneakily). And in keeping with the integrative style of this sub-series, earlier stories are worked into the mix, notably the tale of Phssthpok and the Brennan-monster from Protector (1973).

The result is an absorbing mix of problems and puzzles and conflicts, space battles and interrogations and negotiations, shot through with fresh takes on familiar tropes and themes. It more than holds its own in the Known Space canon, which ought to be recommendation enough.

Read more! This is one of many reviews from the November issue of Locus Magazine. To read more, go here to subscribe.

Destroyer of Worlds

Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner
(Tor 978-0-7653-2-205-0, $25.99, 368pp, hc) November 2009.

Yesterday's Tomorrows: A. E. van Vogt

2009-10-28T19:51:00.001-07:00

by Graham Sleight

Every time I write this column I try to answer, for a series of authors now considered canonical in science fiction, two questions. Firstly, are they worth reading today for pleasure? Secondly, were they of historical importance in the development of science fiction? No author I’ve discussed so far, and I suspect no author I ever will discuss, gets more different answers to those two questions than A.E. van Vogt. His work has been generously reissued lately, so it’s relatively easy for the contemporary reader to explore. There are a couple of especially important pieces of work: the sequence begun by The World of Null-A (1945/1948), the singleton Slan (1941/1946), the sequence beginning with The Weapon Shops of Isher (1951), and the stories subsequently fixed up into The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950). The NESFA retrospective Transfinite collects a generous and thoughtfully chosen selection of stories. Van Vogt had a long career, stretching into the 1970s, and since his death in 2000 there have also been "posthumous collaborations" with Kevin J. Anderson and John C. Wright. But the early work shows you most clearly what was unique about him.

The obvious place to start is "Black Destroyer", van Vogt’s first published story — it appeared in Astounding in 1939 — and, Gary K. Wolfe has argued, as good a marker as any for the beginning of the Golden Age of science fiction. It’s also the first of the Space Beagle stories. It begins like this:

On and on Coeurl prowled! The black, moonless, almost-starless night yielded reluctantly before a grim reddish dawn that crept up from his left. A vague, dull light it was, that gave no sense of approaching warmth, no comfort, nothing but a cold, diffuse lightness, slowly revealing a nightmare landscape.

Black, jagged rock and black, unliving plain took form around him, as a pale-red sun peered at last above the grotesque horizon. It was then Coeurl recognized suddenly that he was on familiar ground.

He stopped short. Tenseness flamed along his nerves. His muscles pressed with sudden, unrelenting strength against his bones. His great forelegs — twice as long as his hindlegs — twitched with a shuddering movement that arched every razor-sharp claw. The thick tentacles that sprouted from his shoulders ceased their weaving undulation, and grew taut with anxious alertness.

It’s not that there’s any one thing wrong with that passage, but lots of little things that throw you off. That exclamation mark at the start: isn’t that just artificially amping up the tension? Does tenseness flame along nerves? Do muscles press against bones or work with them? And so on. What you recognise, though, is that everything in that passage is designed to make you as a reader more excited. Nothing is done by half-measures. Every adjective intensifies the extremity of the situation: the nightmare landscape, the razor-sharp claw, the grim dawn. That’s the first thing to register about van Vogt: he’s a writer who will not calm down. His stories have lulls or quiet stretches, to be sure, but even then they’re always telling you about how urgent and important they are.

"Black Destroyer" is, characteristically, a story that sounds saner to paraphrase than to read. In the first pages, Coeurl watches a spherical rocket-ship touch down; humans step out of it. This is the Space Beagle, on a mission to discover new life-forms. Coeurl tricks its way on board by pretending to be a dumb animal rather than the savage predator he is. (He feeds on "Id energy," and it’s stated early on that he wants "to kill everything in the ship, and take the machine back to their world in search of unlimited id.") Coeurl does succeed in killing several crew-members, but ends up being tricked into launching himself from the ship in an escape rocket, realising that he’s doomed himself, and committing suicide. The paraphrase doesn’t, however, come close to the experience of reading the story. It alternates between the viewpoint of Coeurl and the human crew, each escalating in urgency as the narrative goes on. There is some tension — the reader is clear on the danger from Coeurl far earlier than the crew — but the main impact of the story is that van Vogt keeps throwing in new ideas. There are super-senses for Coeurl, a whole range of new sciences used by the humans, an "anti-acceleration" drive that propels the Space Beagle, and so on. Whatever the actual process of writing, it certainly looks as if van Vogt just created whatever occurred to him to keep the excitement going.

One way of understanding van Vogt is by contrast with the early Heinlein, who was coming into prominence at the same time. Heinlein was all rationalism and hardheadedness; van Vogt was transcendence and excitement at the expense of realism. As soon as you start questioning the logical bases of a van Vogt story, it very often falls apart, but that’s not the point. What exactly is the "id" that Coeurl feeds on? How do the Space Beagle’s "anti-acceleration" drives work? You are not supposed to ask these questions: the ideal effect is of surfing the wave, not asking about fluid dynamics.

There are several other Space Beagle stories in Transfinite, including "Discord in Scarlet", an acknowledged ancestor of Alien. Another sign of his influence can be seen in a crew member’s speech in this story:

"Just a minute!" Von Grossen, the plump but hard-boiled physicist, spoke. "Let’s get this straight. The Beagle is going to another galaxy on an exploration voyage — the first trip of the kind. Our business is to study life in this new system..."

You don’t have to go many steps from there to "to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no man has gone before." And once that realisation clicks into place, it’s obvious how much the original series of Star Trek owed to van Vogt. There’s a sparring but generally friendly crew, an episodic format, a frequent resort to previously unheard-of ideas to resolve a story.

One such unheard-of idea, present throughout the Space Beagle stories, is "nexialism," a supposedly synthesising meta-science advocated by one of the crew-members, Grosvenor. Although it’s very difficult to fathom what the content of nexialism actually is, what it does in the stories is give Grosvenor a shortcut to the right answers. However, unlike similar plot-signalling devices such as the Force, nexialism is a supposedly rational creed. One winds up feeling that the stories are rigged to favour those who believe in the wildest of van Vogt’s ideas. (So the reader is encouraged to believe, as well.) And if there’s a single root problem with van Vogt, I’d identify it as an unreasoning faith in the power of abstract nouns. Again and again there’s the idea that a word that sounds right, that seems sufficiently encompassing, can describe the world, a civilisation, or a problem, fully. Other things, such as characterisation or internal logic, take second place. Nexialism is just one such encompassing idea, and so is Coeurl’s "Id": the problem is also visible in The World of Null-A, perhaps van Vogt’s most famous novel. The Tor reissue carries on its cover a line from the New Yorker, "Fine for addicts of science fiction," as backhanded a not-really compliment as I’ve ever seen actually printed on a book.

