Locus, December 2012

by Locus Publications

  This keen awareness extends to Gropp’s sense of character, in portraits of the little groups of locals who didn’t flee when the strangeness began or as it continued to escalate. Though the first man Dean encounters, after several hours on streets that had started to seem totally deserted, is a self-serving creep, Wendell (AKA Weasel) isn’t lying when he describes the current version of city life: ‘‘There are vicious animals in the park, so you don’t go there after dark. There’s a warehouse on the east side – it’s been on fire for three months straight. So you stay the hell away. And if you see people in the street, people who shouldn’t be there, people whose feet don’t move when they walk….’’ Rather than say more, he shrugs, almost blasé about it all – but he does tell the newcomer: ‘‘And if you came here looking for reasons, you’re just wasting your time.’’

  In the course of Dean’s adventures, he’ll hear plenty of weird theories, but even their looniest advocates still tend to have some seeds of doubt. What may be the best advice he gets simply sidesteps explanations. Before finding the confused outsider a place to stay, the genuinely benign (and attractive) woman Taylor tells him, ‘‘There’s a lot to see here. I don’t know what pictures and stories have made it out to the real world, but we’ve certainly got a lot to photograph.’’ She adds, ‘‘Not quite sure it’s smart to seek it out, but it’s certainly there.’’

  Against the promptings of his own better judgment, even when the strangeness escalates to a murderous degree, Dean stays on to witness and portray it. I was going to say ‘‘document,’’ but that term might seem naive to the embittered older photographer who gives the book its title, as he tells our hero ‘‘you lie with pictures just like you lie with words. You can’t help it, you can’t control it…. All of that stuff turns dark. Through bad glass, it gets tainted.’’

  Emotion, memories, or madness – any of them can destroy the purity of the image, and Dean comes to know them all. It’s ironic that, as a kind of coda to this tale, we get a stark governmental list of the contents of a black footlocker: photos, manuscripts, notebook entries, videos, computer, memory card, etc. – everything that helped turn the chapter introductions into something like a chilling collage, reduced here to mere objects. One further list deals with the major characters, referenced as a numerical sequence of ‘‘cases,’’ with notes on their presumed fates (some still live, though the majority are MISSING or DECEASED).

  What happened in, and to, the city of Spokane? Not even Uncle Sam’s investigators may ever really know.

  •

  Cherie Priest first tackled Seattle in a very different spirit, with Boneshaker (2009). That book and its sequels are set in a steampunkish alternate 19th century, where mad science created the earthquake that destroyed most of the city, and zombies soon show up to menace anyone who manages to survive the unbreathable air of the Blight. Jonathan Strahan’s year-end summary called Boneshaker a ‘‘romp’’ and ‘‘fun, fun, fun’’ – qualities which may also have helped it win a Locus Award in 2010.

  The Inexplicables (Book 4 and potentially the last in the series), features a newcomer who finds his way past the barricades and into the walled-off remnants of Seattle, but this 18-year-old orphan’s subsequent adventures resemble a drug-crazed combo of Twain and Poe, as the rampaging plot sends him into a poisonous labyrinth of monsters and machines. Rector (‘‘Wreck’em’’) Sherman both deals and uses ‘‘sap,’’ a drug distilled from Blight. He’s also haunted by the ghostly presence of a boy whose death he may have unwittingly caused. There will be little time for tripping or introspection, however, once he’s forced to take part in the investigation of a new mystery: something is killing ‘‘rotters,’’ and the monsters known as ‘‘Inexplicables’’ might be a menace far worse than the undead. (One further source of evil proves to be quite human.)

  The Inexplicables turns out to be more than a genre-mixing romp. Neither Rector nor Seattle can cast off all their ghosts by the book’s end, and the Epilogue might as well be talking about Tacoma when a woman (who happens to be a writer) sums things up with genuine regret: ‘‘Too many people lost, or silenced.’’ With this, an extended tale that started out as zany zombie steampunk may have come of age.

