We meet the first version of our protagonist, the photographer Tibor Tarent, as he returns from Turkey, where his wife Melanie was obliterated by what we soon recognize as an adjacency weapon, leaving behind those blackened triangles. A much larger triangle has annihilated a good chunk of London, and when Tibor witnesses such a weapon in action, it’s described with a special-effects glee worthy of Independence Day. But these attacks are not all that has turned this future England – now part of the Islamic Republic of Great Britain – into a virtual police state: violent ‘‘temperate storms’’ ravage the landscape periodically, and armed gangs roam the countryside. After an uneasy reunion with Melanie’s parents and some Kafkaesque debriefings, Tarent is summoned to an area called Warne’s Farm, but en route has a brief encounter with a secretive woman who calls herself Flo and works for the government in an unspecified capacity, who later seems to die in another adjacency attack.
The second iteration of TT takes us back to WWI, when a stage illusionist named Tommy Trent, in a scheme that sounds like a Wodehouse parody, is drafted by a military officer who seems to think his skill at disappearing things on stage can somehow be translated into making British aircraft invisible to the Germans. En route, he finds himself in conversation with H.G. Wells – the middle-aged, more cynical Wells who had just published The War that Will End War. Trent wonders if the illusionist’s trick of adjacency – placing two objects near each other and calling attention to one as a kind of misdirection – might work, but finally despairs of any thought of success and returns to London. A brief interlude takes us back to the 21st century, where a journalist named Jane Flockhart recounts an interview with the physicist who invented the adjacency field, which can ‘‘divert physical matter into a different, or adjacent, realm’’ and who naively believed his discovery could never be weaponized, echoing Wells’s dream of ending war. (The photographer accompanying her on the assignment is a younger Tibor Tarent.)
We next find ourselves in a WWII British airfield (which, we eventually realize, will later be Warne’s Farm), where an aircraft mechanic named Torrance finds a wallet left behind in a plane by Krystyna Roszca, a skilled aviator whose tale of her early romance with a young man named Tomasz and her eventual escape from Poland takes up much of the chapter. Decades later, though, a much older Torrance can find no trace that Krysyna or Tomasz ever existed. Back in the 21st century, trapped by the violent storms at Warne’s Farm, Tarent becomes involved with yet another woman, a teacher named Lou, who tells him that England is facing ‘‘the last war ever, the war that will end everything’’ – again echoing Wells’s words from back in 1914. He also is asked to identify the body of a Dr. Mallinen, who turns out to be Flo, but by now his own reality is splintering into parallel streams, in which Flo might still be alive, or in which he himself may be dead, or both. A recurrent image of a brick tower on the site of the airfield that later becomes the farm begins to take on something of the aspect of a Childe Roland dark tower, and seems to be involved in some way with the discovery of the adjacency principle itself.
But what seems to be the most unexpected shift of all – away from England entirely to the island of Prachous in the Dream Archipelago – instead turns out to be the portion of the novel in which the various guylines begin to be gathered together. We meet another TT, a photographer named Tomak Tallant – whose journey across the desert with a mysterious woman missionary recalls Tarent’s journey across England with the equally mysterious Flo – and yet another, a stage magician named Thom the Thaumaturge, whose main trick goes horribly awry. We also meet another version of the aviator Krystyna Roscza, now called Kirstenya Rosscky, who changes her name to Mellanya Ross (which of course echoes both Melanie and Mallinen). By now it’s becoming clear that the reader has some assembly work to do – sometimes a Priest novel feels like something you’ve just unpacked from Ikea and are wondering if all the tools have been included – but Priest’s clever manipulation of his own adjacencies somehow makes the novel grow more coherent even as it grows more mysterious. In some ways a contrapuntal intergenerational love story, in some ways a meditation on war and remembrance, in some ways an exploration of the nature of illusion and observation (it’s no accident there are so many reporters, photographers, and illusionists here), it is, overall, rather stunning.