The World of Null-A is set in a future where, supposedly, the dictates of Aristotelean logic have been surpassed. (Hence "Null-A," taken from Alfred Korzybski’s real-world doctrine of General Semantics.) With this step away from two-valued, yes/no logic, the world is now governed by computers, with seemingly idyllic results. The story follows the protagonist, Gilbert Gosseyn, through a series of adventures that slowly reveal to him the true nature of the world and, relatedly, his true story. (And so he’s also a prototype for that typical sf figure, the amnesiac superman.) As in the stories, van Vogt still keeps opening trap-doors under the reader each time they think they have a hold on the shape of the narrative. In the Space Beagle stories, though, that was a relatively contained problem: each tale (or episode) returned you to the frame-story of the ship. At novel-length, there’s a problem of revelation compounding revelation. So in The World of Null-A we get multiple identities, implausible captures and escapes, escalating jeopardy, all piled on top of each other so that by the end parsing what’s happened in the story is nigh-on impossible.

I try to steer clear of secondary criticism in these columns, and to present an unmediated view of each author, but with van Vogt I think that’s impossible. For a start, Damon Knight’s "Cosmic Jerrybuilder", a demolition job on The World of Null-A in In Search of Wonder, remains one of the great classics of invective in the field. Its charges are that van Vogt was wildly inconsistent, a poor characteriser, a flat stylist, and so on. I don’t go quite as far down the same road as Knight; van Vogt’s style seems to me now efficiently pulpy rather than actively bad. But a lot of his charges seem to me irrefutable. (It’s worth noting, also, that in the wake of Knight’s 1945 essay, van Vogt revised a number of works to try to address his criticisms. Most of the available van Vogt texts — and most of those considered here — are the revised ones.) On the other hand, the critic Leslie Fiedler (in a 1981 Eaton conference talk called "The Criticism of Science Fiction") argued that any account of the virtues of science fiction had to provide an account of what made Van Vogt good:

Any bright high school sophomore can identify all the things that are wrong about Van Vogt, whose clumsiness is equaled only by his stupidity. But the challenge to criticism which pretends to do justice to science fiction is to say what is right about him: to identify his mythopoeic power, his ability to evoke primordial images, his gift for redeeming the marvelous in a world in which technology has preempted the province of magic and God is dead.

The problem is that you can no more extract just the mythopoesis from van Vogt than you can extract just the strawberries from a milkshake. Van Vogt has, as Fiedler hints, been hugely influential on writers like Philip José Farmer, and Philip K. Dick; but I’d argue that what they took from him is what’s least interesting and characteristic about their work. That’s not to deny, though, that van Vogt does quite often find his way to the sort of mythic story-structure Fiedler was describing. Case in point: Slan.

The setting for Slan is a future Earth where human evolution has produced a tiny minority of "Slans" with abilities beyond the norm. Some Slans are visible as such because their heads have tendrils in their hair; others, with lesser abilities, do not. Slans of the first kind have telepathic abilities, and both kinds have greater than normal strength and intelligence. The book opens with its protagonist, the Slan Jommy Cross, walking with his mother through Centropolis. Even this basic activity reveals how much Slans are persecuted. Jommy’s mother is killed, and he has to shelter with a malicious old woman named "Granny." As he does, he grows more knowledgeable about the Slan condition, and the crusade against his kind led by a man named Keir Gray.

Of all the van Vogt books I’ve discussed, I suspect Slan will be the one that’s most accessible to readers now. It exemplifies what I often end up calling the Hollywood epistemology, that things are only real to the extent that they affect the protagonist: you have very little sense of a felt world present when Jommy (or a subplot protagonist called Kathleen) is not there. This reinforces the idea that only the Slan-world matters. One outgrowth of the idea that you’re the only real thing in the universe is paranoia, and it’s for its dramatisation of that state of mind that I think Slan may be of interest. We live, after all, in paranoid surveillance-state times. Even if the idea that "Fans are Slans" now seems pretty far-fetched, the idea that ordinary citizens might be persecuted by all-seeing "security forces" does not. The book is very good, also, on what it feels like to identify as an outcast. Here’s Jommy describing his family history to Granny:

"My mother and father were the finest people alive," he said softly, "And they were terribly unhappy. They met on the street one day, and saw in each other’s minds that they were Slans. Until then they’d lived the loneliest of lives, they’d never harmed anyone. It’s the human beings who are the criminals. Dad didn’t fight as hard as he could when they cornered him and shot him in the back. He could have fought. He should have! Because he had the most terrible weapon the world has ever seen — so terrible he wouldn’t even carry it with him for fear he might use it. When I’m fifteen I’m supposed to — "

He stopped, appalled at his indiscretion. For an instant he felt so sick, so weary, that his mind refused to hold the burden of his thought. He knew only that he had given away the greatest secret in Slan history, and if this grasping old wretch turned him over to the police in his present condition, all was lost.

I have no idea whether it was an accident or a strategy on van Vogt’s part that a creed of outsiderdom like that should chime so well with the way many SF readers evidently felt — both about the relationship of their genre and, perhaps, their lives, to the outside world. These days, perhaps, we understand that far more people live in the overt world but feel themselves not belonging to it, and so required to pass for normal. (Or, alternatively, not to pass for normal and say to the world that it’ll have to deal with the way they are.) But in Slan, this myth of a secret cabal of outsiders, reviled by but better than normal humans, feels as if it’s put into definitive form. The story itself is as roller-coasterish as ever with van Vogt, and the final revelations manage to be both extensively foreshadowed and pretty unconvincing. But you do feel he’s found the motherlode here, putting into fictional form a potent dream of childhood. I suspect, though, that most readers in 2009 will feel they’ve put away these childish things.

That’s not to say, though, that van Vogt shouldn’t be read by those wanting to discover how sf got to where it is currently, and Transfinite is probabably the most useful volume from this point of view. I reviewed it, at some length, in the New York Review of Science Fiction (10/03) and will try not to repeat myself too much here. Perhaps the first thing to say is that the book shows van Vogt to have far greater range than the books I’ve already discussed would suggest.

