When Varley’s first collection, The Persistence of Vision, appeared in paperback in 1978, I immediately snagged it as the centerpiece for one of my science-fiction courses. His stories were great to teach, not only because they required students to pay close attention to what was on the page (‘‘Yes, he really does mean that literally’’; ‘‘Yes, that character really used to be female’’), but because they were early explorations of the fringes of the post-human condition, as well as fountains of exotic, playful ideas. If gleefully confronting taboos and unthinking convention and turning expectations on their heads are among the functions of art, then Varley is an artist. Nor does it hurt that he is also a craftsman, an entertainer, and a first-rate line-by-line writer.
Most of the stories in this collection belong to the Eight Worlds future that dominated the beginning of his career. Here the Nifty Skiffy technologies – nullfield vacuum suits, symbiotes, sex-changes, and the colonization of insanely hostile environments – compete for our attention with equally revolutionary and transformative changes in social, psychological, and moral realms. There is considerable conventional SF ingenuity at work in ‘‘The Funhouse Effect’’, ‘‘Retrograde Summer’’, and ‘‘In the Bowl’’ – notably the imaginary technology of the nullfield, which shapes the stories’ environments and enables the physical drama. (All three include strong survival-adventure elements.)
But it is the human context that is more profoundly estranging, particularly the familial and sexual environments. Once again, I noted how often the non-SF heart of a story turns on childhood or family dynamics, on new modes of parenthood and parenting, or even on new modes of dysfunction and child abuse. ‘‘GoodBye, Robinson Crusoe’’ (1977) features a return to physical childhood (a companion piece to ‘‘Beatnik Bayou’’ over in the Reader), while ‘‘Retrograde Summer’’ and ‘‘Lollipop and the Tar Baby’’ turn on mother-child relationships and tensions (and dysfunctions) possible only to a culture with cloning technology. All of them – along with ‘‘In the Bowl’’ – also poke at our notions of children, kinship, and sexuality. These stories had a definite and useful shock value thirty years ago, and while sex changes and easy or routine somatic modifications are not surprising any more (at least in fiction), I suspect that some Varleyan notions might still raise eyebrows or blood pressures in a contemporary classroom – for example, the equating of religious evangelism with mental illness as a disqualifier for parenthood (‘‘Retrograde Summer’’), or his portraits of religious fanaticism (‘‘Equinoctal’’, 1977), or the casual mention of the possibility of sex between clone ‘‘siblings,’’ rejected only to avoid thermal overloading of one’s nullfield suit. (Though, to be fair, Heinlein was toying with related stuff back in 1959 in ‘‘‘All You Zombies – ’’’.)
Like McAuley, Varley has had some revisionist second thoughts about his future history. (There is a website that includes a detailed unpicking of the [in]consistencies of the Eight Worlds stories – Google up ‘‘Varley Vade Mecum’’.) At one time, it seemed that the world of lunar police chief Anna-Marie Bach (‘‘Bagatelle’’, ‘‘Blue Champagne’’) belonged with the Eight Worlds, but eventually Varley decided that, as he writes in the headnote to ‘‘Bagatelle’’, that world is ‘‘harsher’’ than that of the Eight Worlds. ‘‘Bagatelle’’ has a strong Larry Niven vibe, with its cop-with-a-problem foreground and nicely textured settled-Moon background. But despite the sophisticated technologies on display, this is far from the almost-magical milieu of its cousin series. There are no nullfields, no almost-perfect med-tech, no aggressively rationalist government. Instead, there is some pretty ugly general background, built up gradually from mentions dropped into the story: lunatic-fringe terrorist bombings, even with nuclear devices, and corporate wars are not-uncommon occurrences. ‘‘Blue Champagne’’ (1981) elaborates on the corporate and cultural side of this future, where some near-miracles, such as the paraplegic’s full-body prosthetic, are possible, but only at a very high cost that only starts with the money, and corporations withhold unprofitable disease cures.