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I’ve always thought that describing someone as a ‘‘writer’s writer’’ – a phrase I’ve heard more than once in reference to Eileen Gunn – was something of a backhanded compliment for the author, and no compliment at all for the reader. After all, if you’re mostly read by other writers, you’re hardly on a path to solvency, let alone fame, and the implication concerning lay readers is that we may just be too clueless to appreciate the sheer precision and technical skill that wins a writer the admiration of her peers. As far as I can tell, Gunn has exactly one Nebula Award and a handful of other nominations, but it’s likely this is due more to her slim output of stories rather than to any sort of elite appeal – most of her stories are a lot of fun, even when the fun reveals a sneaky dark undercurrent that ends up making the story far more memorable than you thought it was when you were reading it. Her first collection nearly a decade ago contained only a dozen stories, and the new collection Questionable Practices (which already gets my nomination for collection title of the year) contains 17 pieces, one of which is a poem, four of which are clever vignettes originally published as one piece, and five of which are collaborations (four with Michael Swanwick and one with Rudy Rucker). Two of the best are original to this collection. All of this suggests that any fears of Gunn becoming irresponsibly profligate after the success of her first collection are premature.
But back to that ‘‘writer’s writer’’ question. There is at least one sense in which it’s valid: Gunn writes, comfortably and knowledgeably, from within the headspace of SF as fully as any writer I can think of. I’m not sure what a neophyte reader would make of ‘‘Michael Swanwick and Samuel R. Delany at the Joyce Kilmer Service Area, March 2005’’, presented as a kind of literary legend recounted by a ‘‘guydavenport storybot’’ a century later, or ‘‘The Steampunk Quartet’’, four very short pieces originally written for Clarion West donors (who appear as characters) and improvising from titles by China Miéville, Howard Waldrop, William Gibson & Bruce Sterling, and K.W. Jeter. These pungent vignettes, especially the Gibson/Sterling piece (‘‘A Different Engine’’, in which Thackeray has given up aspirations of novel writing to become a punch-card operator) and the Jeter piece (‘‘Internal Devices’’) reveal Gunn’s somewhat affectionate but sardonic view of steampunk – her relationship to steampunk is somewhat like Emily Dickinson’s relationship to 19th-century ‘‘lady poets’’ – which also shows up more fully developed in her gonzo Swanwick collaboration ‘‘Zeppelin City’’, a delightful screwball comedy that pillages more than a few SF traditions. This is partly what I mean by Gunn’s willingness to explore every unlikely corner of SF headspace; there’s even a brief piece of Kirk/Spock slash (‘‘No Place to Raise Kids: A Tale of Forbidden Love’’), though it’s the slightest piece in the book.
In many ways, Swanwick is an excellent collaborator for Gunn, since he shares her enthusiasm for appropriating all sorts of genre materials and hammering them into a coherent but sometimes surprisingly dark vision. The elves in ‘‘The Trains that Climb the Winter Tree’’ bear little resemblance to folklore sprites or to Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel; they start off by killing and replacing all the adults in a family on Christmas Eve, while the elves in ‘‘The Armies of Elfland’’ are nothing short of genocidal, flaying and roasting their human adult victims while enslaving a young girl who eventually proves their undoing. ‘‘Shed That Guilt! Double Your Productivity Overnight!’’ is a far more waggish parody, this one of self-help websites, with ‘‘Swanwick’’ taking on the role of an online sales closer while ‘‘Gunn’’ is a disastrously insecure writer inquiring about the service. Gunn’s one collaboration with Rucker, ‘�
�Hive Mind Man’’, about the problems of dealing with a wannabe wirehead rock promoter who more or less realizes his dream, is far less distinctive.