As an example, take "Film Library", from Astounding in 1946. The audience at a contemporary electronics convention is baffled by a film showing "an automatic electric stove that merely had to be supplied with the appropriate ingredients, and it would mix them and serve up the finished meal piping hot." A curious attendee asks the man who showed the film if he had any similar ones, and it turns out that he does: footage of a Venusian squid haunting the warm seas of that planet. Other examples are shown. Slowly, a partial explanation for these films becomes clear to the characters. They all originate from the same library of stock footage, whose films have been substituted with these mysterious ones, seemingly from the future. Only in the last page or two, though, does van Vogt provide a full account of what has happened. A film projector in 2011 somehow became synchronised with one in 1946 and "for one second of eternity two motion-picture projectors in two separate space-time periods lost some of their aspects of separateness, and there was a limited liaison." Exactly how this happened is not really explained, except through some flummery about time being "the great invariant." Again, the instructive contrast is with Heinlein, who even in his first story "Life-line" was treating ideas of space and time with more rigour than this. But van Vogt is trying for different effects. In the last scene of the story, the original film exhibitor is packing up his equipment, bemused and disappointed by the response to what he thinks of as a "novelty film": "Blue was that sky above, alive with the mystery of the immense universe. Corteya scarcely noticed."

That idea, of the wonders of the universe only being fully revealed to those who read van Vogt stories, is also present in "Recruiting Station" (1942), the longest of the stories here. It’s another time-travel story. The initial hook, a young woman being recruited into "the Calonian cause" is soon bypassed. Indeed, "Recruiting Station" is probably the clearest example of a van Vogt story that’s just a series of trap-doors, every so often letting the reader know that what they’ve thought is the frame of the story isn’t really. The trap-dooring is often done crudely:

He braced himself. Where the devil was this all-knowing machine?

The corridor opened abruptly into a plain, black door, exactly like all the other doors, that held not the faintest promised of anything important beyond.

Amazingly, it opened onto a street!

A street of the city of the future!

Garson stiffened. His brain soared beyond contemplation of his own danger in a burning anticipation; and then, almost instantly, began to sag.

There’s no question that the contemporary reader will have problems taking a passage like that seriously, and that the cross-temporal exposition that ends the story will also seem pretty crude. In fact, that’s a general problem for van Vogt: having started off, especially in his longer stories, so many potentially contradictory accounts of what might be going on, he has to spend their conclusions frantically knotting them together. So several other stories here have, in their last few pages, similar huge blocks of exposition as the author invokes previously unknown sciences to justify what has gone before.

Transfinite also contains a fair number of what might be thought of as "gimmick stories." Because these are often of shorter length, van Vogt doesn’t get too burdened by the need to keep shifting perspective every few pages. In "A Can of Paint" (1944), for instance, an Earth expedition touches down on Venus and discovers a crystal cube containing Venusian paint made from "liquid light." This has been left by the Venusians as an intelligence test to see whether Earth-creatures are worthy of their attention. The astronaut who discovers the cube fails the test, and is unable to get the paint off him, but does manage to pass on the news to the next landing-party. "The Rulers" (1944) is also a gimmick story, the twin premises here being a consciousness-altering drug and a history-altering conspiracy. It’s the sort of work where one can see the seeds of Philip K. Dick’s writings, but only faintly; and there’s a huge gap between van Vogt and Dick in how intensely felt distortions of reality are.

Perhaps the best story to finish with is "The Rull" (1948), which like the Space Beagle stories also became part of a longer sequence. Van Vogt’s strengths and weaknesses are clearly on display here. The story follows a human protagonist, Jamieson, at a point where our species has been involved in an interstellar war with the alien Rull for centuries. All sorts of devices that we now take for granted in such stories - "defensive screens" for spaceships, for instance, are introduced and used almost offhand. The telepathic Rull are an interesting creation. But the story itself, wherein Jamieson captures a Rull and discovers things about its nature that explain the way the war has been fought, makes the usual kinds of not-sense. Van Vogt takes a real-world notion (in this case Pavlovian response to stimuli) and extrapolates them into a set of ideas about how the Rull perceive the world that’s barely coherent, and seemingly made up on the spot. With this knowledge in hand, Jamieson can return home: "the Rull-human war was over". But, you keep wanting to say, it’s not that simple in the real world. And so it becomes very difficult to believe in these idea-packed but incoherent stories. Van Vogt may have created much of the language of science fiction, but not its grammar.

This is one of many reviews from the August 2009 issue of Locus Magazine. To read more, go here to subscribe.

The Voyage of the Space Beagle, A.E. van Vogt (Simon and Schuster, 241pp, hc) 1950.

The World of A, A.E. van Vogt (Simon & Schuster, 247pp, hc) 1948.

Slan, A.E. van Vogt (Arkham House, 216pp, hc) 1946.

Transfinite: The Essential A.E. van Vogt, A.E. van Vogt (NESFA 1-886778-34-5, $29.00, 573pp, hc) 2002.

This review was first published in the August 2009 issue of Locus Magazine.

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Yesterday's Tomorrows: Hal Clement

2009-10-18T23:36:00.001-07:00

by Graham Sleight

Hal Clement's work represents, in remarkably pure form, a particular tradition of writing SF. So to write about him is really to write about the strengths and weaknesses of that whole tradition. Thankfully, these three NESFA volumes collect much of Clement's most essential work into permanent form and allow the reader to get an overview of his whole body of work. Volume 1 contains three novels: Needle (Astounding, 1949), Iceworld (Astounding, 1951), and Close to Critical (Astounding, 1958). Volume 2 collects short stories from across his career. And Volume 3 contains his most famous novel, Mission of Gravity (1953) together with its sibling Star Light (1970) and associated shorter fiction and non-fiction.

Perhaps the place to start is the story "Uncommon Sense" (1945) from Volume 2, retrospectively given the Hugo Award. It starts in the middle of a crisis. Laird Cunningham, an explorer of star systems, is sheltering in a cave on a planet orbiting the star Deneb. His rocket has crashed there following sabotage by two of his assistants. They are now attempting to repair the ship and get it back to serviceable shape while Cunningham hides from them. But because the light on this planet is so bright, and the ship's hull gleams so brilliantly,

[Cunningham] was forced to keep his eyes elsewhere most of the time, and look only in brief glimpses at the dazzling metal; and in consequence, he paid more attention to the details of his environment than he might otherwise have done. At the time, this circumstance annoyed him; he has since been heard to bless it fervently and frequently.

