Asimov's SF, October-November 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  But even that would be very wrong.

  For one thing, Millar's fairies are no more homosexual as a group than a general cross-section of humanity, and for another they are literally, not metaphorically or pejoratively, fairies—little people from the British Isles, and as it turns out from China and Africa and Italy too, among other places, either long term denizens of their more or less ethnically assorted immigrant ghettos in Manhattan, or plunked down in the Big Apple from the Auld Sod by adventure or misadventure.

  Nor are Millar's fairies all that good by the conventional moral standards of the conventional genre in which such fey flying personages are generally found. A good many of them are drunks, most of them are not above petty thefts and swindles—not to mention angry musical rivalries—and two of them are would-be punk rockers and obsessive fans of the New York Dolls and the Ramones.

  Most of the action takes place in the more or less contemporary East Village, with side trips to Central Park, Harlem, Little Italy, and Chinatown, for some converse with talking animals and faerie ethnic gang warfare.

  And speaking of warfare, one of the reasons some of the fairies find themselves refugees in New York has to do with a guerilla war among the fairies back in Britain, between the libertarian more or less hippie traditionalists and a fairy king and his evil Iago who have established a modern corporate capitalist fairy fascist state and who eventually invade New York fairyland with fairy mercenaries from Ireland.

  Oh yes, there are three human protagonists mixed up with the doings of the fairies; a Slum Goddess from the Lower East Side and a fat slob obsessed with TV porn channels who find fairies crashing in their pads, and a crazed bag lady who believes she is a general in an ancient Persian army.

  As you have perhaps surmised, The Good Fairies of New York fits not at all into an existing commercial genre, nor could any spinmeister conceivably create one to contain it. Nor does it even merely cross or break genre boundaries; it's written as if Martin Millar was entirely ignorant of such apparatus, or if he wasn't, that he just didn't give a shit.

  And the style in which Millar has written the novel, the angle or angles of attack, even the moral slants, fit no easy expectations, conventional consistency or consistent literary conventions. This is a fantasy novel and a piece of “street fiction,” a comedy and a political novel in fairly angry earnest, full of the lore of British, Scottish, and English folk music and hardcore punk.

  The Good Fairies of New York deliberately defies and blows riffs on any number of expectations of any number of genres, from the title on in; a defiantly but rather gently humorous piss-take on them.

  You either like this sort of thing—or rather this novel, since there is really no sort of thing that The Good Fairies of New York is one of—or you don't. Or some aspects please you greatly while others make you groan, depending on your individual constellation of literary tastes. The point is that this is a very individual novel, a boutique novel, if you will, highly unlikely to appeal to a mass audience of McFantasy fans or those who buy their reading matter in literary Wal-Marts.

  Can there be a place for such a novel in a commercial SF line? Meaning an imprint of one of the handful of corporate conglomerates that dominate the racks in the chains? The major bookstore chains whose orders dominate their distribution expectations, which control their pro-spective print runs, which determine unit cost and whether there is any hope of turning a profit?

  Which determine their decision as to whether to buy a novel or not, irrespective of literary quality?

  Crank something like The Good Fairies of New York through this accounting software and the answer comes up No Way. Leaving it to the small press, whose commercial expectations are modest, whose advances are therefore minuscule, to buy according to taste and instinct, as was the industry norm in days of yore, throw a hail mary from inside the twenty-yard line, and hope for the best.

  Liz Williams’ The Demon and the City, on the other hand, is something that might have been publishable in a major commercial SF line, and all the more so since Williams has been published in two of them, were it not the second novel in the Detective Inspector Chen series, the first of which was also published by Night Shade Books, with a third announced as forthcoming in the “Other Books by Liz Williams” page.

  I ordinarily loathe this sort of thing, and more or less give an automatic bypass to the second volume in a series I've never heard of that promises to be open-ended, by a writer I've never heard of, and whose first volume I haven't read.

  However....

  However, the publisher's description gave the fictional locale as “Singapore Three,” whatever that might be. I had fairly recently been in Singapore itself, where my interest in researching a possible novel, or, heaven help me, a series of novels, about the incredible but true exploits of the fifteenth century Chinese admiral Zhen He was rekindled. I am generally fascinated by things Chinese, so despite all of the above, I gave The Demon and the City a more careful look.

  And was hooked.

  What hooked me was not so much the story line, which, being that of a detective novel, is at least nominally that of a murder mystery, but the characters, the terrific job of world-building that Williams has done, and beyond that, the world she has built.

  The Inspector Chen after whom the series is named is mostly on vacation during The Demon and the City, and the most prominent, if hardly the only, viewpoint character is his assistant cop, Zhu Irzh, a demon on loan to the Singapore Three police force from Hell.

  The McGuffin is, of course, a murder, not of a particularly prominent personage, but of a somewhat demonic nature, which casts suspicion on Zhu himself even while he is investigating it. The case leads him deeper and deeper into the cyber, political, and religious machinations and struggles for dominance and/or the very continued existence of Singapore Three among humans, the gods and goddesses of more than one Heaven, and the forces of various factions of Hell, so complex and arcane that I will not even bother to make a futile attempt at a plot summary.

