Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews

by John Grant

  The Compleat Enchanter tales are seen as the ancestors of that strain of comic fantasy which has reached its current peak in the works of Terry Pratchett. Novels by expert practitioners in this subgenre – a category which unfortunately excludes almost all of Pratchett's imitators – and inexpert ones alike generally follow the pattern established by de Camp and Pratt: all or a good part of the action takes place in a fantasyland whose skewed logic both fascinates and provides a constant undercurrent of humour.

  It was the skewed-logic aspect that appealed to John W. Campbell Jr, the editor of Unknown who published the first three tales. Campbell was a man with a highly structured mind (a pretty odd bloody structure, some might maintain, but that's beside the point), and he was eager to see fantasy codified, so that it would have rules in the same way that the laws of science supposedly governed the genre he preferred, science fiction. De Camp's and Pratt's pretence that they were applying just such a set (or series of sets) of rules to magic – the underpinning of almost all genre fantasy – was therefore right up the Campbellian street.

  The trouble is that it was, as stated, quite simply a pretence. We are given a few fragments of the Boolean equations that Shea must recite in order to effect his transition from one reality to the next, and really their relevance is no greater than if he'd been saying "Abracadabra!" or "Hocus! Pocus!" Other "rules" are introduced, such as that any gadgetry Shea brings with him into a fantasy reality won't work; but there's no more coherent explanation of why this should be so than there is in the average traditional story about a mortal incursion into Fairyland, where very much the same effect occurs.

  This might seem to be irrelevant – after all, you might say, what's important is that the tales work as entertainment – but that would be to ignore the major role that skewed logic plays in works of humorous fantasy (and indeed in almost all humorous fiction). Most of the best jokes rely on a final shock logical leap from a premise that is convincingly quasi-rational and has generally been built up in a quasi-logical progression. Remove that premise and there is no basis for the punchline; almost always, the joke is not funny but just sort of silly and trivial.

  And this is an ongoing problem with the Compleat Enchanter tales as entertainment. Events tend just to happen. Those events are enjoyable enough to read about, but, as there's no particular reason why one should follow the other, similarly there's no particular reason to keep turning the pages. It's clear de Camp and Pratt were aware of this, because all five of the tales here don't so much end – in some kind of climax or resolution – as just peter out. At the conclusion of the first tale, for example, we have no idea of how this version of Ragnarok will turn out or even if Shea has really affected it at all; it's just time for him to get the hell out (perhaps, Fanthorpe-fashion, the two authors realized they were fast approaching the permitted word-count), so he does. Story's over; on with the next one.

  Which leads to a further difficulty. There's not much new to say in each fresh story, aside from the change of venue. "Formulaic" is a cruel word, but it's hard not to apply it here. Certainly this reader's heart did not soar at the prospect of each new story's beginning. Rather there was the sense that, for a full understanding of the tale, all that had to be established was the new setting; from there the rest of the story could be more or less taken as read.

  But one after the other may not be the ideal way to approach the five tales in this volume. Singly, with long intervals between the reading, the four novellas are entertaining, and there are a few good jokes lurking in the midst of these 532 pages. The Castle of Iron, the novel, is less successful, primarily just because it is longer, so that the conceit is wearing a bit thin by its end. The characterization of Belphebe is a delight; it's a pity that none of the other protagonists, Shea included, are much more than names on the page. In sum, then, it can't be denied that these tales justify their recognized status as seminal in the story of comic fantasy; in that sense they are required – and important – reading. There should be a copy of this book on the shelf of every serious student of fantasy.

  Presumably to enhance the reader's sense of the historical significance of these stories, Millennium/Gollancz have preserved all the many typographical errors of the previous printing.

  —Infinity Plus

  Singularity

  by Bill DeSmedt

  Per Aspera, 502 pages, hardback, 2004

  The first book from a new Seattle publisher that aims to compete head-on with the established "big boys", Per Aspera Press, Singularity is an effective technothriller that stamps DeSmedt's name on the field in no uncertain manner.

