by John Grant
However, although Confetory members may not interfere with the social evolution of Enclave worlds, this does not mean they may not land on and move around covertly on such worlds, just so long as the locals are never aware of the Galactic civilization or indeed the existence of life outside their own planet. So Jaremi Four has long been infiltrated by Spectators, busily broadcasting all the thrills and spills of barbarism to their senso audience.
One such Spectator, Ruth Griszam, has been observing events of no particular note. One day, however, she meets Arn Parek, a native Jaremi Four conman superabundantly charged with charisma. He has discovered – more accurately, has independently invented – religion, and the way in which the mentally or emotionally inadequate (which on Jaremi Four means just about everybody, oppressors and oppressed alike) find that it fills a gaping hole in their psyche. With the aid of a few basic mentalist (conjuring) tricks, Parek is making a good living as a sort of peripatetic avatar of the sky gods, enjoying worship, viands and wenches in one community until they grow weary of his easy-going parasitism, at which point he swiftly moves on to the next. And so on.
By chance, Griszam records Parek in action, "converting" the two murderous barbarians, Ulf and Chagrin, who have been her companions this past little while. She assumes her broadcast of his tricksterism will be regarded as mere fun by the audience, but to her astonishment the trillions of senso addicts instantly become devoted Parek fans, being converted by him as easily – albeit at a remove – as the primitives Ulf and Chagrin. Even when Parek connives at the murder of his old friend Dultav, who has become her lover, Griszam realizes that there is potentially a big journalistic story here.
She's not the only one. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has been fairly dormant for a long while, but entrepreneurial evangelist Alrue Latier recognizes in Parekism a chance to revitalize Mormonism with himself at the helm – and, more pertinently, how this situation can be manipulated such as to increase yet further the torrent of monetary "offerings" sent in to his own near-perpetual senso show by the credulous. Using the latest technology, Latier secretly violates Enclave in order to present himself to Parek as one of the sky-gods, to enable Parek to perform miracles and so on (according to Arthur C. Clarke's famous principle that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic). The savages didn't need much convincing before, but, now that Parek can do some really spectacular miracles and can predict future events, they're falling over themselves to follow him.
But Latier is not alone among the Galactics in recognizing the potential of the situation and violating Enclave. Orgena Greder, owner and tyrant of the planet Khoren Four, wants a spectacular and public end to the ministry of Parek so that she may promote the claims of her own psychopathic protege to be the newly incarnated Christ; the presence on a planet of a godhead does wonders for interstellar trade, and Khoren Four could sorely use the revenue. Accordingly, Greder presents herself to Ulf, Parek's bloodthirstily military sidekick, as another and better sky-god, so that Ulf, while outwardly the loyalest of disciples, is in fact secretly plotting Parek's downfall and his own triumph as conqueror of all Jaremi Four in a series of ever-increasingly bloody, massacre-strewn campaigns.
The Catholic Church, in two minds as to whether or not it would be to its own advantage if Parek were the Christ, cannot leave this alone, and so breaches Enclave even more comprehensively than anyone else ...
Believe it or not, all of the above is really little more than the starting premise for the plot! For we have in Galactic Rapture not only an extremely long book (large pages, narrow margins and eye-strainingly small type mean you could at least double the page-count given at the head of this review for an estimate of the novel's length) but an extremely complex one – and, for that matter, an extremely good one.
There is obviously plenty of material here from which to construct a fairly standard space opera trilogy. (I am convinced Galactic Rapture was intended as a trilogy but that the publisher decided to cram its three parts all into a single volume. This would explain the minuscule type, which makes this most engrossingly readable of books in practice very hard to read.) But space opera is not Flynn's purpose. Instead, he offers a very, very, very deep and biting dark satire of not just the imbecilities of organized religion but also human frailties and vices in general. Quite frequently the bracingly refreshing bleakness of his satiric vision is illuminated by extremely funny jokes, so that on one page you can be nauseated by the fastidiously detailed scenes of carnage and torment yet on the next find yourself laughing out loud. The overall sense, though, is that there is very little to laugh about in the human condition, and that the blame for this being so cannot be laid at the feet of some creator god. We ourselves have quite deliberately, through action or inaction, created such misery, using our religions as only one of several tools in the construction of it. Furthermore, unless we change our ways, if unrestricted we are capable of spreading the same folly and affliction far beyond the confines of our own home world.
Agree with it or not, Flynn is presenting us with, through his satire, some extremely fundamental questions about ourselves and the axioms of our social structures, questions which we normally do our best to evade. To take just a single example, it is generally assumed by atheists that the beliefs of others are sacrosanct: that it is a fundamental right of every human being to believe in the religion of his or her choice; that religion is a personal matter, not to be tampered with by others.* By the end
[* 2011 note: Attitudes have changed quite a lot among many atheists in the few years since I wrote this review. Plus ça change, plus c'est une autre chose.]
of reading the thought experiment that is Galactic Rapture, having seen plausibly exemplified the damage that religion can do – and on a massively widespread scale – one has to face what has become an inescapable question: Is that tolerant principle in fact a viable one? Will toleration of religious nonsense – and the question is unaffected by the actual existence or otherwise of a deity or deities – spell the doom of the human species?
