When the point of view shifts to that of 2.0, whose real name is Moses, the reason for his interest in Alix becomes apparent. Together with his small band of mostly teen pranksters/activists – Adam, a mechanical genius named Tank, and a brilliant goth-girl computer whiz named Kook – Moses has managed to cyberstalk Alix and her family and friends for weeks. When Alix and her friend Cynthia plot an escape from her stifling ‘‘protection’’ to attend a secret rave held in an industrial-district warehouse, Alix passes out and wakes to find herself caged and in the custody of Moses and his group. The conspiracy has gone on far longer and deeper than we had suspected; all the kids in Moses’s gang have directly or indirectly been damaged by unsafe products defended by Alix’s dad – an asthma medication that can sometimes cause comas; asbestos; bisphenol A; a cholesterol drug that caused heart attacks – one of which killed Moses’s dad. In nearly all these cases, Alix’s father and his scientist partner managed to cast doubt on reports of health hazards, sometimes commissioning phony ‘‘independent’’ studies proving the safety of their clients’ products. Even if a product was eventually taken off the market, the massive profits to be gained by delaying such action could be in the billions.
Since PR is seldom regarded as a life-or-death profession, these revelations not only stun Alix, but probably most of Bacigalupi’s young readers as well. He intends to foment outrage, and succeeds pretty well, while at the same time putting Alix herself in the complex position of having to choose between her privileged family life and a life on the run with a band of outlaw activists. If that band of outlaws seems a bit clichéd at times – the street-smart Hispanic kid, the goth-girl computer genius, the charismatic black leader – and if the villains seem taken straight from the crypto-fascist security firm playbook, Alix herself emerges as a likeable, smart, and thoughtful protagonist, and an excellent vehicle for the important concerns that Bacigalupi successfully raises in this novel, which manages to be as unnerving as his postapocalyptic dystopias, precisely because the future it depicts is already here.
•
One of the reasons I enjoy SF or fantasy baseball stories is that they challenge two pernicious stereotypes at once: that sports fans don’t read fiction, and that geeks like us don’t like sports. And of all American sports, with the possible exception of boxing, baseball seems to have garnered the lion’s share of literary attention (there’s even a Library of America anthology on baseball). The same is true of SF, and Rick Wilber’s Field of Fantasies is not the first genre anthology devoted to the topic (though Greenberg and Waugh’s Baseball 3000 is over three decades old and W.P. Kinsella’s Baseball Fantastic is more than a decade). Many reasons have been advanced as to why or whether baseball has a particular affinity for the fantastic – the notion that the foul line theoretically extends to infinity, the lack of a clock limiting the game in time, the obsessions with statistics and history – and some of these come into play in Wilber’s astute and quite literary selection of stories. The endless ‘‘what-ifs’’ in baseball history, for example, seem like an open invitation to alternate histories, and indeed the prolific master of the form, Harry Turtledove, is here with ‘‘The House that George Built’’, credibly detailing how Babe Ruth might never have made it in the major leagues and ended up a tavern owner instead. No fewer than three stories hang on the rumor that Fidel Castro was once scouted by the New York Giants; the most politically astute is John Kessel’s ‘‘The Franchise’’, which combines it with the equally unlikely scenario that George H.W. Bush played well enough for Yale to gain a contract.
Similarly, three stories riff on baseball’s most famous bit of doggerel, ‘‘Casey at the Bat’’, with Robert Coover’s ‘‘McDuff on the Mound’’ revisiting the tale from the pitcher’s point of view, Rod Serling’s ‘‘The Mighty Casey’’ turning Casey into a robot, and Ray Bradbury’s ‘‘Ahab at the Helm’’ – the only poem and the most awkward selection here – force-mating it with Moby-Dick. Much more successful literary tributes are Wilber’s own rather elegant ‘‘Stephen to Cora to Joe’’, which imagines the ghost of Stephen Crane (or someone who thinks he’s Stephen Crane) joining a contemporary team – at least to the extent that we can trust the multiply unreliable narrator, who takes all his section titles from Crane’s work; and W.P. Kinsella’s early fantasy ‘‘How I Got My Nickname’’, an amiable tall tale of an overweight diabetic teen adopted by an unlikely New York Giants team as preoccupied with American literature as they are with baseball.
