Locus, April 2013

by Locus Publications

  Ahmad the jinni, born of fire, has been imprisoned in a copper flask far longer than Chava has existed, after an unfortunate encounter with a Bedouin wizard. The flask eventually reaches New York as a battered memento, its occult contents totally forgotten, and comes into the hands of a Maronite Catholic tinsmith in the Lower Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria. When the smith touches it with a soldering iron, ‘‘A powerful jolt blasted him off his feet, as though he’d been struck by lightning.’’ Trying to figure out what happened, he sees someone lying on the workshop floor.

  The man staggered to his feet. He was tall and well built, with handsome features. Too handsome, in fact – his face had an eerie flawlessness, like a painting come to life. His dark hair was cropped short. He seemed unconscious of his nakedness.

  And then the ‘‘man’’ grabs him, lifting him clear off his feet and asking weird questions. Almost as elemental as that giant who exploded onto the Patch, but confined to a much less deadly form, the newcomer finally starts to calm down. So does the frightened tinsmith, who remembers enough legends from his homeland to whisper, ‘‘Sir… are you a jinni?’’ Ahmad could have found a kind of freedom in much worse surroundings.

  In a similar stroke of luck, Chava finds her way to a Jewish neighborhood where an old rabbi takes her under his wing. Despite being supernatural creatures with special powers, when thrust into a bustling New York City both golem and jinni can seem like innocents abroad, baffled and vulnerable in various ways. (For one thing, she’s hypersensitive to the force of religion in action – any religion – while he’s in trouble outdoors every time it starts to rain.) Like ordinary immigrants, they must assimilate as quickly as they can, finding jobs and housing, learning more about the place and its people.

  The other characters turn out to be fascinating in their own right, some with back stories that extend to more openly occult times, but all of them anchored in one of the many classes and cultures of this highly complicated, turn-of-the-century city, with its ice cream vendors, heiresses, halfway houses and busy docks. There’s magic here, if you know where to look. But wonder can have many guises. The nonhuman newcomers find it in what the locals take for granted: our own world, on the verge of modern times.

  That’s where The Golem and the Jinni comes closest to the two books previously discussed, especially when compared to another fantasy inspired in part by The Arabian Nights (back in vogue as a source these days). The Steel Seraglio by the Carey trio, whose British edition I reviewed in #618, has now appeared in the US as The City of Silk and Steel. Though it deals with ancient kingdoms and assorted magics from an unusual variety of viewpoints and voices, combining legend with something more like history when a grim tyrant deposes a self-indulgent king, it never really leaves its version of the ancient Middle East. The Careys’ creatures out of myth and legend (including djinns) won’t have to deal with anything as alien as North America over the course of the last century or so.

  SHORT TAKE

  There’s more to the matter than a mix of old and new, mundane and otherworldly. These days, many fantasies bring sassy, foul-mouthed moderns in touch with uncanny beings and their worlds (or portray such places as if their denizens were modern humans) – a trend mentioned in my year-end comments for 2012. But the results can be very different from what I’ve been discussing here.

  Grail of the Summer Stars by Freda Warrington, third in her Aetherial Tales trilogy, moves between Birmingham UK, the wilds of Nevada, and a variety of other realms more strange, exotic, and elemental than any standard notions of Faerie. Though Nevada may startle some visitors from Britain with the size of both its landscapes and its breakfast portions, things get more psychedelically intense elsewhere, ranging from romance in full bloom (as two main characters shapeshift in a pool whose guardian is a kind of goddess), to an ultimate battle between figures of ice and fire, with the fate of multiple worlds at stake.

  In her end note, ‘‘Landscapes of the Fantastic’’, Warrington speaks of a fascination with uncanny realms and creatures – ‘‘mystical beings who look human but aren’t: elves, angels, demons, vampires, faeries, demigods and so on.’’ In moments of high melodrama, her Aetherials can exhibit aspects of all these. I must admit to a preference for Wecker’s jinni, who tends to downplay his potential for powerful sexual glamor (despite quite Aetherial looks), using his inner flame mainly to light cigarettes without need of a match. But your tastes may differ.