Such a question is represented symbolically in Flynn's satire. To continue with our current example, if we regard Jaremi Four as analogous to an individual (or to that individual's worldview), then its decreed status as an Enclave world – whose inhabitants must not be tampered with by outsiders – can be seen as analogous to the "accommodationist" principle of toleration expressed above. Whatever widespread brutalities and unbelievable human sufferings are perpetrated on Jaremi Four, the Galactics will not intervene; whatever garbage true believers cram into the minds of their children, we will not intervene to save those children from the destruction of their own and others' lives through the indoctrinated hatreds, fallacies and bigotries. Those who choose to turn their backs on the fruits of human knowledge are all, in effect, Enclave worlds; while the rest of us, without really questioning why we do so, observe the principle of Enclave as if it were itself some kind of ineffable religious statute.
Leaving considerations of satire aside for a moment, on a purely sciencefictional basis the principle of Enclave – obviously under a huge diversity of names – is a notion very frequently encountered throughout the genre. It's a very plausible idea, that advanced civilizations will hide themselves from less advanced ones until the latter reach a certain level of sophistication for fear of causing the destruction of a culture; each civilization must follow its own natural course of evolution independently until it is ready to do otherwise in case it is culturally or even physically – as in the case of the now extinct indigenous Tasmanians here on Earth – annihilated by contact with more advanced ones.
I must confess I've always accepted this premise in sf without really thinking about it: one has only to glance at the sorry history of the Native Americans after the arrival of the Europeans to realize that such quarantining is A Good Thing. Yet Flynn actually presents a very strong argument for the opposite: it is in the nature of life itself, and hence human cultures, to encount
er the different – whether that be a volcanic eruption or another civilization. Contact between two cultures is destructive of the less advanced one only if the more advanced one lets it or makes it be so – in effect, only if the approach of the more advanced culture is one of military or social conquest: physical or cultural imperialism.
There are far too many riches within Galactic Rapture for me to even begin to list them here – for that you must go and fight with the small print to enjoy them for yourself. (The small print obviously often defeated the Prometheus proofreader as well;*
[* 2011 note: Flynn's follow-up, Nothing Sacred, arrived in 2004 and shared the same typography. I'm still waiting for the moment when I feel brave enough to face another bout with that tiny print.]
and nobody involved has worked out that "aurora" is a singular, not a plural, noun.) The struggle is eminently well worth it. Equip yourself with a magnifying glass if need be. Whether or not you agree with all of Flynn's answers or with his general theme, he presents questions that we as a single-planet culture really need to face rather than forever dodge. And he does so within the context of a satire that, for all its bitter darkness, is also riotously entertaining.
Endlessly thought-provoking. Tremendous fun. Conceptually challenging. Moving. Impassioned. Richly written. Deliciously imaginative. Willing to speak the unspeakable. Unafraid to accept and explore new ideas. Say, remember when we all thought this was what speculative fiction was all about? Galactic Rapture is all of that and more. Viewed from any perspective, it's an extremely important book; science fiction is lucky to have it.
—Infinity Plus
The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque
by Jeffrey Ford
Morrow, 307 pages, hardback, 2002
In Victorian-era Manhattan, fashionable portraitist Piero Piambo receives a most unusual commission. His client, Mrs. Charbuque, demands that he paint her portrait without ever once setting eyes upon her or upon any other likeness of her; instead, she will sit for him only behind a screen, telling him tales about herself from which he must attempt to deduce her appearance. Piambo would of course normally reject such a nonsensical commission out of hand – he has plenty of rich potential clients drooling to give him their business – but the fee Mrs. Charbuque offers is an enormous one and, perhaps even more important, the challenge is so unique that it inspires a jaded Piambo, although at first he is not fully conscious of this, to revert to the ideals of art he embraced so passionately in his youth, before cynicism and commerce turned him into the darling of the well heeled chic set he is today.
The tales Mrs. Charbuque relates over and through the screen are almost beyond – sometimes completely beyond – belief, and yet Piambo, while knowing at one level they are not to be accepted at face value (as it were), is driven to try to research what he can of the facts behind them, and uncomfortably often his researches seem to show the tales may, after all, be true. It is as if the tales' fantastication itself is giving him the gift of art in place of the slick picture-manufacture at which he has become so adroit – or, rather, that they are forcing him to regain what he once had but discarded. And real life intrudes all too bluntly on occasion upon his dreamlike obsession with these strands of fantasy that have come to dominate his perceptions: there seems to be a Mr. Charbuque, who is none too keen on Piambo's assignations with his, Mr. Charbuque's, wife. Piambo's mistress is not especially pleased, either. It is of no use for Piambo to protest that, far from engaging in amorous congress with his sitter, far from even touching her, he has yet to clap so much as a fleeting glimpse upon her; partially false, too, for him to protest too much, because the truth is there's a decidedly erotic element in his fascination with the voice that tells him these wild stories.
