Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews

by John Grant

  As the social history of ufology the publishers claim it to be in their cover blurb, even an informal one, this book is far from adequate. As noted above, it covers only a small segment of the field; plenty of really quite important ufological figures and their ideas, sane or crackpot, get no mention at all. The index lists only people, so there is no entry for, for example, Roswell, even though there's quite a lot about the Roswell fallacy in the book; bad indexes seem to be a Prometheus speciality. I noticed that Hugo Gernsback is called "Gernsbach", so for all I know there may be countless other individuals – or places, or organizations, etc. – whose names are incorrectly spelled. One could go on chipping away at the text on such grounds for quite a long time.

  But that's not really what it's about. What this constantly entertaining book is about is a very haphazard (delightfully haphazard) ramble through the life of someone who's been in the ufology game primarily for the fun of it. He has teased; he has hoaxed (often in tandem with his friend the late Gray Barker, although Barker almost made a profession of it); he has exposed (the whole of the 1957 issue of Saucer News exposing Adamski is reproduced in the appendix); he has annoyed (too many to name, but they're the sort of people you feel good that someone's annoyed); he has been ufology's gadfly. At the end of the day, he was delighted when "a certain Harry Lime" wrote from Vienna, Austria (not Greeneland?), to tell him he should be proud of, not dismayed by, the sobriquet he'd recently been given in MUFON UFO Journal: "The Reigning Court Jester of Ufology."

  Revealing and entertaining by turns, Shockingly Close to the Truth is a book you'll love or – assuming you're especially po-faced – hate. This reviewer devoured it, and with a grin on his face the whole time.

  —Infinity Plus

  Suicide Casanova

  by Arthur Nersesian

  Akashic, 350 pages, paperback, 2005

  First of all, it should be said that this is a work of the most profound pornography.

  Just before my editor rushes out to buy herself multiple copies, that remark, while true, should be hastily qualified. While it would be impossible for its various graphic sex scenes to be accomplished free of any vestige of the erotic, such eroticism as exists is purely incidental to Nersesian's much more serious purpose, which is to paint a group portrait of people consumed by their own obsessions.

  The most notable figure in this portrait is, rightly, the novel's primary narrator, Leslie Caldwell. A successful lawyer, he has recently lost his equally obsessional professional-dominatrix wife Cecilia to what everyone assumes was an accident during an S&M bout. Now, awash in booze and with suspicious cops harassing him at every turn – was that really an accident or did he deliberately garotte her? – he gives in to his long ill suppressed obsession with the generously bosomed porn actress Sky Pacifica. His fixation on her began in his youth, when masturbatory addiction to her movie drove him to locate her, strike up a brief acquaintanceship, and enjoy an even briefer sexual relationship with her; later, pregnant, she shamelessly abused the friendship ... or perhaps she didn't: perhaps they both got exactly what they wanted from their time together.

  Careless that his career is fast spiraling down the tube, Leslie tracks down Sky once again, discovering her to be a respectably married woman in Long Island. Incapable of making his life simple in any respect, Leslie sufficiently complicates his new approach to her that at one stage he's suspected of sexually harassing her teenaged daughter, but finally the liaison is reaffirmed. Of course, though, there can be no happy ending here: obsession creates its own dooms.

  There is a further dimension to the novel. In their obsessions – and I don't apologize for the frequency with which I've used that word – the central characters of Suicide Casanova are enacting in microcosm the behavioral frenzy of New York City, specifically Manhattan. Leslie's obsessions with sadomasochistic bondage and, both youthful and middle-aged, with Sky are in a way defenses against the lure of the obsessional mire that is his chosen corporate-lawyer career. Anyone who has lived in NYC will be able to identify a part of themselves in Leslie.

  Suicide Casanova is strongly reminiscent in "feel" of – and as much to be admired as – Luke Rinehart's classic novel The Dice Man. A much more recent but equally valid comparison can be drawn with Christopher Fahy's excellent Fever 42, where the obsession likewise has sex as a primary focus. Or maybe, in both instances, the sex is only the excuse for the indulgence of the obsession – if it weren't sex it could as easily be something else that the obsessive personality used as the tool to effect his slow, relentless self-destruction.

