could liberate such long-neglected flesh.
Copyright © 2002 Ann K. Schwader
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Ann K. Schwader lives & writes in Westminster, Colorado. She is an active member of both SFWA and HWA. Her poetry collection, The Worms Remember, appeared last spring from Hive Press.
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chaos
By Jessica Langer
8/26/02
shiva dances
with fractal serpent arms
coiled around perfect circles
and golden rectangles
and dionysus prances
on wandering goat feet
stepping to the shimmering beat
of star-twinkle pulses
gods and muses
arc from sky to earth
and earth to sky
in thought-bodies
while through everything
a thin breeze blows
and also does not blow.
Copyright © 2002 Jessica Langer
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Jessica is a second-year student of English at the University of Toronto. An avid reader of science fiction and fantasy, she won her first poetry contest in kindergarten and finished her first as-yet-unpublished book at age 13. Even so, this is her first paid publication.
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Speculations on Sentience: Ian Watson's The Great Escape
Reviewed by Paul Schumacher
8/5/02
“From the depths of the heart, the mouth speaketh.” How much control do we consciously exercise over what we do and say? Do we choose our words or do they make us who we are? In The Great Escape, Ian Watson explores the meaning of language and its relationship to consciousness and sentience.
This common theme runs through the volume's twenty stories. For Watson, the nature of consciousness is defined largely by how our minds perceive and interact with the outside world, though Watson is concerned not just with our human minds, of course. Several stories focus on machines gaining or dealing with awareness of self and the world apart from self, while others deal with intelligences alien to our own. Readers interested in the scientific underpinnings of the concepts Watson plays with in his stories will find them explained in detail in the author's foreword. Aptly titled “Do Stories Tell Themselves?” it covers topics ranging from experiments in language to current thought on artificial intelligence.
A related theme present in many of the stories is the blending of fantasy with reality, powered only by the beliefs or thoughts of the observer. In “The Amber Room,” “What Really Happened in Docklands,” and “The Last Beast out of the Box,” we see how easily the barrier between what is real and what is envisioned can be broken. How many times have you convinced yourself that something was true, based on your perceptions, only to cause it to be so by acting upon your belief? In “What Really Happened in Docklands,” the main character's reactions to his perceptions of hostility may have caused the conflict he feared to occur. “Tulips from Amsterdam” takes a slightly stronger hypothesis, and considers how much our collective perceptions and obsessions influence the real world around us.
I found myself fascinated by Watson's speculations upon our past and future as sentient beings, upon the causes and effects of awareness, and upon the effect of aware beings upon the world around them. This book will especially appeal to those fascinated with the concepts of machine intelligence, the inner workings of the mind, or the mysteries of perception and language. In “Caucus Winter,” the author explores some possibilities of quantum computers and what they could mean in a more fantastic world than our own. In “Nanculus,” the implications of having machines that can make their own decisions are explored. “The China Cottage” looks at our motivations for our behavior, and how much control we have over them. “A Day Without Dad” explores the future of human sentience from a different perspective: the idea of immortality by personality graft. When a person is about to die, they take the personality, the core “self,” and turn them into a rider within another person's mind. The concept is fully explored through the classic situation of a marriage under pressure, which allows Watson to show us all the burdens and the benefits that such a sharing would impart.
As a whole, I recommend the volume, but there are a few stories that left me feeling unfulfilled, as if the story had been left incomplete, leaving me unable to draw my own conclusions about the outcome. This could, however, be a failure of my own mind, seeking to interpret these tales of the workings of another's. In “The Amber Room,” for example, we leave the protagonist held between dream and reality. He is unsure what is real and what is illusory, and so is the reader. Although this uncertainty was part of the feel of the story, it left me with a sense of incompleteness, like I'd missed the point. The vast majority of the stories achieve their goal, however, and construct a paradigm of reality that makes you stop and consider exactly how sentience works, and how little we understand about it.
In some stories, of course, the parts that are left untold are what make them work so memorably. The modern fantasy “What Really Happened in Docklands” uses the first person perspective to create uncertainty and to explore the nature of fantasy. The story both explicates and exemplifies a theory of generic fantasy: at first, there is a peaceful balance between groups, then the power shifts to the more sinister of the groups, and finally, the status quo is regained. It is left to the reader whether to accept the narrator's explanation of events, or to interpret the story as everyone else does in the aftermath. The reader is free because the author keeps uncertain both the story's outcome and his own view of the matter.
Although I personally disagree with some of the author's views of the mind and machine intelligence, as speculative fiction they perform admirably, raising questions that broadened my consideration of the possibilities of the human mind. “Three-Legged Dog” was a great story, exploring the effects of our obsessions. However, it taps into popular superstitions about computers—that artificial intelligences are more than automatons—in ways that I find disturbing. It anthropomorphizes them and treats them as if they can have effects on the outside world that could best be described as magic. But isn't it the purpose of speculative fiction to jar our minds and egos, to prod us into probing new subjects, and to challenge our long-held assumptions?