  Where or when Singapore Three is or whatever happened to Singapore Two and Singapore One is never gone into in The Demon and the City. For all I know it might or might not be explained in Snake Agent, apparently the first Detective Chen novel, but as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter. And the fact that it doesn't matter, and that The Demon and the City would and does work quite well without any reference at all to anything outside itself and its Singapore Three is part of the charm of the novel—a central part, at least for me, and I would imagine to most readers who come to it cold.

  Williams's Singapore Three and the heavenly, hellish, and cyber realms that surround it and interpenetrate it are a self-contained literary universe unto themselves. And an exceedingly complex and multi-layered one.

  On a horizontal level, Singapore Three is a technologically and, particularly netwise, advanced version of the Singapore in our continuum, and like our Singapore it is an interpenetrating mélange of Chinese, Malay Muslim, and Hindu Indian populaces and subcultures.

  On a vertical level, various celestial beings and hellish demons not only mingle with the human population but, like Zhu, can hold jobs, have their own bars and hangouts, and can be captains of industry.

  And it's even more complex than that. In the literary universe of Singapore Three, not only are gods and demons quotidianly real, not only do heaven and hell do economic and political monkey business with the human level, it's really heavens and hells in the plural, for every pantheon—traditional Chinese, Hindu, Muslim, whatever—is a reality that can interact with any other reality.

  And however uncomfortable I may feel blowing my own horn in this regard, here it's necessary to say that I am rather conversant with these Eastern religions, mystical systems, cultures, and so forth, so that I can tell you that Liz Williams does a wonderful job of making all of it real down to the plethora of small telling details, and then extrapolating from it.

  Here then is an open-ended series that could go on
successfully endlessly, with each novel standing on its own and easily enjoyable by readers not conversant with what has gone before, because all that connects the episodes is not back story but the detective, in this case Chen, and the milieu in which he operates. Indeed, in The Demon and the City, “Detective Inspector Chen novel” or not, Zhu is the main character, and Chen does not even appear until late in the novel. So it is Singapore Three which is really the essential connective element.

  This, of course, while a rare format for a science fiction or fantasy series, is the common strategy of the open-ended detective (noir, mystery, polar, call it what you will) series, with a detective or whatever out to solve a crime or a series of crimes, murder more often than not, in his or her characteristic milieu, and we will pursue this a bit later with Charlie Huston's No Dominion.

  For the moment, suffice it to say that while it is set in a milieu that is a series of interpenetrating fantasy realities rendered with science fictional verisimilitude, formwise, plotwise, characterwise, The Demon and the City is an episode in a detective novel series, and proclaimed as such, and that this strategy has produced many, many ongoing commercial successes.

  So why have The Demon and the City and the other episodes of the Detective Inspector Chen series not been published in a major SF line whose editors would seem to have to be pretty brain dead not to see that the series would be commercially viable if published properly and literarily soulless not to see that it is literarily worthy?

  Quien sabe?

  Williams has had other works published in major SF lines, so it can't be the first novelist's lack of entrée. So perhaps, in a way somewhat similar to what seems to have happened to Alan Dean Foster and Sagramanda, which we will get to later, there is a literarily commercial (or commercially literary?) reason. To wit, that the Detective Inspector Chen series is at once fantasy with a kind of science fictional esprit, set in an unfamiliar fictional universe extrapolated from and within non-western cultures, and a mystery series in form, and therefore editors and publishing executives of commercial genre lines, straitjacketed as they are by narrow genre marketing parameters, couldn't figure out what genre to stick it into, how to package it, or how to market it.

  Bringing us to Charlie Huston's No Dominion, the only novel under this column's consideration that has been published by a major commercial SF publisher, Del Rey. Well, maybe not exactly. Del Rey is supposed to be, and as far as I know always has been, strictly the science fiction and fantasy imprint of Ballantine books. No Dominion is a Del Rey trade paperback all right, but it's not packaged like a science fiction or fantasy novel at all, rather, justly and cleverly, as a hard-boiled detective novel.

  Detectives can't get much more hard-boiled than Joe Pitt, the protagonist and first-person present tense narrator of No Dominion, who can hardly be called the “hero,” though the reader does identify with him. For one thing, he's a vampire.

  Which, I would surmise, is what justifies this Joe Pitt novel, and apparently the previous one Already Dead, being published under the Del Rey imprint rather than the more general Ballantine Books aegis, perhaps because it was a Del Rey editor who acquired them for the house.

  In Huston's contemporary Manhattan, a vampire subculture exists within the human one, preying upon it when necessary, of course—though Pitt buys his blood supply—but otherwise staying discreetly hidden. The vampire subculture divides Manhattan into various turfs, with various ideologies aimed at vampire survival, or even above ground vampire liberation at some point in time, sometimes cooperating, sometimes warring, sometimes respecting uneasy peace treaties. Vampire Manhattan is further balkanized by the racial and ethnic chauvinisms and tensions of the Manhattan we know and love or not, from which vampires are not immune. And almost all of the city's vampires are apparently affiliated with one vampire clan or another if they know what's good for them, a sort of vampire Beirut underlaid within New York.