The two non-series stories sort strangely with the rest. ‘‘The Manhattan Telephone Book (Abridged)’’ (1984) does not operate in anything like the same mode as the others – it is not even a parable. The best labels I can come up with are ‘‘secular sermon’’ or ‘‘reality check’’ – it’s a meditation on the difference between consolatory stories about apocalypse and the real thing. (For an extended and genuinely fictional take on a related subject, see last year’s Slow Apocalypse.) ‘‘The Unprocessed Word’’ (1986) is a goof, the sort of epistolary story that used to show up in the old Analog, but with a different set of in-jokes.
Between this volume and the Reader, the bulk of Varley’s short fiction is now available. The shelf life of much SF can be surprisingly short, but the freshness and vividness of these stories after nearly four decades suggests that Varley’s work belongs in the permanent canon. If I were still in the classroom, John Varley would be right there with me.
–Russell Letson
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LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: ADRIENNE MARTINI
Etiquette and Espionage, Gail Carriger (Little, Brown 978-0-316-19008-4, $17.99, 320pp, hc) February 2013.
Wool Omnibus, Hugh Howey (Hugh Howey 978-1-469984-20-9, $19.95, 548pp, pb) 2012. Cover art by Mike Tabor. [Order via
NOS4A2, Joe Hill (Morrow 978-0-06-220057-0, $28.99, 704pp, hc) May 2013.
We are all completely beside ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler (Putnam/Marian Wood 978-0-399-16209-1, $26.95, 320pp, hc) June 2013.
For reasons unknown, Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate books leave me chilled. I can see why they are loved enough to put them on the New York Times bestseller lists. I get the appeal. I love the concept of a woman of quality fighting crime using the skills only a woman of quality would have. But for my taste, there’s just too much whimsy and too much steampunk-for-its-own-sake frippery in the series to want to read more than one installment.
Yet in Etiquette and Espionage, the first in what Carriger calls the Finishing School series, changing the viewpoint from an adult’s to a young adult’s has made what feels cloying about the Parasol Protectorate delightful. Etiquette and Espionage is a brisk romp about the value of knowing rules, so that you can subvert them.
Sophronia, a 14-year-old, is whisked Harry-Potter-style into a school she never knew existed. As you’d expect, Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality isn’t your standard finishing school. It’s a Girl Genius-y-type airship, for starters, and the girls on board aren’t taught the subjects you’d expect. Or, rather, they are taught traditional skills, like handkerchief rules and table settings, yet there is always a twist, because these girls are being trained up as spies.
‘‘Algebra was far more interesting when it was a matter of proportioning out mutton chops so as to poison only half of one’s dinner guests and then determining the relative value of purchasing a more expensive, yet more effective, antidote as a home remedy,’’ Sophronia observes.
The basic plot is a simple one. On her way to the school, Sophronia’s carriage is attacked by the flywayman, who drop from balloons in order to steal a ‘‘prototype’’ from Sophronia’s escort, who will turn into the book’s antagonist. From there, it all delightfully and speedily unfurls. There will be vampires and werewolves and Picklemen, whose true purpose has yet to be decidedly uncovered. And while there appear to be some connections to the Parasol Protectorate universe, they aren’t overt. It’s much like Carriger’s use of steampunk props; here the gears and steam feel like so much wallpaper rather than grafted-on decorations and signal flags.
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Hugh Howey’s Wool Omnibus is five separate but interlinked stories about life in an underground silo after an atmospheric catastrophe has poisoned all of the Earth’s air. There’s a logic to the silos that makes it clear that the disaster could be seen before it
fell. These spaces are designed, with farms and power and hospitals. For the thousands of people who live in the silo, the biggest criminal act is expressing a desire to leave. For that, you get cleaned, which means a one-way trip outside to die in the toxic air.
The first story, ‘‘Wool’’, is about the after-effects of a cleaning. It’s a love story, mostly, but also sets up with a gentle hand the central mysteries about why this building exists and how it functions. Howey captures you with Holston, the grieving sheriff, and his flashbacks to happier days. In the next installment, ‘‘Wool 2: Proper Gauge’’ – all of the sections are named after fiber processing stages for reasons that are never made clear – the Mayor travels from the top of the silo to its bottom to interview a potential new sheriff. And it’s here that Howey’s story moves from feeling like a poignant elegy to a punchy adventure. From here, the tales grow compulsively readable, with each chapter acting like a potato chip. Reading just one at a sitting isn’t enough.