The point is clear: paying attention to the details of your environment is never a mistake in a Clement story. In this case, what Cunningham discovers is the local lifeforms. They are small and crablike, and are seemingly preyed on by other, centipede-like creatures. He is curious as to how the crab-creatures can survive in this airless environment (he and the other humans are wearing spacesuits), and so investigates: the crab-creatures appear to have a kind of liquid metal for blood. As the blood cools to the planet's natural temperature, it solidifies, and Cunningham hatches a plan. At night, when his two former assistants aren't watching, he takes a couple of solidified rods of this metal and applies it to the hull of the ship where they had been welding. In the morning, when they begin welding again, they inadvertently melt the metal blood. As Cunningham had gambled, the smell of the blood attracts the centipede-creatures, who attack in a kind of frenzy. In the confusion, he is able to get into the ship himself, lock the other two out, and call for help.

However simple the central conceit, "Uncommon Sense" nicely demonstrates the central idea of Clement's fiction: investigating the world will enable you to make sense of it and, very often, benefit in the process. Cunningham may look, superficially, like a Heinleinesque Competent Man, but he differs in having the kind of detailed curiosity I've described. Heinlein's heroes tend to win out because of the strength of their belief, because they're right but the world doesn't know it (quite) yet. Clement's heroes tend to win out because their faith in empiricism is ultimately rewarded. (The unspoken axiom there, of course, is that empiricisim is sufficient to solve any problems that may come along. It's no surprise, then, that Clement's stories tend to be arranged so that this indeed is the case. The question of how often a situation like the one in "Uncommon Sense" might arise in everyday life is not addressed.) There are a couple more arguments that might be made against Clement's worldview. First is that empiricism tends to trump all other values — contemporary readers might balk a little at the scene in "Uncommon Sense" where he kills the crab-creatures just on the off-chance that he might find out things about them. The second is that he's not particularly interested in character. Characters have traits, to be sure — Cunningham is determined, the two men who have highjacked his ship are "villains." But any idea of a more rounded selfhood is very rare in Clement.

Many of the central ideas in Clement's work are taken from chemistry and (pre-Einstein) physics — he took a degree in astronomy and subsequently worked as a high-school chemistry teacher. This gives his work a peculiarly grounded feel, especially when a lot of hard SF today tends to make use of the wilder shores of physics. (Or, more exactly, it often takes the cool and wacky bits from contemporary physics, and then just makes up whatever new ideas it needs to enable the story.) Both the chemistry and physics are on show in Mission of Gravity.

The premise, famously, is that of a super-large planet, Mesklin. Because of its mass, it is oblate, very much flattened at the poles and bulging out at the equator. Gravity at the equator is about three times that of Earth; at the poles, 700 times. The plot itself is the barest McGuffin hunt. Barlennan, an insect-like Mesklinite, is employed by a group of humans to travel from the equator to the pole to recover data from a crashed scientific probe. So the novel travels through progressively more extreme environments. What the reader discovers very quickly is two things. Firstly, that Clement has the perfect expository voice: clear, lucid, answering all the questions you might have. Second, so do all his characters. So a lot of information is imparted in dialogue like this:

"It seems as though it should work, though," [Rosten] admitted grudgingly. "Just what sort of sled are we supposed to build for this ocean liner of your friend's? How big is it, again?"

"The Bree is about forty or fifty feet long and fifteen across; I suppose it draws five or six inches. It's made of lots of rafts about three feet long and half as wide, roped together so they can move freely — I can guess why, on this world."

"Hmph. So can I. If a ship that long had its two ends supported by waves while the middle hung free up near the pole, it would be in pieces before long whether it started that way or not. How is it driven?"

"Sails; there are masts on twenty or thirty of the rafts. I suspect there may be centerboards on some of them too, retractable so the ship can be beached; but I never asked Barlennan."

And so on. You're given all the information you need to visualise this ship, and more importantly to understand why it's shaped as it is. But the thing that makes this passage unconvincing is right there in the first paragraph: Rosten's "How big is it, again?" — so that the reply is, almost literally, an "As you know, Bob..." The elements of this dialogue that are supposedly inflections of character — Rosten being grudging, or making clear that he can work out the reasons for the boat's construction — feel pasted on to the infodump.

The positive side of this, though, is the thoroughness of Clement's worldbuilding. You realise that he has a peculiar talent for thinking through the second- and third-order consequences of his ideas. One of the fundamental ideas here is that because of its huge mass, Mesklin has a very high speed of rotation, and so a short day. Clement then goes on to the next logical consequence, that because of the high Coriolis force, a thrown object will always tend to swerve to the left. To take another example, because of Mesklin's low temperature, the seas are made of methane rather than water, and so because of the higher density of methane, hurricanes at sea tend to blow themselves out much more quickly than on Earth.

In his introduction to this volume, David Langford refers — I think absolutely rightly — to Clement's "staunch faith in universal principles and underlying reasonableness." To me, this explains two central things about Clement's writing. It accounts for the extent to which the world is always perceived as something that can be understood through the application of empiricism and science rather than, say, understanding of character or motivation. And it also addresses, as Langford notes, the criticism that Barlennan and other aliens in Clement aren't alien enough, that they behave and reason as humans do. (This isn't quite the case, and Clement is very good at making the Mesklinite culture reflect their high-gravity environment; but their phobia of, say, heights is again somewhat pasted on to the rest of their character.) Clement's most central axiom is that empiricism will always work, and that it will always trump whatever else might get in the way of understanding. You'll enjoy his fiction to the extent that you can share that axiom. It may be that, in these clouded and postmodern times, his positivistic clarity is more difficult to accept than it once was.

Mission of Gravity is accompanied in the NESFA volume by a number of associated pieces. Perhaps the one to start with is Clement's 1953 essay "Whirligig World", written for Astounding, which serialised the novel. Here Clement sets out the process by which he arrived at the orbit, size, and composition of Mesklin. This exercise of showing his working is fascinating in itself, of course, and also something of a contrast to a lot of hard SF these days is worked out. A lot of times in contemporary works, you feel that handwaving has gone on (especially handwaving using speculative quantum physics) to engineer the outcome the author wants. Clement makes no bones about shaping Mesklin so that it was a venue that could house a story. But he does so without any shortcuts in his logic or use of science.