What is most distinctive, not surprisingly, is the group of stories that are fully Gunn’s own. Even here, though, she manages to find twists on SF icons and tropes that seemed to have no twists left. The funniest of these, ‘‘Thought Experiment’’, dates back to the pulp-era notion of a lone inventor of a time machine, and in fact achieves a Henry Kuttner-like tone with its protagonist’s hapless adventures in medieval England, at Woodstock, and at Ford’s Theatre in 1865. But the strongest stories here strike me as being pure Gunn, and two of them are original to this collection. ‘‘Up the Fire Road’’, which originally appeared in Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse One, is a brilliant exploration of gender roles told from the dual points of view of a couple who get lost during a skiing trip, only to be rescued by a sasquatch who somehow appears as female to the male partner and male to the female. After returning to civilization, in a typically Gunnian left turn, they end up confronting each other and the sasquatch on a sleazy daytime ambush-talk show whose host is named Maury. Of the two original stories, ‘‘Chop Wood, Carry Water’’ somewhat echoes the voice of Gunn’s friend and possible mentor Avram Davidson (who wrote a very different kind of Golem story), depicting the crisis that ensues when Rabbi Loew’s golem temporarily loses the superhuman powers that permit him to defend Prague’s Jewish community. More importantly, it’s a perceptive meditation on the nature of intellect, consciousness, and responsibility. ‘‘Phantom Pain’’ concerns exactly what the title says: a wounded WWII veteran’s consciousness shifts among his initial injury – possibly from Japanese soldiers, possibly by his own forces – and later parts of his life in a hospital, as a veteran suffering the phantom pain of the title, and finally as a dying hospice resident. At one point he thinks to himself ‘‘if it weren’t for the pain, he wouldn’t know where the world started and the imagination left off,’’ and in an odd way that’s a guide to reading all of Gunn’s most powerful fiction, which at its best (as in this tale) poises on the edge of the fabulous and the unendurable, between sheer fun and sheer terror. It’s always good news to get a new Gunn collection, and it’s always bad news that they come so infrequently.
•
Toward the end of Shimon Adaf’s Sunburnt Faces there’s a rather remarkable essay on the wonderlands created by Lewis Carroll, J.M. Barrie, and L. Frank Baum, casting them in the context of writers as unlikely as Nabokov and Wittgenstein, and at the very end there’s an entire condensed epic fantasy novel about a ‘‘fairy detective’’ named Ariella, who learns that she is ‘‘the girl who is all the Wonderlands.’’ Both the essay and the story are the work of Ori Elhayani, a journalist, young-adult novelist, and young mother living in Tel Aviv, and they are the most direct expressions of the negotiations with fantasy threaded throughout this essentially realistic novel about Ori’s continually disaffected life in Israel from her childhood in the 1980s to the Qassam rocket attacks of the early 2000s. Ori is, or wants to be, a kind of Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and we first meet her as a 12-year-old named Florence preparing for her bat-mitzvah in the southern Israeli city of Netivot. After a minor scalp wound renders her mute for two months – she doesn’t quite remember how she got it – she turns on the TV in the middle of a sleepless night and hears the voice of God, who calls her Ori, and suddenly her speech is restored and she insists on adopting the new name.
This would seem to set up a kind of visionary supernatural narrative, but instead Adaf launches into a fairly conventional and somewhat overlong, if convincingly written, narrative of school and family life, highlights of which include the unnerving meltdown of a science teacher (he first insists that the ‘‘a’’ in Newton’s second law refers to ‘‘alive’’ rather than acceleration, then later goes completely bonkers) and a brutal homophobic attack on a fellow student. But the most compelling thread running through these chapters involves Ori’s discovery in the school library of a series of YA fantasies about Ariella the Fairy Detective, by an author improbably named Prospero Juno, who, she learns, died in an auto accident before completing the series (which is pretty clearly based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest). The second half of Sunburnt Faces begins 20 years later, with Ori an author and young mother married to a computer scientist, though with an ex-lover who still haunts her thoughts. Ori makes for a mistrustful wife and a pretty hazardous mom (she forgets to feed the kid and at one point heedlessly drives her into an area at risk of missile attacks), and she refuses to respond to letters from an old school friend who has been following her series of YA fantasy novels, even though the letters mean a lot to her. But what she learns through another revelation – and what we learn about those Ariella novels from her childhood – make this by far the more compelling section of the novel, and bring the fantastical elements bubbling closer to the surface. Ori’s daughter Alma, whose own capacity for wonder provides a neat counterpoint to Ori’s confusion, is probably the most delightful character in the book, not at all a sentimentalized kid.
Readers looking for a novel driven by anything resembling a traditional fantasy plot might grow impatient with Adaf’s leisurely development of his narrative, or with his various asides about the position of Moroccan Jews in Israel during the 1980s or Israeli social welfare policies in the 2000s, but Sunburnt Faces (the title is from Blake’s poem ‘‘The Little Black Boy’’, whose ‘‘sunburnt face/ Is but a cloud’’ which ‘‘will vanish, and we shall hear His voice’’) is a striking example of how a contemporary mimetic novel can be inhabited by fantasy without inhabiting it. Adaf, a respected poet who received Israel’s prominent Sapir Award for an earlier novel, may be only the latest in a growing generation of skilled novelists who are fascinated with the uses of fantasy, revelation, and transcendence – and who know their way around genre traditions – but whose own work remains rooted in the quotidian. It’ll be interesting to see how willing readers are to engage this fascinating discussion, because it’s a discussion that needs to be had.