The purest SF story here is Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘‘Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars’’, which has some fun with gravity and atmosphere differentials, though it’s closely followed by Louis Marley’s ‘‘Diamond Girls’’, which addresses the possible role of women in the game in a particularly compelling way: the only two women in major league ball face each other, the one a genetically modified superathlete, the other a gifted ‘‘natural’’; both face the expected skepticism. Other tales have the baseball disappear in midflight (Ray Gonzalez’s ‘‘Baseball’’), or freeze in midair for decades (Gardner Dozois’s oddly moving ‘‘The Hanging Curve’’), while still others have players who are vampires or even a horse. Jacob Weisman & David Sandner’s ‘‘Lost October’’ involves a kind of magical timeslip which takes its characters back in time to a long-demolished stadium (again that obsession with the past). A few stories deal less with the game than the fans (such as Stephen King & Stewart O’Nan’s ghost story ‘‘A Face in The Crowd’’ or Valerie Sayers’s ‘‘How to Read a Man’’), and some are not fantastic at all (Karen Joy Fowler’s cryptically titled ‘‘The Further Adventures of the Invisible Man’’, actually about a boy forced to play baseball by his mom) or fantastic only by exaggeration (T. Coraghessan Boyle’s ‘‘The Hector Quesadilla Story’’, with its 31-inning game). As some of these names might suggest, the level of sheer prose quality is extraordinary in these tales (though an awful lot of soft summer mornings get described), but for the most part they’re good fun as well. Baseball has been very good to SF.
–Gary K. Wolfe
Return to In This Issue listing.
LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: FAREN MILLER
The Moon King, Neil Williamson (NewCon 978-1-900679-62-8, £12.99/$20.99, 336pp, tp) April 2014. Cover by Andy Bigwood. [Order from NewCon Press, 41 Wheatsheaf Rd., Alconbury Weston, Cambs PE28 4LF, England;
Son of the Morning, Mark Alder (Gollancz 978-0-575-11515-6, £16.99, 782pp, tp) April 2014.
The Hawley Book of the Dead, Chrysler Szarlan (Ballantine 978-0-345-54502-2, $26.00, 338pp, hc) September 2014.
Trying to catch up with more first novels, I’m six months late but massively impressed by a pair of British writers who offer quite distinct – but equally subversive and genre-bending – tales of sovereign rule. The title of Neil Williamson’s The Moon King refers to a figure known to his citizens as the Lunane, the apparently immortal leader of an island city linked somehow to the moon and its phases, with roots in what could be postapocalyptic SF. Mark Alder’s Son of the Morning radically recombines medieval history (King Edward the Third, the Hundred Years War) with quasi-Biblical entities across a spectrum of Good and Evil closer to Richard Kadrey’s metaphysics than to standard moral codes, boldly citing and deconstructing old literary landmarks, and some of the notable works they inspired in the centuries that followed.
Chapter One of The Moon King opens with a scene worthy of a screwball comedy from the 1930s: a recently jilted engineer wakes up, hung-over, in royal apartments that seem more Art Deco than overblown Baroque – with curving walls and ceilings that depict ‘‘a stylised progression of the moon’s phases’’ – where two servants greet him as their own Lunane. Anton Dunn may be aching and bewildered, but his enduring interest in the lost secrets of Founder technology is piqued by elements of the decor: ‘‘tall lamps in each of which burned, with fizzing extravagance, electric light bulbs.’’
Ever since one man’s enduring wil
l and singular talents led shipwrecked refugees from an advanced civilization to set aside despair and build a city (inspired by a bold act first glimpsed in the journal excerpt that precedes Chapter One), Glassholm has used the moon as ‘‘a sign, a symbol of hope’’ far more intimately connected with its fortunes than just some image on a flag. Like an ironic variant on the old boast that ‘‘the sun never sets on the British Empire,’’ the moon never, ever, sets on Glassholm. The Moon King portrays that mad fact and the island’s peculiar ecosystem, with surreal nonchalance.