I will extend a note of caution: While excellently written, this book is certainly not meant for children. Several of the stories contain explicit scenes or descriptions of a sexual nature. “Nanculus” contains a theme, with an accompanying description, that is not only inappropriate for younger readers, but which even some adult readers may wish to avoid.
Overall, the stories collected in The Great Escape are pleasantly varied, despite their shared theme, because they are written in a variety of styles and include multiple perspectives on the nature of thought and its interaction with perception and reality. Even individual stories offer varied perspectives. In “Tulips from Amsterdam,” we are taken as far as we can be with a first person narrative, and then the story is forced to go to a second narrator commenting about the first to complete the concept, and to, once again, leave us wondering whether the narrator's account is true or delusional, in his particular version of our world.
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Paul Schumacher is a Copy Editor for Strange Horizons.
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Killing God: Alchemical Adventure and Pulp Metaphysics in Steve Aylett's Shamanspace
Reviewed by Nick Brownlow
8/12/02
"An armchair was already dwindling into the corner as electrovistas opened up in front, the stream of cells blowing past. Bloodshot intervals of subterranean transport and the racket of magic."—Steve Aylett, Shamanspace
British writer Steve Aylett has been plying his narcotics-fuelled SF satire for nearly a decade now, fiercely lampooning society's hypocrisies and idiosyncrasies in the form of stylish and witty genre fiction. The dawn of the 21st Century sa
w him slip into high gear with the publication of four new full-length novels, a collection of short stories, and a short novel, all in the last two years. Published by Orion in the UK and Four Walls Eight Windows in the US, Aylett has garnered critical praise on both sides of the Atlantic, inside and outside traditional SF circles.
Writing in a style that resembles a bizarre blend of William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick (by way of Elmore Leonard), Aylett is best known for his sequence of books set in the iconic city of Beerlight: a crime-ridden urban-noir hell inhabited by a menagerie of grotesque, amoral characters and surreal, mind-bending technology. Characterised by their gonzo humour and casual absurdity, it's entirely possible to miss the dark current of vitriol that runs through them, and thus miss the points Aylett seeks to make entirely.
Shamanspace—the short novel mentioned earlier—is a very different beast from the Beerlight books.
Owing more to Aylett's less obvious influences—great cynics and satirists such as Voltaire and Bierce—Shamanspace is a savagely uncompromising expression of disappointment and anger. Whilst Aylett could never be accused of over-writing, this slim (but dense) novella pares his sharp and incisive prose right down to the bone. Altogether more aggressive and direct than his usual fare, Shamanspace sees Aylett attacking his thematic quarry with viscous, laser-like precision—dispensing with it quickly and unceremoniously. Clearly fed up with people “not getting it,” Aylett doesn't bother to pull any punches.
Shamanspace postulates a secret society of Gnostic philosophers, who have discovered not only that God does exist, but also that it's possible to take revenge on him for the crimes he's inflicted upon creation. The decision is made that this end should be accomplished as soon as possible, no matter what the cost.
From this relatively uncontested starting point however, a theological schism quickly develops within the group. One faction—the Internecine—believes that God's death necessarily entails the end of the universe, whilst the other—the Prevail—maintain that the universe will survive the demise of its creator and go on completely as normal. In addition, a number of splinter groups have formed around the fringes of the core debate; one such group believes that God should be tortured before he's killed, for instance.
Competing groups of Edgemen—suave, super-powered occult assassins—flit through etheric space on behalf of the various warring factions, searching for a weak point in the creator's defences—where to place the bullet that will either destroy or liberate eternity (or both). Foremost among them is Alik—the young and arrogant narrator of the text, charged with carrying out the hit by the Internecine faction.
Propelled along by sheer audacity, Shamanspace is a breathtaking, relentless roller-coaster ride; an action-packed metaphysical thriller that compresses over a thousand years of philosophical and theological argument into a narrative as dense as a neutron star. Aylett is well known for pushing the boundaries of language in an inventive fashion, and Shamanspace sees him characteristically employing an increasingly bizarre succession of neologisms and metaphors to evoke highly expressive, thought-provoking images. Rooms tumour; Volvos bleed gut lava. Aylett's writing is surreal in the proper sense of the word—super-real, or more real than real.
The most significant feature of Shamanspace however, is the way in which Aylett eschews his usual humorous approach, leaving his scathing cynicism raw and exposed for all to see. For Aylett, profound disappointment and resentment at our state of existence is an unquestioned given, and the desire for revenge a wholly natural and correct one that we go to great lengths to distract ourselves from. God can be taken to represent any suitably abstract and impersonal authority—the government, the world economy, Western society.... The important aspect for Aylett is the fundamental sense in which these institutions are opposed to the individual, and the unwillingness of the individual to adopt the only logical stance (i.e. the antagonistic one) towards them.
An angry and incendiary (yet deliciously cool and clear-headed) work, Shamanspace is far from being Aylett's most accessible book. It is however, the clearest elucidation of the attitude and world-view that informs all his other work—and as such it deserves your immediate attention.
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Nick Brownlow is a web developer and writer living in south-east England.