  Marianna Bonaventure is an inexperienced agent for CROM, a US covert agency charged with keeping track of the nuclear materials and knowhow left lying around after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and – more to the point – with attempting to make sure none of it falls into the hands of terrorists or rogue nations. (Yes, there's an irony in the "rogue nations" part of this.) She finds there is something suspicious going on around the enigmatic Russian industrialist Arkady Grishin, who makes his base of operations on a vast ocean liner, the Rusalka. In order to help her probe this mystery, she ropes in Jonathan Knox, a high-priced civilian business analyst who has a great knack for solving problems through near-instinctive pattern-recognition. At first reluctant about everything to do with the caper except the charms of Ms Bonaventure, Knox soon finds himself an enthusiastic participant in the investigation, as it becomes clearer and clearer that the nature of Grishin's ambitions is world-affectingly grim.

  Meanwhile, on the far side of the globe, Texan physicist Jack Adler is bemused by the extent to which his Russian colleagues on an expedition into the wilds of Siberia to examine the region of the Tunguska Event of 1907 are resistant to his theory of its cause. That theory posits that the earth was hit by a mini black hole, a remnant from the Big Bang. It's a perfectly valid real-world hypothesis; Adler's extension of it is that the black hole may very well have taken up a complex spiralling orbit within the body of our planet. He finds what appears to be proof of this, but then all of his records and equipment are destroyed in a murderous attack.

  Through many complicated routes, Bonaventure and Knox, placed as spies aboard the Rusalka, come close to hitting on Adler's theory independently, and in due course their suspicions are confirmed through a direct electronic contact with Adler himself. Grishin and his scientists have developed a way of capturing the black hole, stripping it temporarily of its event horizon, and using the naked singularity as a time machine whereby they can alter history to their own gain and human civilization's enormous disbenefit.

  As in any technothriller, there are two elements to this novel, the techno part – the scientific/technological underpinning – and the thriller part.

  It's in the techno part that DeSmedt really shines. He has an astonishing gift for explaining really quite abstruse physical and technological concepts with clarity and immediacy, and in making such explanations both fascinating and – let's be forthright here – enormous fun. Even if you're perfectly au fait with current ideas about black holes and their physics, the novel is worth reading just for the flamboyant joy of these expository passages. DeSmedt is clearly passionately in love with these areas of physics, and he succeeds completely in conveying that passion to the reader.

  Similarly, his extrapolations from present into near-future technology are entirely convincing – at least to this reader. I finished this book with my mind in a total jumble as to which of the communication/surveillance technologies depicted are current in the real world and which are merely products of DeSmedt's controlled imagination; all seemed equally plausible. As for the technologies involved in black-hole capture, they too seemed highly feasible. It's a while since my disbelief has been so convincingly suspended by a technothriller.

  DeSmedt is less accomplished in the thriller element of the novel, but luckily he's saved by another of his great skills: the creation of excellently sympathetic characters. Marianna
Bonaventure is a wonderful creation; she stands out in a genre where the smart, kickass, yummy female has come to be regarded as little more than a standard part of the toolkit. This is because all of her many strengths as a person are in part a product of the weaknesses she also possesses. At first she completely flummoxes Knox, who simply cannot find a way to relate to her complexities, his reactions to her beauty and her personality all clashing with each other. The reader's reactions are likely to be similar, until at last, probably more than halfway through this long book, it becomes possible to understand, at all levels, this thoroughly three-dimensional – and certainly very engaging – individual.

  Knox himself is no mean fictional creation. He's somewhat reminiscent of an Ellery Queen for the twenty-first century in his powers of ratiocination and his veneer of general geekiness, but he's a far more real person than Ellery Queen could ever be. DeSmedt's semi-major characters, too, leap from the page: Sasha, the old friend of Knox's who has compromised his idealism in the pursuit of entrancing technology; Galina, another old acquaintance of Knox, a tragic figure whose love for children is brutally matched by her inability to have a child of her own, and who, unknowing of Grishin's fell motives, is the primary technological brain behind his endeavours; and Mycroft, a.k.a. Dr Finley Laurence, the super-analyst and cybernetics genius to whom Knox turns when even his own analytical powers prove insufficient. Even Bonaventure's boss, the shoot-first-think-later bureaucratic numbskull Pete Aristos, has a delightful sense of realness to him. Only the character intended as our heroes' ultimate focus of dread, Yuri, Grishin's murderous sidekick, is a bit of a cypher; in essence, he's Jaws from the James Bond movies but without any of the redeeming characteristics. Grishin likewise seems to have been drawn from Central Casting.