It’s not a perfect story. At times, Howey ratchets the melodrama up too high and makes his bad guys just a little bit too bad. A few spots – like when the hero of the later half of the omnibus has a diving accident and keeps herself alive in a way that strains belief – would have worked better if Howey had put as much care into them as he clearly has for the rest of the book. Ultimately, these rough patches are forgivable, if only because Howey’s Wool world is so intriguing and his characters so compelling.
These self-published stories will soon be coming out in a Random House edition in the UK, from Simon & Schuster in the US, and the movie rights have been snatched up by Ridley Scott and Steve Zaillian. It’ll be interesting to see where Howey takes the story next, both in terms of fiction and his real world publishing choices.
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Once you know that Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son you can’t unknow it. And that unknowable knowledge can’t help but lead you to comparisons, no matter how hard you try to resist them. That leads me to this comparison, as unfair (to both writers, natch) as it may be: the first quarter of Hill’s newest NOS4A2 reads like mid-career King, right when the elder specialized in those visual moments of sheer fear that stick with the reader for decades. I can be a little weird around sink drains, thanks to It. Now, thanks to Hill, I’ll be a little bit weird (well, weirder) about people in comas.
It’s not like the unsurprising similarities between the two writers stop after the first hundred-ish pages of the book; it’s more that the story really finds its pace and takes off from there. After that, you’re flipping pages too fast to think too much about voice and style.
NOS4A2 concerns Christmasland, a place where Charlie Manx takes kids so that they can forget all of their unhappiness. The process, as you’d expect in a horror novel, isn’t benign and the kids wind up… different after their journey. We meet the protagonist, Vic, as a young girl affectionately referred to as ‘‘The Brat,’’ right when she discovers her special power, which involves finding lost things via a bike and a bridge. And, again, as you’d expect, this power is not without it cost.
But like he did with Horns and Heart-Shaped Box, Hill doesn’t make this shopworn set-up bear the weight of the story. Instead, he focuses on the intersection between horror tropes and reality, which is where the meat of this story is. His universe isn’t one where a Whedonesque Scooby Gang teams up to save the world. Instead, his badass hero is broken by what she can do – and so is everyone she knows. Hill’s hero is human, in other words.
Vic resonates, as do so many of Hill’s characters, like Maggie Leigh, an Iowa librarian whom you know and love from Hill’s first description of her: ‘‘She looked like Sam Spade, if Sam Spade had been a girl and had a weekend gig fronting a ska band.’’ Even Manx, our antagonist/personification of evil, has a depth to him. Like any good villain, he has solid reasons for what he’s doing; it’s just that his methods that are questionable.
That’s where, I think, the difference between Hill and King might be. The delineations between good and evil are always ambiguous in Hill’s work. Still, that voice and propulsive narrative force has not skipped a generation.
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Karen Joy Fowler’s multiple World Fantasy and Nebula awards coupled with her involvement with the Tiptrees make her best known to Locus readers as a genre writer. But her books have always slid around and through genre, defining the idea of interstitial and frequently feeling like they belong on the fantasy/science fiction shelf without a concrete argument as to why. But, without any doubt, We are all completely beside ourselves isn’t a genre book. Also without any doubt, it is a book you should read the instant it is available.
It’s a book about a family, the Cookes, told from the perspective of the youngest daughter, Rosemary, whose wry voice captures and colors the story to come. She starts in the middle, talking about waking up in the middle of the night in her grandparent’s house as a five-year old, certain that her life had changed but unclear about how. We meet her sister, Fern, and her older brother, Lowell. But what we don’t learn until later – or learn before we even start reading if we’re foolish enough to hope that the back cover copy keeps the story unspoiled – is that Fern is a chimpanzee who was raised alongside Rosemary as part of her father’s research.
It’s a story based in reality. There have been quite a few cases of chimps being raised in human homes, either alongside human children or as singletons. In real life, it doesn’t end well, which is true for Fowler’s story, too.
But this isn’t a loosely disguised lecture on the hazards of anthropomorphism or a screed against research. These ideas come up, yes, but the meat of the story isn’t about them. As Rosemary herself says: ‘‘Nobody’s arguing these issues are easy’’ and proceeds to prove how not easy they are. The story moves and feints but never stalls.