  –Faren Miller

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: RUSSELL LETSON

  A Very British History: The Best Science Fiction Stories of Paul McAuley, 1985-2011, Paul McAuley (PS Publishing, 978-1-848635-96-8, £25.00, 435pp, hc; -97-5, £60.00, signed, slipcased edition with five additional stories in separate booklet, hc) April 2013. Cover by Jim Burns. [Order from PS Publishing, Grosvenor House, 1 New Road, Hornsea, East Yorkshire HU18 1PG, England; .]

  GoodBye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories, John Varley (Subterranean Press 978-1-59606-528-4, $45.00, 338pp, hc) April 2013. Cover by Vincent Chong. [Order from Subterranean Press, P.O. Box 190106, Burton MI 48519; .]

  I have always found story series, future histories, and common backgrounds to be among the chiefest pleasures of science fiction – the sense that behind each story there is an entire world waiting to be revealed. New retrospective collections from two of my favorite writers include generous samples of their work along those lines.

  As Michael Swanwick has observed of Paul McAuley, ‘‘his stories often serve as scouts in the mental space of his imagination.’’ McAuley has produced four backgrounds that have fed into novels and one that is still a-building: the future histories of the ReUnited Nations (the setting for his first three novels, Four Hundred Billion Stars, Secret Harmonies, and Eternal Light) and the Quiet War sequence; the milieux of Fairyland and the Confluence trilogy; and the near future of the Jackaroo stories, which has yet to grow a novel. Now, in A Very British History, we have a pair of stories from each of these backgrounds, plus representatives of his non-series fascinations: biotechnologies, alternate histories, the blues, planetscapes, and homages to various favorite writers, whether SF or not. This is a career-overview volume: 21 stories from 1985 through 2011, presented in publication order, with a set of ‘‘Story Notes’’ at the end of the volume, in which the author offers commentary, background, and personal reflections. McAuley’s short work has been documented in three previous collections – The King of the Hill and Other Stories, The Invisible Country, and Little Machines – so there is some inevitable overlap, but this volume also includes seven previously uncollected items: six post-2003 publications, plus ‘‘Sea Change, With Monsters’’ (1998).

  The earliest stories in the collection, ‘‘Little Ilya and Spider and Box’’ (1985) and ‘‘The Temporary King’’ (1987), belong to the RUN future history. The features I especially admire about this series are its scope and control of scale – it ranges from a middle-distance starfaring future out to deep-galactic-historical vistas. These two selections, however, restrict their settings, which is appropriate for stories about escape from limiting environments. The protagonist of ‘‘Little Ilya’’ is a child/pet/prisoner whose nature – and the nature of whose world – is gradually revealed as she attempts to get to the moon and the larger universe beyond. In ‘‘The Temporary King’’, it is the universe beyond, in the form of a faux-romantic fugitive, that comes calling to disrupt the peaceful, constricted life of a cultural-museum enclave.

  ‘‘Prison Dreams’’ (1992) and ‘‘Children of the Revolution’’ (1993) form a diptych from the Fairyland background. Set in the same neighborhood of the Netherlands and not too far separated in time, they show different sides of the callous, exploitative world that depends on dolls – artificial, chip-controlled humanoid workers – and point toward the explosion that is the matter of the novel. ‘‘Recording Angel’’ (1995) and ‘‘All Tomorrow
’s Parties’’ (1997) form a different kind of diptych from the Confluence sequence. The former documents an early disruption of the stable, orderly, engineered civilization by the return of strange, powerful descendants of original humankind (shades of ‘‘The Temporary King’’). McAuley calls the latter story ‘‘a kind of pendant to the Confluence trilogy’’, and cites the influence of James Joyce. I found it, at the beginning at least, strikingly reminiscent of a certain kind of middle-period Silverberg story, all decadence and ennui-of-the-immortals. What, after all, do godlike beings do to amuse themselves? (The answer seems to be a cross between Mardi Gras and an enormously inflated version of reality TV, with legions of virtual extras.) It also has a small part for Ernest Hemingway, or something made to act exactly like him.