  Perhaps Yuri in particular epitomizes the novel's weakness as a thriller. The thug-dodging and general hijinks are all perfectly competently done, but they lack the marvellous originality of the rest of the novel: you find yourself aching for each "exciting bit" to be over so you can get back to the really exciting stories being told – the next link in the scientific chain, or what's happening in the faux pas-strewn mutual circling going on between Bonaventure and Knox. As implied above, it's because of the enormous strength of these aspects – the scientific and the emotional – that the novel swings grippingly along at the high pace that it does; the relative weakness of the adventure aspects, their resorting-to-the-default aura, becomes more or less irrelevant.

  The back of the book bears a stack of cover quotes from noteworthies: Kevin J. Anderson, David Brin, Kip Thorne, Greg Bear and Anthony Olcott. Unusually, I found that I agreed with just about everything they said; for once the blurbers' enthusiasm isn't hype. With one exception. Anderson says: "Singularity juggles Clancy, Crichton, and The Da Vinci Code." The comparison with Crichton is justified, although DeSmedt is by far the better novelist of the two. The comparison with Clancy may be justified: I've never been able to get beyond about twenty pages into any of Clancy's writings, so rely for my knowledge of them on the rather jolly movies. But Singularity has no connection whatsoever with The Da Vinci Code; the comment is quite simply absurd – a thoroughly egregious example of the base art of rentaquote. In the ordinary way I'd not bother mentioning this piece of folly, but Singularity is something, well, a bit special. Shame on Per Aspera for so cheapening the treasure they've published.

  Throughout this review I've been describing Singularity as a technothriller. As will be evident, though, it can also be approached as hard sf. In that context, too, it's eminently successful – in fact, it's the most readable piece of hard sf, by a quite significant margin, that I've come across in quite a long while, and, enlivened as it is by its glorious characterization (or, to be waspish, by characters at all), should be recommended reading for most of the authors currently working in the subgenre.

  However, matters of categorization are best left to the Dryasdusts and Panglosses: technothriller or hard sf, who really cares? It's purely as a work of imaginative fiction, classification be damned, that Singularity should be assessed. Well, put it this way: this is a book you'll want to own in hardback. DeSmedt is a wonderful newcomer to the field, and his debut must surely be of great significance to it. I cannot believe otherwise than that his voice will be given the attention it so emphatically deserves in the years to come.

  —Infinity Plus

  The Mind Box

  by A.J. Diehl

  Midnight Ink, 472 pages, paperback, 2005

  Hollywood detective Lane (Helena) Daily is called in to lead the investigation into the horrific murder of movie and music producer Eddie Ealing, whose corpse has been found grotesquely mutilated in the style of his screen gorefest Sense of Life. Could this be the first killing by a serial murderer with a bizarre sense of humor and a chip on his shoulder about cleaning up the entertainment industry? That's Hollywood's first assumption, an assumption shared by many of Daily's colleagues, but she's not so sure – especially when there's evidence that her investigation is being quietly hobbled by powerful movers and shakers.

  Not long before the murder, Ealing received by e-mail a sadistic display showing a human heart and a young woman's blood-smeared face. The sender was Mike's Gifts, a shadowy organization – or individual – whom Daily discovers has a long history of, for a fee, exacting physically harmless but psychologically sadistic revenge upon the bullying and corrupt. Could this "gift" be linked to the murder? Does she need to solve the mystery of Mike's Gifts before she can solve the mystery of Ealing's death?