  This is the territory within which Joe Pitt operates. For backstory reasons I would assume are elucidated in Already Dead, he is unaffiliated, a lone operator in the good old hard-boiled dick tradition—useful from time to time to various vampire clans for that very reason, as operative or dupe and sometimes both, generally tolerated, but generally mistrusted.

  And for good reason.

  No Dominion is mostly set in the grittiest and most street-tough venues of Manhattan, and the vampire versions thereof, as one would imagine, juice up the savagery and violence another notch or two. But even among the vampire gangs of Lower Manhattan, Pitt has a well-justified rep as a savage, unpredictable bastard.

  The novel opens with a gory and gorily detailed scene of Pitt beating the shit out of a vampire who has gone dingo in a bar under the influence of some horrible drug like STP, finally throwing him through the plate glass window, and it goes on from there.

  Newbie vampires are being turned into crazed out of control homicidal maniacs by this stuff, whatever it is, threatening to bring vampires to the attention of the ordinary citizenry, and, uh, give them a bad name, something that the leader of the Society, one of the three most powerful vampire clans and one with the long-term goal of bringing vampires public, hardly favors.

  Pitt, the loner, works for money and blood as a private contractor, and at this point is hard up for both, and so is constrained to play detective for the Society and track down the source of the drug. That's the plot engine of No Dominion, and it leads Pitt uptown, downtown, around town, deeper and deeper and more dangerously into a writhing snake-pit of double and triple crosses, vampiric political machinations, torture, murder, and horror.

  If this seems like the plot engine of any number of mystery novels and mystery novel series—the cynical hardboiled detective punching, shooting, fighting, staggering his way deeper and deeper into the more and more sinister and grandi-ose machinations behind what starts out as a fairly straightforward case—well, it is. If the addition of the horror novel element, even the horror novel element in the form of vampires, doesn't seem quite unique to the Joe Pitt series, well, it isn't.

  But what makes No Dominion, and no doubt the ongoing series, shockingly and interestingly unique is the punkish gangsterism and/or cultish ideologies of the vampire clans, and the streetwise and uncompromisingly savage manner not only with which Pitt deals with them, but the style with which he narrates it all in first person.

  Which is to say the character of Pitt himself.

  Okay, the nasty loner hard-boiled, snide, sardonic detective is a familiar literary figure, and many of them tell their stories in first person. But generally it's a mask over a heart of mush or at least gruff reluctant idealism, good guys beneath it all.

  Not Joe Pitt, at least not in No Dominion. Yes, he has a good side, a human lover from whom he keeps secret his vampire nature, and the service of whose medical survival motivates him, but he seems generally indifferent to the moral ambiguities of the vampiric ideologies and politics except when they impact on his own self-interest. And in the service of that self-interest, self-preservation, cause enlisted in at the time, or even just because he's pissed off, he will do terrible things, up to, including, and surpassing casual murder, without an apparent qualm of conscience.

  More interesting and shocking than Pitt's identity as a vampire is his character as something pretty close to a psychopath even by vampire standards and what is impressive about No Dominion is the power of Charlie Huston's style and unflinching deadpan angle of attack to make the reader identify with this bastard anyway.

  So here we have, like The Demon and the City, an unusually well-written and interesting episode in a detective novel series in terms of form and protagonist, with a strong fantasy element. Another cross-genre novel, but one that found a home not in small press publication, but in a commercial SF imprint without a hint of SF packaging.

  Why No Dominion and not The Demon and the City? And give that Char-lie Huston has published “straight” hard-boiled detective novels under the Ballantine imprint, why in the De
l Rey SF line where he is a newcomer? Because a hard-boiled vampire detective was deemed to have violated the parameters of the detective novel genre, whereas a vampire protagonist made it ipso facto “SF"? And if so, why package a Del Rey book as “non-SF"? Does not seem to compute.

  Thus the ins and outs and ups and downs of major commercial SF publishing marketing strategies versus small press. But there is a third path, taken by all too many so-called “literary” writers, but very few writers of speculative fiction—the path that winds through the groves of academe, grants, endowments, teaching gigs and so forth, and into small press or academic press publication. Commercial seppuku in terms of the economics of publishing, maybe, but a path that does lead more or less to the freedom to write whatever you damn well please if you know how to play that game.

  Carol Emshwiller is one of the few writers of speculative fiction who has more or less successfully followed this path through a long, literarily distinguished, but popularly not all that visible, career. The “Works by Carol Emshwiller” in the front of The Secret City says it all. Six novels and five short story collections are listed, but they are outnumbered by thirteen assorted awards, fellowships, and grants, some of them familiar genre awards, but more of them not.

  Now, a half century after her first publication, Tachyon Press has published The Secret City, a new novel that I at least would contend is her chef d'oeuvre, a kind of small-scale work that is damn near perfect, and the sort of thing that just about has to be in order to work. Emshwiller has always been more of a short story writer than a novelist, and The Secret City, though unequivocally a full scale novel in terms of length and form, relies for its successful effect on the control and precision that she has developed and relied upon in her long career as a writer of short speculative fiction.