Not all of the tales have equal charm. The tale of the seer who bases his divinations upon the morphologies of snowflakes, and who one day is confounded to discover two of them impossibly identical, is exceedingly beautiful. That of his copromantic counterpart ("turdologist", to use Ford's term), who is thrown into consternation by discovering two identical turds, comes across not so much as a delightful flight of fancy as profoundly unfunny schoolboy scatological humour masquerading as arch wit behind a gauze of elegant articulacy.
But that elegance is truly remarkable. Consider this:
"How did you know it was me?" I called after him.
Before he disappeared into the night, I heard him say, "The smell of self-satisfaction; a pervasive aroma of nutmeg and mold."
Or this, concerning a numerological system:
An abracadabra of addition, division, and multiplication would follow, capped off by the subtraction of the digit one hundred forty-four, the numerical constant for human error.
Or this, describing a professional lockpicker:
"There is no ring of keys," said Wolfe. "I'm the ring of keys." He held up his open hand, knuckle side out, before my face. It was a rather squat, round mitt, the fingers like sausages, but from their tips grew exceedingly long nails that had been precisely trimmed to the thinnest width. At their very ends, those of the pinky and ring bearer were cut in a serrated pattern, the thumb bore a three-inch hat pin, and the remaining index and middle sported eruptions of nail that evidently would fit a lock's baffle.
(There's also the occasional instance where the conscious stylistic elegance trips up over its own two feet, as in this: "Upon voicing my question, the door opened and Watkin announced that my time was up.")
I'm quite certain the term "magic realism" will be bandied about quite widely concerning this book, and indeed it does have a strong magic realist feel – which is in no way diminished by the serial-killer aspects of its real-world plot. However, its concerns seem to be somewhere else entirely; one should look for similarities not among the magic realist writers but instead to a writer like John Barth, obsessed with the power of Story in such novels as The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1992). For really the real-world elements of The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque – dramatic as they become, personally threatening to Piambo as they are – fade almost into insignificance in our minds as well as his beside the Story-empowered alternative truth that Mrs. Charbuque creates. The real world becomes just a jostle of trivial stories; hers is Story, and therefore truer – even though, as with its creator, for it to be perceived (which it can be) one must strain to perceive the invisible.
Which is, of course, something at the very core of human fantasy.
Despite any minor criticisms, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque must be one of the best novels of 2002. The fact that Ford has chosen to use fantasy as a means of investigating fantasy is of course its appeal to die-hard fantasy readers; but really this is a novel of interest to all, whatever their normal literary palate. This novel is a deftly constructed creation every bit as lovely as any of the invisible sitter's flights of fancy. The sense of it – its air – lingers long in the mind, and is welcome there.
—Infinity Plus
Daughters of a Coral Dawn
by Katherine V. Forrest
Naiad Press, 226 pages, paperback, 1984
Although outwardly completely human, Mother is an alien from the planet Verna III, brought home to Earth by Father, with whom she has a passel of seemingly human daughters. But, as they grow older (which they do much more slowly than humans do), it becomes evident the daughters are far more intelligent than the Earth-humans around them. This might be tolerable were it not for the fact that this near-future Earth has reverted to a complete male domination, with testosterone being the currency of the day. Might is right, and it's the men who've seized the might.
The daughters go out and marry Earth men, by whom they in turn have daughters who seem fully human but are in fact as talented as their mothers. And the daughters have daughters ...
By the time there are thousands of this all-female clan, the world situation has deteriorated yet further, the male tyranny having become yet more oppressive; a means of artificial fertilization has become available, but has been outlawe
d because it would diminish the male grip upon the female thralls. The women of the clan decide that they should leave to find another world to claim as their own – a habitable planet of which Earth has not yet become aware, of course, because otherwise the males will hunt them down and either try to exterminate them or, perhaps even worse, try to bring them back. The logistics of locating such a world and getting there are not so daunting as they might seem, because, despite their femaleness, many of the clan members have, through their hyperintelligence, risen to fairly high-ranking positions within the scientific/technological hierarchy.
The first half of this book – which very much falls into two halves – concerns all of the above and the journey, aboard a seized super-starship, to the planet, which they christen Maternas in honour of the still-jaunty Mother, the only heterosexual among the thousands-strong party of settlers. At Mother's insistence, the women appoint a new leader, perhaps the most intellectually talented of them all: the synthesist Megan.
In the second half, Maternas is accidentally discovered by a ship from Earth containing three hyper-chauvinist males and a young female lieutenant, Laurel. After an attempted rape by one of the males, and after Laurel has described how she has been harassed and bullied throughout the flight, it is clear the males cannot be allowed to stay. On the other hand, neither can they be allowed to go back to Earth and report their discovery. There are some difficult decisions ahead for Megan.
And some equally difficult decisions ahead for Laurel, too. Should she return to Earth, her home and, despite everything, the world to which she has at least some emotional allegiance; or should she stay in the semi-idyll of Maternas? Previously a practising heterosexual, can she adapt to the homosexual ways of the women of Maternas?