The other novels collected in Volume 1 of the NESFA edition share the same worldview. Close to Critical, for instance, is set on Tenebra, a world where gravity, temperature and pressure are contrived so that water is close to its triple point — it may be solid, liquid, or gas. So oceans rise vastly at night, and much of their water boils away in the day. Needle is more involved with ideas of biology than Clement's other books. It's the story of two jellyfish-like aliens, crash-landed on Earth, with one ("the Hunter") a police-officer-equivalent seeking the other, a criminal. Both end up residing in human bodies in a kind of symbiosis in order to get around. The core of the book (and its main viewpoint) is the relationship between the Hunter and Bob, the teenage boy in whose body he comes to reside. From the moment when the Hunter first reveals himself to Bob, the boy has a kind of open-eyed curiosity and wonder at the situation that, you sense, was what Clement wanted his readers to feel about the world in general. Iceworld was the one of this trio that I felt was a little routine. The premise, as ever in Clement, is just an excuse to explore a particular scientific concept. Like Needle, the specific idea here is a cops-and-criminals one, with alien police trying to track an evil drug made on Earth — tobacco. The twist is that they come from a very much hotter environment than humans, so our planet is freezing and inhospitable for them.

It may be that Clement's particular interests, even more than most SF writers, were best expressed at shorter lengths. The stories collected in Volume 2 of the NESFA edition certainly fulfil the classic pattern of the SF story: a single idea gets set out, explored, and made sense of. "Proof" (1942), Clement's first story, is actually more speculative than most of his work — and also, in a sense, reverses the premise of Iceworld. It's based around a race that lives in the solar photosphere, and that has based its civilisation on the ultra-heavy element neutronium, which periodically needs to be harvested from the sun's core. Because of the temperature, their bodies are "simply constructed: a mass of close-packed electrons — really an unimaginably dense electrostatic field, possessing quasi-solid properties — surrounded a core of neutrons, compacted to the ultimate degree." One of the characters puts forward the theory that "matter — ordinary substances like iron and calcium — might actually take on solid properties, like neutronium, under the proper conditions." In the end, a sort of proof-from-observation for this is advanced, but the story works on two levels. Firstly, it's an exercise in irony: we humans know perfectly well that iron and calcium exist in solid forms. Secondly, as ever with Clement, it's a demonstration of method: you get to the right answer by applying logic to what you see.

Other stories collected in the second volume are more grounded in known science. For instance, "Raindrop" (1965) covers some of the same territory as James Blish's "Surface Tension" (1956) in its working-out of what the ecosystem of a water-filled environment would be. "Sun Spot" (1960) has one of the more kinetic ideas in Clement's work. It follows a group of scientists slingshotting themselves round a star while buried in the depths of a 30-billion-ton ice comet. Of course, the amount of ice that will boil off has been carefully calculated, and nothing happens in their journey that's not somehow explicable in terms of physics. And "The Logical Life" (1974) is another story in which a human (Laird Cunningham from "Uncommon Sense") has to figure out the nature of an alien world with the help of an alien. Hypotheses are tried out and rejected — at one point, Cunningham says to himself, "The geyser idea was good, but left out some facts that needed explaining." A good scientist, or Clement character, would never do that. At the end, Cunningham proposes an ambitious expedition to investigate the final hypothesis further; his alien friend replies, "I will be quite willing to listen to reason." In Hal Clement's world, there is no higher value.

This is one of many reviews from the October issue of Locus Magazine. To read more, go here to subscribe.

The Essential Hal Clement, Volume 1: Trio for Slide Rule and Typewriter

Hal Clement

(NESFA 1-886788-06-X, , $25.00, 518pp, hc) 1999. Cover by George Richard.

The Essential Hal Clement, Volume 2: Music of Many Spheres

Hal Clement

(NESFA 1-886788-07 -8, $25.00, 506pp, hc) 2000. Cover by George Richard.

The Essential Hal Clement, Volume 3: Variations on a Theme by Sir Isaac Newton

Hal Clement

(NESFA 1-886778-08-6, $25.00, 465pp, hc) 2000. Cover by Richard McKenna.

This review was first published in the October 2009 issue of Locus Magazine.

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In the Midst of Pandemonium, Profundity?: A Review of Pandorum

2009-10-02T07:10:00.001-07:00

by Gary Westfahl

If I were posting film reviews on Twitter, instead of Locus Online, I might limit my review of Pandorum to "It's I Am Legend Meets Alien!" and stay comfortably within the 140-character limit. All director Christian Alvart and writer Travis Milloy have done, one can easily argue on the basis of their final product, is to take the basic story line of I Am Legend (2007) (review here) — a few genuine humans struggle to stay alive while battling hordes of mindlessly homicidal, pale-skinned mutants — and transplanted it from the streets of a deserted New York City to the dark, dimly-lit corridors of a large spaceship — making their film suitable entertainment for filmgoers in search of another cinematic thrill ride, but a disappointment to those who would prefer a thought-provoking idea to an adrenalin rush. And it's all sort of a shame, since it transpires that lurking underneath this seemingly unending humans-versus-monsters slugfest is a reasonably interesting future history of the human race, and one suspects that Alvart and Milloy originally envisioned a film that would be slightly more cerebral — more like Sunshine (2007) or Moon (20090 (reviews here and here), perhaps, than an action-packed Will Smith spectacular. Fortunately, despite the hypothesized revisions in the screenplay to boost the body count in hopes of maximizing ticket sales, the fossilized remains of a different film remain visible.

That much of this film is a homage to — or ripoff of — I Am Legend seems indisputable, given that its mutants are virtually identical to their predecessors in their appearance and behavior; indeed, if they haven't already been paid off, the producers of I Am Legend could plausibly sue the makers of Pandorum — even the way the mutants set booby traps to ensnare humans and make them hang upside down seems transparently stolen from Smith's epic. As for other influences on this film, many will think of Event Horizon (1997), another horror film set in a spaceship which was uncoincidentally directed by the producer of Pandorum, Paul W. S. Anderson, but since he was also responsible for the lame Alien vs. Predator (2004), I suspect that Ridley Scott's masterpiece was more on his mind while supervising this particular project.

In defense of the notion that this film departed from its original design, one can readily detect the outlines of a film that omitted those derivative mutants (officially named the "Hunters" in the closing credits) and instead generated drama exclusively from the interpersonal conflicts of interstellar crewmates and the dangers of madness induced by space travel. After all, the title of the film is another of science fiction's made-up terms for the condition of "space madness" — hurriedly explained as some sort of bureaucratic acronym — and the screenplay retains dialogue suggesting that such insanity, not mutated monsters, represents the major menace awaiting long-distance space voyagers.