SHORT TAKE
Someone who is pretty good at getting such discussions going is Brian Attebery, who has long been among the more lucid academic scholars of the fantastic, and one of the few whose ideas have entered the general discourse – decades ago, borrowing from math, he described genres as ‘‘fuzzy sets’’ with clear centers and very unclear boundaries, a useful concept that almost everyone has since borrowed. Attebery likes to root out such terms, and in Stories About Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth he offers us such ideas as ‘‘memorate’’ (borrowed from the Swedish folklorist Carl von Sydow and referring to first-person accounts of supernatural encounters), ‘‘situated’’ myth or fantasy (adapted from Donna Haraway to refer to narratives that consciously manipulate multiple worldviews), and ‘‘narrative nodes’’ (borrowed from botany to describe ‘‘moments of thickened narrative tension and possibility’’ that might lead off in all sorts of directions).
Stories About Stories addresses a topic – the relationship of fantasy and myth – that has been chewed up by so many for so long that it would seem suitable for baby bird food, but seldom with the systematic common sense Attebery brings to it. After a fascinating personal account of listening to Australian storyteller Kath Walker some years ago, he looks at the evolution of the terms ‘‘fantasy’’ and ‘‘myth’’ and devotes later chapters to the usual suspects (Tolkien, the Inklings, Eddison, etc., noting that they were the generation who grew up reading Victorians like MacDonald and Morris), and to Christian fantasists, later adapters of myth and angels (with a nice interlude concerning religious attacks on fantasy), and more recent postcolonial or postmodern writers. While one would expect a fair amount of discussion of Le Guin, Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams in such a study, Attebery also provides some provocative readings of authors less widely covered in the usual academic literature, such as Nalo Hopkinson, Patricia Wrightson, John Crowley, Terry Pratchett, Alan Garner, Patr
icia McKillip, Hope Mirlees, and Roger Zelazny. If there weren’t points you can quibble with, or points you’re tempted to expand upon yourself, the book would hardly have been worth writing, but Attebery is persuasive enough and widely enough read to make this probably the most cogent and wide-ranging discussion of fantasy and myth that has yet appeared.
–Gary K. Wolfe
Return to In This Issue listing.
LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: FAREN MILLER
Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 978-0-374-10409-2, $13.00, 198pp, tp) February 2014. Cover by Eric Nyquist.
Dream London, Tony Ballantyne (Solaris 978-1-78108-174-7, $7.99, 404pp, pb) October 2013. Cover by Joey Hi-Fi.
The Pilgrims, Will Elliott (HarperVoyager Australia 978-0732289475, A$22.99, 528pp, tp) January 2010. (Jo Fletcher Books 978-0857381378, £18.99, 512pp, hc) November 2011. (Tor 978-0-7653-3188-5, $26.99, 438pp, hc) March 2014.
SHORT TAKE
Apparitions: Ghosts of Old Edo, Miyuki Miyabo; Daniel Huddleston, trans. (Haikasoru 978-1-4215-6742-6, $14.99, 266pp, tp. Cover by Katsushika Hokusai. November 2013.
Last month, I discussed a number of works – both long and short – where a firmly grounded sense of reality gets knocked askew. That feeling of uncertainty, displacement, grabs hold of travelers from something like our own 21st century in various but equally unsettling ways in three genre-bending novels by Jeff VanderMeer, Tony Ballantyne, and Will Elliott.
VanderMeer’s Annihilation opens with a line that won’t let the reader sit back and settle down: ‘‘The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats.’’ As flats become coastline, a ‘‘derelict lighthouse’’ obeys the laws of gravity and rises where it was built, back in the day, to signal ships. But, the narrator informs us, ‘‘All of this part of the country had been abandoned for decades, for reasons that are not easy to relate.’’ Wary explorers call it Area X.
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