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What You Didn't Learn in Civics: Alexander Irvine's A Scattering of Jades
Reviewed by Theodora Goss
8/19/02
The first time I read a story by Alexander Irvine, I thought, here is a writer with a devious and logical mind. The story was “Akhenaten,” in which the pharaoh with the spindly arms and elongated head turns out to be a visitor from the distant future, a temporal alien who wins the love of Amenhotep's wife Tiye, succeeds Amenhotep to the throne of Egypt, and imposes the worship of Aten, the sun-god, on his adopted land. As an explanation of Akhenaten's anomalous monotheistic reign, Irvine's version makes considerable sense. Why not, I found myself thinking. According to Akhenaten's supposedly realistic statues, he looked more like something from Close Encounters than your average Egyptian. Who knows, it could have happened that way.
In A Scattering of Jades, Irvine does again what he has done so well in his stories: rewrite history, or rather write the strange truth behind a history we think we know. This time the year is 1843, the place is New York City, and the history is as American as apple pie. But in Irvine's America, Aaron Burr conspires with his financial backer Harman Blennerhassett and an itinerant showman named Riley Steen to revive the Aztec god Tlaloc, whose return will bring about the time of the Sixth Sun, in which sacrificial fires will once again burn to the gods and the conspirators will rule an American empire. According to Burr's research in the archives of the Tammany Society, to revive Tlaloc the conspirators must locate a chacmool, an ancient mummy concealed in the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky. They must also prepare an appropriate sacrifice. A child is ritually scarred in a New York fire and stolen away by Steen, to wait for the chacmool's awakening. And all that happens before the first chapter.
Our hero, of sorts, is Archie Prescott, who believes that his wife Helen and daughter Jane died in the Great Fire of 1835. Archie doesn't know that the Great Fire was started by the ritual that scarred Jane, identifying her as Nanahuatzin, the sacrificial victim who must die so Tlaloc can return. He also doesn't know that the disfigured orphan who begs by his tenement every morning is his daughter, escaped from Steen and eager to be reunited with her father. Absorbed by grief for the wife and daughter he has lost, he attempts to become a newspaperman at James Gordon Bennet's Herald. While Archie tries to create a life for himself in New York, Steen is travelling around the country, assembling all the pieces for Tlaloc's revival. Burr and Blennerhassett have died, poor and dishonored, but Steen is determined to bring about the Sixth Sun and succeed where they have failed. The first step involves bringing the chacmool from Kentucky to New York, where it is placed in P.T. Barnum's American Museum. The second involves recapturing Jane. Predictably, Steen soon runs into trouble. Neither the chacmool nor Jane is easy to control. Most troubling of all, Bennet has asked Archie to investigate the activities of the Tammany Society, which brings Archie into continual conflict with Steen's plans. It begins to look as though the Aztec gods have a purpose for Archie, a purpose that Archie himself must slowly discover.
Although Irvine wrote A Scattering of Jades before the stories for which he has become known, the novel displays the same precise, evocative prose. Nineteenth-century New York, with its omnibuses and ox carts, its abolitionists and newspaper boys, its pigs rooting through garbage, becomes a character in the novel. It is a quintessentially American city, where the privileged play political games and poor children beg in the streets, where crime is a spectacle and the criminals are on politicians’ payrolls. Here we meet Royce McDougall of the Dead Rabbits, an Irish enforcer for Tammany Hall; the consummate showman Barnum; and even a reticent William Wilson, who is fascinated by live burial and wh
ose real name seems to begin with Edgar Allan. A Scattering of Jades moves back and forth between New York and the Mammoth Cave. In a recent interview, Irvine mentions that he visited the Mammoth Cave several times while writing the novel. While reading it, I felt as though I were experiencing the cave as well: its absolute darkness, the weight of the rocks above pressing downward, and a silence so intense that the mulatto guide Stephen Bishop is convinced he can hear ghosts. I was sitting in a sunlit room, with the noise of city traffic outside, but Irvine's description made me feel claustrophobic. It also made me want to visit those ancient spaces.
These two locations structure Irvine's novel, both because characters travel between them and because they have a symbolic resonance. New York belongs to the America we know, where Archie tries to find satisfying work and Tammany Hall carries on its political machinations: the America of political corruption and “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” The Mammoth Cave represents an America we don't know or would rather not acknowledge. In it we find the chacmool and Stephen, the Indian and the slave, members of populations conquered to make that other America possible. Although Irvine certainly delivers “one wild ride,” as Karen Joy Fowler promises on the jacket cover, he also presents us with a vision of America as fundamentally double, both the ancient America of the Indian and the modern America of the immigrant, both the land of economic opportunity and a land whose economic system is founded on oppression. As Archie travels south, he confronts the brutality of slavery; when the steamboat on which he is traveling sinks, the slaves working on her drown, dragged to the bottom by their shackles. Simultaneously, we experience slavery from inside Stephen's mind, sharing his dream of becoming a free man and moving to Monrovia. In the end, Stephen must make the most difficult decision of the novel, choosing between his own freedom and the freedom of the society that has enslaved him.
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