And Pandorum involves a truly long journey through space, featuring what science fiction readers would term a "generation starship." Some two centuries in the future, Earth is threatened by massive overpopulation and a deteriorating environment — one flashback reveals that humans at the time had to wear plastic facemasks in order to survive outdoors — so people are heartened by the discovery of an earthlike planet, Tanis, in another solar system. A huge ship, the Elysium, is constructed to take 16,000 people on a 223-year voyage to colonize Tanis (clearly, this future world has not mastered faster-than-light travel), though passengers spend most of their time in suspended animation — "extended hypersleep" — leaving only a small number of crewmates to be awake during rotating shifts (presumably, so that they can avoid succumbing to Pandorum). One problem is that reawakening crewpeople take a long time to regain their memories — so that when Corporal Bower (Ben Foster) and Colonel Payton (Dennis Quaid) wake up at the beginning of the film, it takes them a while to remember the information they need to figure out exactly why the ship isn't running the way it is supposed to; another problem is that a few crewmen have been violating protocol and staying awake too long, causing them to go insane. On the face of it, these seem like reasonably sensible premises that could lead to a generally palatable film in which Bower and Payton explore the ship, gradually learn why it appears to be out of control and running out of power, and finally succeed in restoring the ship to normal functioning and allowing everyone on board to complete their important mission.

But then there are those constantly attacking mutants, which simply don't make any sense at all. The official explanation is that the colonists were given some sort of special gene or treatment which would allow their bodies to adapt to the different conditions on Tanis, but in some people it somehow malfunctioned and instead made them adapt to the different conditions on the Elysium. However, to say the very least, it seems extraordinarily unclear why losing one's intelligence and becoming a feral cannibal would represent the ideal biological adaptation to life on board a starship. In any event, we have been told repeatedly that Tanis is an earthlike planet, meaning that no sort of special adaptation would be needed, and without saying too much about the movie's final twists, you have probably already deduced that its happy ending involves the main characters reaching the surface of Tanis and finding it a habitable home, with absolutely no physiological changes required. This serves as yet another indication that the mutants represent an inorganic, forced addition to the original story — recalling the egregiously incongruous "Mutant" belatedly inserted into This Island Earth (1954) — but at least that creature only appeared in a few scenes. In this case, the egregiously incongruous additions virtually dominate the entire film, reducing all other events to the status of subplots.

In order to appreciate Pandorum, then, one must ignore those silly mutants and instead focus solely on the shorter, better film they are viciously struggling to conceal. The film, of course, is yet another meditation on the folly of damaging the delicate environment of our home planet, and the potential need for human beings to seek salvation by traveling into outer space — points also made in worthwhile films with similar back stories like Titan A.E. (2000) and Wall·E (2008) (review here). Believe it or not, the film also shares a theme with the works of Octavia E. Butler — that humans do what they must do in order to survive, and one should not judge them for what they might do — and there are trite homilies about the importance of people learning to work together, such as Bower's eloquent "A little fucking solidarity goes a long way."

What is most provocative about this film, though, is what appears to be its curiously old-fashioned argument about the human habitation of outer space. In Pandorum, as in its cinematic precursors, space is portrayed as a dangerous and evil place, a realm of monsters and madness; space travel, while sometimes necessary, is therefore something to endure rather than something to enjoy. The designers of the Elysium saw fit to ensure that the vast majority of its passengers would spend the vast majority of their time asleep, while the only people awake would be small rotating crews of military personnel who are presumably hardy enough to actually stand living in space.

But there are two objections to make to the way this film seems to characterize space travel. In the first place, the Elysium is not a tiny spacecraft with a handful of crewmembers, as was the case in Alien and Event Horizon, but an immense space ark filled with 16,000 people. Science fiction writers have long realized that when we construct such vast habitations, it would be both possible, and desirable, to make the interiors of the vehicle resemble a park more than a prison. Why did the builders of Elysium make absolutely no effort to fashion a vessel with more pleasant environments, instead of a Nostromo writ large consisting of nothing but unadorned metallic walls, sterile corridors, and visible machinery? Did anyone ever theorize that space travelers regularly go insane in part because their quarters are so relentlessly and unnecessarily grim? Apparently, it never occurred to anyone in this future world that a large spaceship, properly equipped, might serve as a reasonably attractive second home for a human race facing the crisis of a dying planet — which was precisely the rescue plan carried out in Wall·E; instead, they believe the only answer is to transport humans to the only other earthlike planet available, even though it is many light-years away.

Mentioning Wall·E brings up another curious omission in the thinking of the people who planned this mission: recognizing the complexities and innumerable perils of space travel, both science fiction writers and NASA personnel have understood that astronauts will require constant assistance from advanced computers, typically envisioned in future spaceships as ambulatory robots or ubiquitous voices with traces of a human personality. In Pandorum, while characters are observed punching buttons and staring at screens that are presumably connected to computers of some sort, there are no signs of an advanced computer intelligence continually monitoring the entire ship, either because none was installed in the ship or because it has been completely disabled due to the ship's various issues — but both scenarios suggest a design flaw. Granted, Wall·E and other films point out that it is dangerous to become overly reliant on such computerized colleagues, but Pandorum seems to illustrate the opposite problem of underutilizing computers, as the human astronauts here are forced to overcome their problems entirely on their own.

Thus, even overlooking those nasty mutants, one can maintain that the makers of Pandorum are falsely portraying outer space as an horrific experience by failing to acknowledge two relatively recent conclusions about space travel: that the environments within spaceships will not have to be drab and confining, and that the difficulties of surviving in space will always be mitigated by helpful computer companions. Instead, either because they found it made for better entertainment or because they really didn't know any better, they have returned to the earlier, naïve vision of space travel observed in films of the 1950s like, say, It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), arguably the granddaddy of all space horror films.

But there is another explanation for these apparent lapses, one which may be giving Alvart and Milloy much more credit than they deserve, but it remains a possibility: the filmmakers may be deliberately presenting an inaccurate picture of space travel in order to provide commentary on people's stubbornly enduring misconceptions about what life in space will actually be like. Yes, some will immediately say that I am wildly overanalyzing one of this week's popcorn films, and I generally agree that critics should not attempt to excuse flaws in a work by arguing that the wise author was being ironic by intentionally making flaws. Still, in this case there is one aspect of the film which provides powerful support for this seemingly outlandish theory. Unfortunately, if I am to follow the implicit code of reviewing and avoid "spoilers" (which I have been endeavoring to do of late), I am unable to discuss it.