  •

  Terry Pratchett’s Dodger updates a scenario that could have come from heroic fantasy – the rescue of a sorely threatened, golden-haired maiden who happens to be a foreign princess, by a young Galahad – into a far less glamorous era and milieu: London early in the reign of Queen Victoria. Unlike the fantastical modern version of Ben Aaronovich’s Whispers Underground, this London is an unholy mess, both above ground and below. After a hard rain, even the distinction between levels essentially vanishes, as overflowing drains disgorge all the ‘‘muck, slime and filth, the dead dogs, the dead rats, cats and worse,’’ into a city that no amount of rain could possibly wash clean.

  Though we may cringe, the title character likes it just fine. Dodger seems born to thrive here, through a combination of petty thievery and ‘‘toshing’’: scavenging the muck for lost coins and the like. For him, ‘‘toshing was living, toshing was coming alive,’’ much better than some dull workaday existence. But as the book begins, an unthinking act of chivalry introduces an escalating sequence of changes into his world.

  Hearing a girl scream as she tries to get away from two sinister men who have held her captive in a coach, Dodger intervenes, an unlikely savior in the form of ‘‘a struggling and skinny young man who moved with the speed of a snake.’’ When a pair of male Londoners happen upon this scene, he’s ready to tackle them as well, until they manage to convince him that they’re harmless. Viewing the girl and her defender, one of them tries to praise him as a hero, provoking a baffled response: ‘‘What’s it to you, anyway? And who the hell is this Galahad cove?’’

  The men turn out to be Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew as they were – or might have been – before they wrote the works that became prime sources of inspiration for this book, Dickens’s novels, and Mayhew’s disturbing sociological investigation London Labour and the London Poor. (Though Pratchett never seems to use the word, we know what that later Dickens called his Dodger: Artful.) Here, in the grand tradition of genre fiction giving major roles to big names from the past, they aid and abet the reluctant hero in a lively tale of suspense with all manner of plots and subplots that involve other well-known figures along with new inventions.

  Dodger ponders his situation, while lying on the brink of sleep:

  How long ago was it that he had heard a scream and jumped out of a foaming sewer… how many days was it? Three days! It was as if the world was moving too fast, laughing at Dodger to keep up with it. Well, he would chase the world and take what came and deal with it…. Seem to be a hero, seem to be a clever young man, seem to be trustworthy. That seemed to fool everybody, and the most disconcerting thing was it was doing the same to him, forcing him on like some hidden engine.

  I should note that this reads more like a summary of feelings than a typical expression from a lad so thoroughly steeped in the crude slang of his day (well researched by the author, and used with evident enjoyment).

  Despite a plot with elements of outright horror, and a subtext of poverty and misery in the vast morass of London at a time when the notion of government aid would have been more unthinkable than journeys to the moon, at heart this is the story of a princess and a tosher, not a grim modern meditation on hard times.

  •

  In Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim series, Hell itself proves to be vulnerable, particularly its chief metropolis, Pandemonium. When Devil Said Bang (Book Four) opens, the city has been blitzed and repairs are on the agenda at a Council meeting where a builder, a general, a sorceress, and a politician confer with the guy in charge of everything, our narrator. According to him, ‘‘We’re rebuilding Hell after it went up in flames like a flash-paper bikini when the original Lucifer, the real Lucifer, blew out of town after sticking me with the job. The trouble for the rest
of the Council is that I don’t know how fast I want Downtown back in working order.’’

  Even in his latest guise, James Stark (AKA Sandman Slim) reacts to Hell and its inhabitants like an outsider, disgusted with the way these ‘‘hellions’’ – not recognizably dead humans, eternally damned for their sins – have ‘‘turned inward and created a rat-maze culture. All bureaucracy, schizo rituals, and murderous deadfalls.’’ Once that breaks down, ‘‘these assholes are going to turn on each other. The biggest, baddest civil war ever, until none of them are left.’’ While hardened cynics might say this sounds a lot like life on Earth, he’s known both and would tell mortals, ‘‘Welcome to Hell. It’s just like high school but with more boredom and entrails.’’

  This grumpy Devil finds a way to escape again, dodging both ennui and responsibility through a retreat to home ground: Los Angeles CA. He knows the place is flammable and plenty of the citizens are assholes, but all that should be sweet relief compared to the occult universe with its mentally conflicted God, doomed hellions, and squabbling fallen angels. Unfortunately, the occult follows him back – with a vengeance. The unnatural serial killer on the loose is just part of it. Things get so weird, the locals can’t help being freaked and tourists vacate the hotels. (‘‘Even in L.A., the Apocalypse is bad for business.’’)