  ‘‘Second Skin’’ (1997) was the first Quiet War story to appear, though McAuley notes that when it came time for the novels, some of the events and outcomes and characters got changed, so that the earlier stories constitute ‘‘a kind of alternate future history, self-contained sketches around the edges of something much bigger.’’ The motifs and actions in this tale of deep disguise, deception, and move/counter-move can be read as rehearsals for some aspects of the Dave #8 thread of The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun. ‘‘Sea Change, With Monsters’’ also involves deceptions and transformations, but of a more (eventually) hopeful kind. In both stories, the physical settings among the cold, distant, but finally entrancing bodies of the Solar System are as affecting as the foreground action.

  The stories in the Jackaroo group examine what happens when an on-the-ropes humankind gets a visit from aliens bearing gifts: access to the stars – or one string of them, anyway – and some black-box technology and scavenging rights to the trash left behind by mysteriously vanished predecessors. ‘‘City of the Dead’’ (2008) combines a rough-country, exotic-planet adventure with alien intelligences and mobsters (and maybe alien-intelligence mobsters), while ‘‘The Choice’’ (2011) is set on a tattered, near-future Earth transformed by forces unleashed by our own folly, greed, and violence – which prove to operate on the smaller, personal scale as well as the planetary.

  Now we come to a rich thematic or subgeneric seam that does not depend on a series: alternate histories. ‘‘Cross Road Blues’’ (1991) revisits the endlessly tempting story of Robert Johnson, here seen through the eyes of an Ike Turner who is a cross-time secret agent instead of a seminal R&B bandleader and Svengali. In ‘‘The Two Dicks’’ (2001), an alternate (and strangely rich and famous) Philip K. Dick meets an alternate Dick Nixon (and a couple of other celebrities who remain unnamed but identifiable) in a world that is Dickian in several senses. ‘‘A Very British History’’ (2000) is a review of a doorstop-size book about the conquest of space that has leaked over from a different time-track. Like its companion pieces, it drops familiar names right and left, though more to comic than dramatic effect – Baudrillard, author of The Space Race Did Not Happen; a Sergeant Stapledon, who liberated Peenemunde for the Brits; ‘‘brilliant and ruthless entrepreneur’’ Delos Harriman; and the various real heroes of the founding of the Lunar Republic (pace the claims of that crank Heinlein). By convenient cross-connection, ‘‘A Very British History’’ is also an example of another honorable magazine tradition that McAuley has dusted off: the faux document. Its companion here is ‘‘How We Lost the Moon, A True Story by Frank W. Allen’’ (1999), which presents itself as an online memoir with the real skinny on how a black hole ate the Moon.

  In fact, McAuley seems to enjoy all kinds of formal fiddling and topical fooling around. In earlier reviews of ‘‘Gene Wars’’ (1991) in 1992 and 1998, I called it a collapsed novel, and so it still seems to me. (What I tell you three times is true.) McAuley’s notes on the story’s genesis indicate how quickly and thoroughly he can chase down the implications of an idea, while the finished product shows how skillfully and compactly he can present a chain of reasoning that could be (but in this case does not need to be) expanded to book length. The narrative of ‘‘The Thought War’’ (2008) is somewhat less condensed, but here story is less important than situation and idea (a spooky mix of zombie apocalypse and quantum-induced invasion or transformation), both of which are revealed in a one-sided conversation. ‘‘Meat’’ (2005) is also a monologue, less a narrative than an elaboration of an idea – in this case, a new and quite icky version of the pursuit and consumption of fame.

  The narrative of ‘‘Rocket Boy’’ (2007) is somewhat compressed, particularly in its second half – I can easily imagine a longer version with set-piece action sequences – but the primary impression is made by the setting of a war-ravaged society under the heels of military occupiers, criminals, and corrupt politicians. It’s a world that shapes the protagonist as much as does the slyly intelligent weapon that gives him power. Similarly, the environment of ‘‘17’’ (1998) – part Dickensian factory, part mobocracy, part alien-planet hellhole – works to define its scrappy, unstoppable heroine, though she has only intelligence and true grit to get her through her challenges.