For most citizens, each month’s lunar cycles (from Wane and Darkdays to Wax and Full) join mood swings to genuine changes in their surroundings. At Full they revel and everything works well; when the nadir of Dark approaches, ‘‘Glassholm slumped into habitual ruin. Bricks crumbled, paint flaked, food mouldered,’’ while people ‘‘hid themselves away behind warping doors and splintering shutters, and prayed to their king for the moon’s light to return.’’ Without resorting to high-flown prose, the paragraph that follows conveys the nature of a man, an icon, and a place:
Anton had never been comfortable with prayer. It flirted with what the people of the Jealous Lands referred to as religion. Glassholm had its fair share of superstitions, many revolving around their age-old Lunane himself: but he was a prosaic miracle that you could overlook because he was a simple fact staring you in the face every day, as large and conspicuous as the moon itself. Everyone knew that the Lunane shat, shaved and ate, just like they did. They read about it in the diarised excerpts in the newspaper. The fact that he had been keeping their city safe for half a millennium seemed inconsequential.
But now the age-old system may be breaking down. Whatever of the Lunane’s presence that still haunts the palace could use an engineer’s investigative mind, and appetite for lab experiments, to set things right – if that’s still possible.
Five hundred years of ‘‘safety’’ haven’t achieved full resurrection of the Founders’ lost civilization from the scraps that washed up on these shores. Anton’s initial dumbstruck awe at the enormous machine throbbing within the palace (Glassholm’s mysterious heart) gives way to alarm: ‘‘His engineer’s sixth sense tingled. This was not a well machine.’’ And the malaise is spreading.
In the relatively brief following chapters, The Moon King introduces two other lead characters. A young outsider artist feels cheerful enough when she leaves her loft/bedsit to run some errands not long after the Full, but soon encounters signs of unexpected mayhem. Changing times are summarized in a dour reflection, as the final viewpoint character (an ex-policeman now working at the palace) scans the evening paper while scarfing a hearty meal: ‘‘Used to be the news after Full was little more than a social diary of the glitterati. Now there were reports of brawls, robberies, fire-raising.’’
The former cop is nothing like the sinister sciencefictional creatures evoked (with a slight alteration) by his name, John Mortlock. And artist-in-glass Lottie Blake won’t follow in the footsteps of her mother, leader of an underground Church of women who practice occult rituals and flaunt their woes, ‘‘supposedly to prove their sex’s favour with the moon.’’ But their city can resemble the post-Victorian London of Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack the Ripper, and H.G. Wells, with its tram lines, early motor cars, and increasingly brazen serial killings.
What sets this book apart from more tentative first novels is how seamlessly Williamson blends historic and genre elements into a setting that seems to skirt the more exotic bounds of Empire, leap to the borders of reality itself, and then go further. ‘‘Luck monkeys’’ hand out strange tokens here. Civic unrest (centered on the palace) competes with rumors of sea creatures much weirder than the current plethora of crabs. Though the Moon still looms over Glassholm, it may be utterly indifferent to human woes.
•
At more than 750 pages, and touted as the first volume of a fantasy trilogy centered around the Hundred Years War, Mark Alder’s Son of the Morning may have some trouble finding the enthusiastic audience it deserves. Much as I savor the works of George R.R. Martin, Gollancz’s PR didn’t convince me that a similar treat awaits the reader here. (In terms of narrative style, it doesn’t). But when I finally plunged in, doubt gave way to a fascination that rarely lapsed. Alder turns standard notions of fantasy and history, human and supernatural motivations, Nature and a structured Cosmos, on their heads, writing beautifully and at a pace undaunted by the twists and turns of a wild plot.
The Prologue (1330) and first chapter of Part I (1337) introduce a pair of boys too young to control the power struggle that will reach a climax near book’s end with the Battle of Crecy (1346), but still deeply involved in what was never just a game of mortal thrones. We meet Dowzabel the night before he leaves the Cornish moors, perhaps forever. When the scrawny six-year-old asks Nan for his favorite bedtime story, she intones familiar words: ‘‘In the beginning was the void and darkness was on the face of the deep.’’ But Dow won’t listen meekly, and Alder skews the tale. Here ‘‘the lord’s name was the light’s name, which was Lucifer, who is rightly called Son of the Morning.’’ (The boy asks, ‘‘How is he the morning’s son if he made the morning? Doesn’t that make him the morning’s dad?’’ She snaps back, ‘‘Well I don’t know, it’s a mystery, isn’t it? Do you want the rest of the story, or don’t you?’’)