  Slim may be plagued by nightmarish insecurity and guilt, everything on display in a narrative with no chapter divisions, but he never really loses his foulmouthed, kick-ass Attitude. And he’s not in this mess alone. Amid gathering horrors, he assembles a delightful band of weirdoes and misfits (including an old flame) who might just help him save the day, against all odds.

  •

  Felix Gilman’s The Rise of Ransom City (sequel to The Half-Made World) purportedly gathers autobiographical writings from one Harry Ransom, travelling inventor. Genius or charlatan? Even Elmer Merrial Carson, purported editor of the account – laboriously retrieved and rendered into more acceptable prose – still doesn’t know. Carson’s Foreword simply calls him ‘‘the kind of odd fellow one used to meet back in the century gone by, in the days when the Great War was at its height.’’

  Not our Great War (WW1), but civil war in a land that will never become the USA, between opponents the blurb describes in brief as ‘‘The Line, a cult of industry, and the Gun, a mission of Chaos.’’ And yet, while Gilman introduces SFnal elements a bit like steampunk (though scarier, at their strangest) with hints of magic in the culture of the displaced Folk (neither Celtic nor Native American), he keeps returning to more familiar images, as in this passage:

  Adversity breeds ingenuity, that’s what they say. It was a great year for ideas and notions and inventions and grand world-changing schemes. In our various travels and escapes me and Mr. Carver met gentlemen and sometimes ladies who were trying to sell sewing machines, and electrical door-buzzers, and a method of hypnotism using magnets, and procedures for rain-making and cloud-seeding and the increase of crops.

  Ransom seems to fit right in with this bunch, on a quest to sell his own peculiar gizmo the Apparatus and become known for the Process behind it – ‘‘nothing electrical!’’, the inventor insists.

  This narrator regards his chronicle as is a ‘‘yarn of world’s-edge adventure and daring’’ which just happens to be the honest truth. Its gallery of extreme eccentrics and vagabonds, who flee the Law almost as often as they survive fantastic perils, may remind us more of 19th-century American comic fiction by the likes of Mark Twain, early in his career. The Rise of Ransom City extends this casual outlook to the stuff of epic. Thus warring armies, some armed with the occult, attack settlements of all sizes right up to the most widely-known regional center, boisterous Jasper City (which could almost belong in our Wild West, if not for the manner of its Fall).

  And what of Ransom City? Passing invocations give some sense of what it means to its inventor, but much of this account must pass before he finally describes his moment of inspiration: ‘‘It was while I was writing to Mr. Angel Langford that I first came up with the notion that all of us free-thinkers and dreamers together could quit the Territory and leave behind Mr. Baxter and all his money and his Injunctions and leave behind all the armies of the world, and strike out for the West and build Ransom City.’’

  We never see a brick-and-mortar version rising here, but the utopian ideal is more than a madman’s ravings in a crazy, mixed-up world.

  –Faren Miller

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: RUSSELL LETSON

  Apollo’s Outcasts, Allen Steele (Pyr 978-1-61614-686-3, $16.95, 312pp, tp) November 2012. Cover by Paul Young.

  The Cassandra Project, Jack McDevitt & Mike Resnick (Ace 978-1-937-00871-0, $25.95, 387pp, hc) November 2012.

  Fate of Worlds, Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner (Tor 978-0-7653-3100-7, $25.99, 317pp, hc) August 2012. Cover by Stephan Martiniére.

  Though it is not so identified on the review copy I received, I take Allen Steele’s Apollo’s Outcasts to be a YA novel, and a particularly Heinleinian one at that. It even has an opening line – ‘‘On my sixteenth birthday, I went to the Moon’’ – that had me thinking immediately of the curtain-raiser of one of the Old Man’s best ‘‘juveniles:’’ ‘‘You see, I had this space suit’’ (Have Space Suit – Will Travel). But where Heinlein’s protagonist’s route to the moon and beyond starts gradually, with a jingle-writing contest, Steele’s Jamey Barlowe and his older sisters, self-involved Melissa and responsible, hard-nosed Jan, are dumped right into an unexpected adventure. They are political refugees, bundled off in the middle of the night and taken to a lunar shuttle with a bunch of other kids, one jump ahead of federal forces in the service of a shady new President whose first official act is to round up her opponents, among whom are the kids’ parents. And if this weren’t enough upset in a teenager’s life, Jan volunteers to give up her place to make room for a last-minute addition to the cargo of kids, a mysterious girl who arrives with an escort of Men in Black.