  There is considerable range of conventional forms on display here. ‘‘Prison Dreams’’ and ‘‘Second Skin’’ point toward the crime and/or intrigue thriller (a subgenre McAuley has explored in several novels); ‘‘City of the Dead’’, and ‘‘Sea Change, With Monsters’’ are (among other things) variations on the exotic-setting action adventure; ‘‘17’’ and ‘‘Rocket Boy’’ are tough-kid melodramas. But that range is matched by a willingness to mix and cross-breed motifs and idea-families, so that ‘‘Rocket Boy’’, ‘‘City of the Dead’’, and ‘‘Sea Change, With Monsters’’ are also about encounters with exotic intelligences, while ‘‘Children of the Revolution’’ and ‘‘Rocket Boy’’ have traces of cyberpunk in their DNA. Sometimes it seems as though most of the history of SF is woven through these stories. In ‘‘Little Lost Robot’’ (2008), Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkers meet Olaf Stapledon – or maybe the 3G trio of Gregs Bear, Benford, and Egan. And maybe Bruce Sterling as well, given the bad-boy style the marauding ‘‘big space robot’’ adopts when it characterizes itself: ‘‘It’s a midnight rambler. Sooner or later it’ll be coming to the star next door to you, and it will rock your world.’’ With rocks. And gravity probes, and swarms of killer drones, and a muon gun. Yippee-ki-yay, etc.

  And through it all, the writing pays close attention to physical setting, to the textures of environments, and to the careful describing and naming of phenomena: the nanotech in ‘‘Children of the Revolution’’ consists of ‘‘self-replicating fembots, assemblages of carbon polyhedra doped with heavy metals… operating on scales of a billionth of a millimetre.’’ ‘‘Sea Change, With Monsters’’ features what has become a McAuley signature, a vivid worldscape built up from a combination of metaphor, analytical understanding, and technical language:

  the surface of Europa was a thin skin of ice over the ocean, as fragile as the craquelure on an ancient painting. Triplet ridge and groove features cut across the plates. They were caused by the upwelling of water through stress fractures. The ridges were breccia dykes, ice mixed with mineralised silicates, complexly faulted and folded; the grooves between them were almost pure water-ice. They were like a vast freeway system half-built and abruptly abandoned, cut across where the ice plates had fractured or had been buried by blue-white icy flows which had spewed from newer fissures.

  Not all the threads running through the stories are technical or scientific or science-fictional. I found it interesting how many of them depend on variations on of a motif that I mentally labeled ‘‘displacement’’ – refugees, escapees, people (often young people) somehow detached from their emotional or cultural or actual homes. This was one of the emotional engines of McAuley’s first two novels, with its astronomer protagonist hauled across interstellar space to investigate cosmic mysteries. In these shorter pieces, the repetition of these patterns, reinforced by McAuley’s autobiographical Notes, make this volume particularly appealing to anyone who follow
s this versatile, ingenious, and endlessly inventive writer.

  •

  John Varley is another writer whose backgrounds and idea-sets were developed in magazine pieces before being fed into novels, and whose career cannot be fully appreciated without the short-form part of the canon. So a few years back, I was happy to see The John Varley Reader (reviewed in December 2004), which brought back into print a substantial chunk of Varley’s shorter work after an eighteen-year drought. Now I am made happy again to see a somewhat smaller chunk surface in the form of GoodBye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories. The 11 items here collected date from between 1975 and 1986, eight of them clustered in the incredibly productive ’75 to ’77 period, and they are presented not in publication order (as was the case with the Reader) but as a ‘‘Grand Tour of the Solar System.’’ The fact that some planets are left out and that two stories that don’t fit the schema at all doesn’t bother me, since the Tour gives Varley an excuse to write headnotes reflecting on the state of understanding of the solar system when the stories were written and to offer some insight into the play of ideas (emphasis, I suspect, on ‘‘play’’) that generated them.