Perhaps, though, I can complete the thought and avoid an outright violation of protocol by discussing a hypothetical case. Suppose that, in a film about space travelers, it turned out that they were not really in outer space at all. Suppose that it transpired that, at any time during that film, the characters could have solved all their grievous problems simply by pressing a few buttons. Such a film, then, would not really be about the dangers of space travel; rather, it would be a film about the dangers of succumbing to your own unexamined preconceptions. As one possibility, such a film might turn out to be a reversal of the scenario of Robert A. Heinlein's "Universe" (1941) and other similar stories — not people in space who falsely believe they are inhabiting a world, but people living on a world who falsely believe they are in outer space.

Such a film might turn out to be much more interesting than a film about people who need to kill a bunch of mutants before the mutants kill them. And it would be a tragedy — hypothetically — if film producers, given the opportunity to oversee such a film, instead insisted that the screenplay had to be reshaped in order to foreground a much less interesting story.

Gary Westfahl's works include the Hugo-nominated Science Fiction Quotations: From the Inner Mind to the Outer Limits (2005) and The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy (2005); samples from these and his other works are available at his World of Westfahl website. His most recent books are two collections of essays — Science Fiction and the Two Cultures, co-edited with George Slusser, by various hands, and The Science of Fiction and the Fiction of Science, by the late Frank McConnell — and the second edition of Islands in the Sky: The Space Station Theme in Science Fiction Literature.

Directed by Christian Alvart

Written by Travis Milloy and Christian Albart (story), Travis Milloy (screenplay)

Starring Dennis Quaid, Ben Foster, Cam Gigandet, Antje Traue, Cung Le, Eddie Rouse, Norman Reedus, and André Hennicke

Official Website: PANDORUM - Now In Theaters

A Glimpse of the Future: A First Look at FlashForward

2009-09-26T11:04:00.000-07:00

by Gary Westfahl

If nothing else, watching "No More Good Days," the first episode of the new ABC television series FlashForward, suggests why many people who are devoted to science fiction literature and film pay little attention to science fiction television; for even more so than films, television regularly displays a visceral aversion to all aspects of the genre that make it uniquely interesting.

Series creators and producers Brannon Braga and David S. Goyer did begin promisingly by purchasing the rights to a novel by a noteworthy science fiction writer, Robert J. Sawyer's Flashforward (1999); however, when the new paperback edition of the book says only that it was the "Inspiration for the Hit ABC TV series," one realizes immediately that the series will not be a faithful adaptation. True, the series employs the basic premise of the novel: everyone on Earth blacks out for about two minutes and has visions of their futures. And the experiences of certain characters in the novel are replicated: a woman sees herself with a man other than her current partner; a widely separated man and woman have the same vision of the two of them together; and one man sees nothing at all, leading to the grim conclusion that he must be dead in the future.

However, science fiction stories often focus on the drama of investigating mysterious phenomena in the universe, and accordingly employ scientists as protagonists — in the case of Flashforward (the book), physicist Lloyd Simcoe, colleague Theo Procopides, and Simcoe's fiancée, engineer Michiko Kumora, who work at CERN's Large Hadron Collider and immediately deduce that its high-energy experiment aimed at detecting the Higgs boson somehow must have caused the blackouts and the visions. But one can readily imagine television executives blanching at such a scenario: "A hit television series about scientists? Who live in Switzerland? Give me a break!" Instead, Brannon and Goyer prudently replaced Simcoe, Procopides, and Kumora with two FBI agents based in Los Angeles, Mark Benford (Joseph Fiennes) and Demitri Noh (John Cho), who are assigned to investigate the FlashForward, and Benford's wife Olivia (Sonya Wagner), a beautiful surgeon who works at a local hospital. Thus, if the obvious resonances with Lost were not sufficiently persuasive, producers could endeavor to sell the series by exclaiming, "It's 24 Meets Grey's Anatomy!" And focusing a series on the conflict between humans and a cosmos reluctant to yield its secrets would never do; instead, the conflict must be between good guys and bad guys. Hence, while in the novel all video and audio records of what occurred during the blackouts are blank, the series allows one character to survey all such records and find a video of a single man walking around a baseball stadium during the blackout — a man immediately labeled "Suspect Zero" who creates the exciting possibility that the FlashForward was all some sort of strange terrorist plot. (Did I mention 24?) And don't hold your breath waiting for any intriguing scientific ideas regarding what might have caused the phenomenon; for while this episode does briefly mention NASA investigating "solar flares" and other possible factors, the scientific explanation most emphatically presented in the episode is that it was all the work of God.

One might also wonder why the visions in the novel, which were of life twenty or so years in the future, were replaced in the series by visions of life only six months in the future. Well, for one thing, the change lays the groundwork for a thrilling first-season finale in which characters advance to the moment of their visions and finally discover if they were accurate or not (and, if the series is renewed, to presumably experience, as in the novel, some sort of second FlashForward). In addition, the characters in the novel reported observing some new household technologies and learning about new political developments, which might be too disconcerting for a mass audience, so having visions that are only six months ahead allowed producers to present images of a future that is identical to the present — precisely the sort of future that most people prefer to envision.

Still, like the visions experienced by these characters, a first episode of a series provides only a fleeting glimpse into its future; no one watching "The Man Trap," the first aired episode of Star Trek, could have predicted that the series would become an enduring monument in popular culture, and there are reasons to hope that FlashForward might eventually offer viewers some "good days" — or at least, some better days than this one. David S. Goyer and Brannon Braga have track records in writing and producing science fiction film and television which suggest that they are capable of rewarding work in the genre, and the first episode includes characters seen only briefly who will be more fully developed in later episodes and may take the series in more interesting directions than ongoing efforts to track down the evil terrorists who might be responsible for the FlashForward. Suffice it to say that I'm willing to give this series a second look, which is more than I would say about most of the television series I've encountered in recent years.

Gary Westfahl's works include the Hugo-nominated Science Fiction Quotations: From the Inner Mind to the Outer Limits (2005) and The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy (2005); samples from these and his other works are available at his World of Westfahl website. His most recent books are two collections of essays — Science Fiction and the Two Cultures, co-edited with George Slusser, by various hands, and The Science of Fiction and the Fiction of Science, by the late Frank McConnell — and the second edition of Islands in the Sky: The Space Station Theme in Science Fiction Literature.

"No More Good Days." FlashForward. New York: ABC-TV, September 24, 2009.