  Jamey is actually returning to his birthplace, the Apollo settlement, though he hasn’t seen the Moon since his family’s return to Earth after the death of his mother. He suffers from Lunar Birth Deficiency Syndrome and cannot walk in terrestrial gravity without crutches or his semi-intelligent ‘‘mobil,’’ more-than-wheelchair. This makes for two parallel thematic-narrative tracks: the large matter of how to deal with the new President’s attempt to get control of the multinationally-administered Apollo facility, which mines the helium-3 that fuels America’s fusion power plants; and the close-up personal story of how Jamey comes into his own when he is able to literally stand on his own two feet. This personal track divides as well. Some of it deals with the expected newbie-on-theMoon challenges of living in a fragile, pressurized environment, adapting to the pragmatic egalitarianism of Apollo’s social system, and so on, spiced by familiar kid stuff about best friends, attractive girls, bullies, and other sources of adolescent angst. But Jamey’s particular story has to do with how he embraces his newfound physical freedom, to the point where he joins the most demanding of Apollo’s work groups, Lunar Search and Rescue, aka the Rangers.

  The learning curves in both personal tracks are not completely smooth, but Jamey, like his genre cousins in the old Heinlein juveniles, is fundamentally well-balanced, thoughtful, and determined enough that he does not have to Learn Better about much. Eventually, of course, this only moderately bumpy road to competent adulthood intersects with the outside world as the new American administration issues a series of increasingly bellicose demands and threats. In the face of a possible invasion, the Rangers become a defense force, and Jamey and his young friends find that they have a new and more demanding kind of growing-up to do.

  This is not Steele’s first YA rodeo – A King of Infinite Space (reviewed in December 1997) is a variation on Heinlein’s The Man Who Learned Better pattern. But Jamey’s story seems to me even more classically Heinleinian than King, from the family dynamics (highl
y competent, principled, and well-prepared dad; prematurely grown-up, self-sacrificing older sister Jan; snotty-sister-who-learns-better Melissa) to Jamey’s never-in-doubt overcoming of his handicap and fulfillment of his parents’ values when the chips are down. And the background to all this is a carefully worked out and clearly described lunar industrial settlement, a less wild-and-wooly descendant of the world of Steele’s earliest working-stiffs-in-orbit Near Space stories. The Apollo colony is permanent, with a population that is on the Moon for keeps and an evolving culture suited to its demanding and dangerous environment. It’s a safer and saner place than some of the dark places that Steele has imagined (rogue politicians and hard-vacuum combat notwithstanding), and it is a fitting setting for this kind of bildungsroman – a world worthy of the adult that Jamey is becoming. I have no idea how actual young adults might react to such an old-fashioned story, but this rather jaded grandpa-ager found it well-crafted and engaging in way that has nothing to do with nostalgia for the time when Heinlein (and Andre Norton and ‘‘Paul French’’ and the Winston logo) ruled the kids’-SF section of the library shelves.

  •

  The random activities of publishers and writers have resulted in a number of collaborations showing up in the stack on my dresser recently – novels by Cory Doctorow & Charles Stross, Larry Niven & Greg Benford, Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner, and Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck (DBA James S. A. Corey). The newest allstar pairing in this (probably-accidental) pattern is of Jack McDevitt & Mike Resnick, whose The Cassandra Project is an expansion and considerable reworking (or even a complete reimagining) of a McDevitt short story of the same title that appeared in Lightspeed in 2010. Even though the story’s reconstruction is shared with another writer, the novel is dominated by features and feelings familiar from McDevitt’s Alex Benedict solo novels: a puzzle rooted in past events; a search for answers that requires rummaging through old memories and fragmentary records; a cast of all-too-human characters, even the ones who are eccentric billionaires or leaders of the free world.