Edward III has reached the age of seven in Chapter One. Despite his royal lineage and fancy duds (‘‘a full hooded tunic in the Italian style, its rich red cloth trimmed with gold and pearls’’), he is largely ignored when Edward II and some noble advisors discuss England’s chances in the current patchwork of European conflicts. This strategy session looks beyond human resources. While their foe’s armies seem big enough that ‘‘the French have no need for angels,’’ this king could use them, if he can find them again. Although angelic powers helped Normans conquer the land across the Channel three centuries ago, the link between royalty and Heaven seems to have snapped after the reign of his own father, Edward I.
Son of the Morning moves among social classes as blithely as Shakespeare’s plays, often driving plot with dialogue. Its minor nobles seem most absurd when they flaunt outlandish garments, dyed in a rainbow of expensive hues, and prate about privilege. Rich Italian bankers dress just as lavishly, and King Edward can’t afford to offend them (without borrowed funds, he couldn’t pay his soldiers).
Money also preoccupies this book’s most Chaucerian character, the Pardoner. While he offers atonement for a sinner’s confessions, we’re told he ‘‘did not see the world in terms of right and wrong so much as profit and loss.’’ Thus far, he’s made little gain from dealing with troubled souls, but in a cosmos where the fantastic lurks just out of most men’s reach, he’s on the lookout for any opportunity. A king may regard angels as instruments of war; the pardoner sees potential monetary value in their spilt blood, and manages to score some. When he learns of a bounty set on the head of the Antichrist, long prophesied and now returned in youthful (vulnerable?) form somewhere in France, he finds a well-heeled sponsor looking for a hit man, and tracks down the mysterious lad.
By this point, more than halfway through the book, readers will have experienced the amazing glory of an angelic visitor to a grand Gothic cathedral, and heard moving plaints addressed by special prisoners in Hell. But the meeting of two characters who could have stepped out of an illuminated manuscript (Pardoner, Antichrist) seems to unleash new tides of strangeness in the mortal world, strewing grotesques through the scenes that follow. One creature is ‘‘a long thin devil, its body like that of an emaciated man, its head stretched and thin and sporting a pair of great donkey ears.’’ Several chapters later, ‘‘a tiny figure, a winged woman, her skin white as ivory,’’ hovers above a bankrupt man and asks ‘‘Do your masters oppress you?’’, then offers reassurance: ‘‘[T]ake heart. Across the world, the poor are rising.’’ Are these Bottom and Ariel, reconceived by Bosch and Karl Marx?
Over the book’s long co
urse, my attention only wavered during a few scenes where Son of the Morning conforms to Gollancz’s initial description, seeming most like (another) chronicle of medieval war, infused with fantasy that suits the times. Touting first novels, publishers understandably cite familiar tropes and well-known writers, but newcomers as gifted as Alder manage to find their way outside the box.
•
Chrysler Szarlan’s The Hawley Book of the Dead serves as my final promising debut, since the author brings a lively imagination to a mixture of witchcraft and romance. Different forms of magic work together in unexpected ways; a lovely redhead with special talents stays anchored to ordinary life with help from her three children (though one daughter is a trifle strange); and when the heroine’s left widowed, the guy who once loved her spends more time hovering on the sidelines than clasping her in his manly arms.
Reve Dyer’s full first name is Revelation – biblical enough to reassure any Puritans still lurking in the New England where generations of her family lived, concealing the least mundane aspects of a heritage that reaches back to Old Ireland. She and her dashing husband Jeremy may have gained fame as stage magicians with a show on the Las Vegas Strip, but she admits, ‘‘It is the magician’s finest trick to rise above the dime-store tackiness that infuses our profession.’’ Her one occult ability plays a minor role in their carefully scripted performance, but when a dangerous being from family lore manifests in Nevada, only her sense of smell alerts her to its presence. That awareness can’t thwart it, so the tale begins, ‘‘On the day I killed my husband, the scent of lilacs startled me awake’’ (in a dry land ‘‘where no lilacs bloomed for a hundred miles’’).
Locus, October 2014 Page 13