Series created and produced by Brannon Braga and David S. Goyer, "inspired" by the novel Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer

Episode directed by David S. Goyer

Episode written by David S. Goyer and Brannon Braga

Series starring Joseph Fiennes, John Cho, Sonya Wagner, Zachary Kingston, Jack Davenport, Dominic Monaghan, Peyton List, Brian O'Byrne, Christine Woods, Courtney B. Vance, and Bryce Robinson

Official Website: ABC.com - FlashForward

Howard Waldrop & Lawrence Person Review 9

2009-09-13T20:49:00.001-07:00

Both: Given the visuals and origin of 9, we had high hopes for this. High enough that we felt it wise to dial those expectations down several notches before seeing it, lest we be disappointed.

We didn't dial them down far enough.

Lawrence Person: I've been looking forward to this movie for two years. As for why, before I can talk about 9 the feature film, I have to talk about 9 the short film.

The original short film is a real masterpiece. Clocking in at just over nine minutes, it told, in non-linear fashion and without words, the story of a horrible mechanical thing hunting small canvas bag people and stealing their souls, and the efforts of the titular protagonist to fight it. It was clever, original, beautiful to look at, utterly gripping, filled with pathos, terror, wonder, and the sense of a fascinating back-story beyond the boundaries of the film's frame. It was a worthy nominee for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, and after seeing it, Tim Burton gave creator/animator/writer/director Shane Acker the go-ahead to turn the short into the feature film.

Parts of 9 the feature film retain the short film's virtues, but much of the rest falls woefully short of the magic of the original.

Howard Waldrop: This reminds me of nothing so much as Hugh Harmen's Academy Award-nominated 1939 cartoon Peace on Earth, as done by a creepy stop-motion iconoclast like Ladislaw Starewicz or Jan Svankmajer. (Warning: 3 seconds of full frontal animated clay nudity in that link.)

The surviving intelligences of a machine-human war seem to be sewn together with burlap 'toe sacks, and have been made in a series. The film is about all of them and their world, but mostly concerns 9.

The CGI is excellent. I was stuck in a D-Box seat; even that didn't detract from the movie. (It starts out quietly, but soon there are enough sounds and explosions to please the worst gamer who ever was or ever could be.)

LP: The look of the film is truly gorgeous, and hats off to Acker and the CGI team at Focus Films (or their subcontractors). If the jury-rigged, burnished, Steampunk-by-way-of-World War II look of the film appeals to you, it might very well be worth seeing merely on that basis alone. In this it's a lot like MirrorMask: the visuals are much more interesting and original than the plot. But anyone working in visual arts or computer animation will get more than their money's worth out of the ticket price.

And the first ten minutes of the films are very effective, with our tiny protagonist waking up in a half-destroyed house with no memory, no voice, and no idea what's going on.

HW: 9, by (his?) arrival, upsets the status quo (which seems to be Run and Hide). He first meets 2, then ends up with 1, the leader of the group. There's also a Mord the Executioner equivalent (8), who looks like a Golem, or burlap version of Bibendum, the Michelin Man.

LP: They live in an abandoned cathedral over which 1 rules in his pope hat and robe with all the subtlety of Jonathan Edwards and none of his better lines. There's also what appears to be a World War II-era bomber (possibly a B-24) from the final war against the machines crashed into the cathedral, which tells you very quickly that 9's world is not our own. (That, and the alchemical trappings, make it very clear that this is A Fable and not science fiction. And speaking of fables, there's an explicit shout-out to The Wizard of Oz.)

HW: Because 9 is inquisitive and naïve, things begin to go very badly very quickly. We meet the rest of the group while their world starts falling apart. Big problem: A dormant factory once used to manufacture war machines comes back on line: soon everywhere is covered with bio-mechanical versions of raptors, spiders and less-classified things. Some of them are right out of Bosch and Breughel (and, like Bosch, the director has a Thing for knives...).

LP: Some of the monsters are very imaginative. The first one we meet (a mecho-skeletal horror known only as "The Beast"), is the one from the short film, and is every bit as menacing here, and possibly even more so in its reborn form as a sort of canvas hypnoworm with some truly evil adaptive camouflage . But beyond The Beast, most of the monsters here seem to owe some degree of debt to machine intelligences in The Matrix movies, right down to the multiple glowing red eyes.

HW: There's some pretty exciting stuff here; it's repeated often enough you want something else to happen. Eventually, it does.

LP: The struggles between the 9's brethren and their mechanical foes start out quite gripping (especially given how tiny our heroes are; all of them easily fit inside a single army helmet), but quickly grow repetitive. As do the circular arguments between 1 and 9.

HW: I wasn't bored; I was somewhat let down by the last ten minutes, a sort of feel-better-about-things-coda, like the last scenes of a John Ford cavalry movie where all the dead soldiers ride across the sky...

LP: The worst thing about the film is the dialog, which falls utterly flat in almost every scene. This is something of a shock, since screenplay writer Pamela Pettler did a much better job in both Corpse Bride and Monster House.

Even more surprising is the somewhat lackluster voice acting in many of the scenes, especially given the quality of actors assembled here. Jennifer Connelly has fun (and the best lines) in her role, and Martin Landau and John C. Reilly bring their diminutive characters to life. But Elijah Wood and Christopher Plummer are allowed to get away with generally unsubtle, one-note performances, and I think Acker has to take the blame here, as both have done much better. (One of the many similarities with Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, another labor-of-love feature debut by an animator-turned-director.)

HW: Good thing I wasn't 8 years old when I saw this. I would think it was one of the best movies ever made and would be looking for more just like it. Because I'm all grown up, I know better.

LP: This is another film I really wanted to be great, or at least very good, and it just turned out OK. It's short and reasonably entertaining, but far less original and emotionally involving than I had hoped. Howard's right: This is a great movie for the 8-12 year old set, much like Monster House, but like that film, the menace and violence may be too intense for younger viewers. (And unlike Monster House, it wasn't marketed as a YA film.) Teenagers may enjoy it too, but many adult viewers are likely to find that the non-visual aspects have a ho-hum, by-the-numbers quality to them. You've seen this plot too many times before. And the ending is more than a little sappy. (Though not as irritating as The Last Mimzy.)

If you haven't already seen the short film, you might want to see the feature film first, because just about everything good about the feature film is contained in the short film, with none of the irritations. (But either way, you should see the short film; it's still great.)

Directed by Shane Acker

Written by Pamela Pettler (script) and Shane Acker (story)

Starring the voice talent of Elijah Wood, Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, John C. Reilly, Crispin Glover , Jennifer Connelly, Fred Tatasciore, Alan Oppenheimer, Tom Kane, Helen Wilson

Official Website: 9 | Film Overview