  Or is the answer to be found in the too-squeaky-clean memory-research establishment, the Temperel Institute, run by the Ealing family and centred on the dead man's eccentric-genius brother? And where does the Ealing paterfamilias, a hyper-rich professional moralist, fit in?

  All of the above, while an accurate summation of the scenario, makes A.J. Diehl's first novel, The Mind Box, sound like just another template mystery.

  It's not.

  To amplify that statement would probably be to give away too many of the surprises to be found during the course of reading this long, richly textured and very rewarding book. Suffice it to say that it's one of those wonderful novels where you end up a very long way from where you expected to find yourself.

  The Mind Box is not a perfect novel. The first sixty or eighty of its 470+ pages have a certain aura of uncertainty about them; I was reminded of one of those small-press authors who have all the talent in the world but desperately need a good editor. In particular, the author seems keen to cram in as much as possible of her research on police procedure, forensics and the like. But thereafter, almost between one page and the next, the narrative picks itself up and starts zipping along compellingly. Daily, who in the initial pages seems set to be a by-the-numbers modern-mystery-novel female cop sleuth, becomes instead a fully rounded and very simpatico personality, as does her friend and shrink, television psychiatrist Paulette Sohl. Minor characters become fully fleshed out, including Daily's cop ex-husband and especially one of the other characters, whose identity I'd better not reveal here but whose importance becomes increasingly evident as the tale progresses.

  A.J. Diehl is definitely a writer to watch. The Mind Box is a complex and highly satisfying novel, and an impressive debut to the genre.

  —Crescent Blues

  The Dead Wives Society

  by Sharon Duncan

  Signet Mystery, 288 pages, paperback, 2003

  An attractive, independent young-middle-aged female PI with something of a past? Sounds a bit like Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone, and the comparisons are sure to be made between Milhone and Sharon Duncan's Scotia MacKinnon, protagonist of The Dead Wives Society. The similarities don't stop with the setup: just as Milhone's adventures are (increasingly) undertaken against a sort of soap opera background woven from the relationships between her supporting characters and indeed from that between Milhone and her estranged family, so are MacKinnon's. Perhaps such comparisons are odious, but there are
enough echoes of Grafton's work here that I kept expecting to be brought up short by one of Milhone's electric one-liners. No such luck.

  Ex-cop Mackinnon, three husbands down and a rich boyfriend on call, lives on a boat in the San Juan Islands, Washington State. Surrounding her are folk like the guy on the next boat, Henry; ditzy Zelda, her part-time assistant downstairs; Abbie, ever looking for a good cause to demonstrate about; and local newspaper editor Jared. These and others are having their interpersonal ups and downs, into which MacKinnon is sometimes dragged. To add to the mix, MacKinnon's mother, elderly hippie Jewel Moon, arrives for a stay to have a heart-to-heart about the way she abandoned MacKinnon in infancy, so MacKinnon can realize she's been maybe a bit tough on Mom all these years.

  MacKinnon's new client is sizzlingly glamorous French-Moroccan medic Chantal Rousseau, freshly arrived in town with her aged full-Moroccan mother. Rousseau has been swindled bigtime by one Forbes Cameron, who briefly married her, and wants at least her mother's jewelry back; placing Cameron's own family jewels in a blender is an eagerly sought optional bonus. As MacKinnon digs, she discovers Cameron, under various aliases, has perpetrated similar swindles on a whole string of women, some of whom have been – and are still being – bumped off.

  But that's not all. It soon emerges Cameron is a rogue MI6 agent who a couple of years ago turned murderously traitor and is now on the run from ex-colleague Michael Farraday, despatched to terminate him. Even so, Cameron has a new rich female victim in his sights ... but who?

  Implausibilities leap forth. Cameron knows his most recent ex is here but nonetheless plans a high-profile celebrity marriage in the locality. All his aliases have the same initials, FWC, a habit an MI6 agent might perhaps have grown out of. As MacKinnon puzzles over a pair of cufflinks, monogrammed with those initials, that Cameron forgot when ditching Rousseau, she on impulse shows them to Zelda, who just happens to recognize them instantly because she once shared a house with the jeweler who made them. And so on.