Stefan Dziemianowicz reviews Peter Straub

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.

Faren Miller reviews N.K. Jemisin

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.

Adrienne Martini reviews Connie Willis

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.

Jeff VanderMeer on The Best of 2009

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).

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).

Faren Miller reviews Kit Whitfield

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.

Yesterday's Tomorrows: Brian Aldiss

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.