We are all completely beside ourselves is a powerful story about memory and language and family. It’s about what makes us human while never forgetting that humor and cunning are part of that definition. It’s gorgeously written in that seemingly effortless style that Fowler has perfected. No, you probably won’t see it on next year’s Hugo list – but you will hear it mentioned as one of the standouts of 2013.
–Adrienne Martini
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LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: CAROLYN CUSHMAN
Written in Red, Anne Bishop
Frost Burned, Patricia Briggs
Etiquette and Espionage, Gail Carriger
Deep Down, Deborah Coates
A Turn of Light, Julie E. Czerneda
Undead and Underwater, MaryJanice Davidson
Gameboard of the Gods, Richelle Mead
Midnight Blue-Light Special, Seanan McGuire
Anne Bishop, Written in Red (Roc 978-0-451-46496-5, $26.95, 433pp, hc) March 2013. Cover by Blake Morrow.
A world where humans were just one intelligent species among many provides the backdrop for this urban fantasy novel, the first in the Others series. At least in the human cities, the world is much like ours, but in most of what we call the New World, the Others (also called terra indigene) – shifters and vampires and elementals – rule. Humans, barely tolerated for their skills at making things, have been allowed to build only a few, carefully monitored cities. The biggest cities have Other enclaves called Courtyards, and the story begins when a desperate human woman named Meg stumbles into a Couryard where Human Law Does Not Apply. She’s on the run from mysterious, but definitely human pursuers, sees this dangerous place as a haven, and takes a job as the human liason – basically, the shipping and receiving person for shipments from the human world. This particular Courtyard is making an effort to get along with humans, running shops that allow both human and Other customers, but the head wolf shifter is bemused by Meg, who seems to know even less about the human world than most of the Others. What Meg is running from is revealed gradually, but, not too surprisingly, she turns out to be a special sort of person who finds unexpected ways to win over the Others. It’s
an interesting mix of SF, fantasy, and mystery/thriller; though there’s no overt romance, there are hints of something building; add significant touches of humor and horror, an adorable wolf pup, and some really special ponies, and this makes a thrilling, yet often charmingly goofy, start to a new series.
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Patricia Briggs, Frost Burned (Ace 978-0-441-02001-0, $26.95, 342pp, hc) March 2013. Cover by Daniel Dos Santos.
Mercy is out for post-Thanksgiving shopping with stepdaughter Jesse when the rest of the werewolf pack is abducted by unknown enemies, in this seventh novel in the Mercy Thompson urban fantasy series. With the fae hiding in their reservations (after events in Alpha and Omega series novel Fair Game) Mercy is lacking many of her usual allies as she tries to figure out the who and why – and figure out how to free her husband and his people without setting off anti-were backlash. The story almost stands alone, but for those following the series there are some interesting changes to work out, most notably in the role of the fae. Mercy’s developing powers come into play as well, as she tackles a mess that ends up involving ghosts, witches, vampires, assassins, rogue agents, a zombie, fae, and some too-smart little kids, for an entertaining outing.
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Gail Carriger, Etiquette and Espionage (Little, Brown 978-0-316-19008-4, $17.99, 307pp, hc) February 2013.
Carriger’s new, young-adult Finishing School series is set in the same world as her adult Parasol Protectorate series, but some time earlier, with younger versions of certain characters making appearances. This first volume introduces 14-year-old tomboy Sophronia Temminnick, whose frustrated mother arranges to have her sent to a special finishing school – but it doesn’t take too long for Sophronia to figure out the school’s real focus is on assassination and espionage. It’s hard to tell if she really grasps that most of her schoolmates are from families that consider it good to be evil; as far as Sophronia is concerned, anything is better than being sent of to work for vampires: ‘‘They’ll suck my blood and make me wear only the latest fashions.’’ As it happens, she’s a natural at sizing up a situation and doing something about it, which leads to airship escapades, night adventures, and a set of companions very odd for the time and place. It’s a cute tale with an entertaining edge; an excellent start to a new series.
Locus, April 2013 Page 12