  This is an impressive novel, and Nersesian an impressive writer: strongly recommended.

  —Crescent Blues

  The Integral Trees

  by Larry Niven

  Del Rey, 480 pages, paperback, 2003

  Despite the title, this is an omnibus reissue of both The Integral Trees (1983) and its sequel The Smoke Ring (1987). I managed somehow to miss out on both of them when they were first released, and consequently fell on this with a delight tempered only by the knowledge that some of Niven's other writing of that era and particularly a little later has not aged well. That criticism could indeed be leveled at these two novels, I found, but so mildly as to be largely irrelevant.

  Long ago a bunch of humans were marooned by a mad computer (I simplify) in a bizarre habitat: the gaseous donut surrounding a neutron star, where there's enough air and energy for life to have developed, most notably enormously long floating trees that serve as homes for many of the more mobile lifeforms, newly arrived humans included. The two novels are set some generations later, when the descendants of the original strandees have multiplied, diversified and established various different mini-civilizations.

  Niven's prose is very pared down by the standards of today, which is not entirely a bad thing, and despite it he is able to convey effectively the kind of cosmic awe which has always been his main strength. However, he loses out a little on atmosphere and characterization; the two novels are highly readable, generate appropriate gasps, but are in the end result a mite uninvolving.

  —Crescent Blues

  Flying Cups & Saucers: Gender Explorations in Science Fiction & Fantasy

  edited by Debbie Notkin and The Secret Feminist Cabal

  Edgewood Press, 394 pages, paperback, 1998

  The James Tiptree Jr. Award, first given in 1991, is designed to honour, according to the only definition given in this anthology of past winners and runners-up, "works of science fiction that explore and expand gender roles". This is, therefore, an anthology with a fixed and stated agenda, and must be evaluated as such rather than purely as the excellent collection of stories it is – even though it is by some distance the best fantasy anthology per se this reviewer has encountered in a while.

  The term "fantasy anthology" is used quite deliberately, because in one important respect the book fails to live up to its agenda. There are only two stories here which are unmitigatedly science fiction: "Eat Reecebread" (1994) by Graham Joyce and Peter F. Hamilton (unfortunately, one of the least interesting of the stories here) and "The Matter of Seggri" (1994) by Ursula K. Le Guin, and even the latter qualifies as out-and-out science fiction only (and only when one is in charitable mood) because the timescales its story requires – generations and centuries – would be difficult plausibly to achieve outside the sf genre.

  For it is impossible to read this assemblage of stories without beginning to query precisely what it is we mean by the term "science fiction". In Le Guin's "The Matter of Seggri" – which is hardly a story, more an expression in disjointed fictional episodes of various social-anthropological/sociological concerns – there is no technology to speak of and very little by way of science. The visiting anthropologists arrive by spacecraft but this is merely a device, as is admitted even in the text, in that a pair of them pretend to the natives to be shipwrecked mariners; furthermore, the opening section is a conscious pastiche of the sort of fabulous-voyage tale that attained its acme of popularity
with Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726). Take away the (off-stage and scantily mentioned) spaceships and the necessary timespans involved for the sociological study to be carried out, and "The Matter of Seggri" could equally well be a lost-race story set back home here on Earth – in other words, a fantasy, not (at least according to most definitions of the term) science fiction at all.

  This attempt to sciencefictionalize fantasies is made particularly overt in two of the other stories, Eleanor Arnason's "The Lovers" (1994) and L. Timmel Duchamp's "Motherhood, Etc." (1993), and in neither case to the tale's advantage. The former is set in a well realized fantasyland whose furry inhabitants regard heterosexual coupling as for perpetuation of the species only, with love, longer-term bonding or even just cheap-thrill sex being possible only in homosexual relationships. There are occasional little irritating asides along the lines of "this concept may be difficult for humans to understand" and there's a self-indulgent quasi-linguistical endnote, but these serve only to disrupt the reader's suspension of disbelief in what is otherwise straightforwardly a fantasy. Duchamp's "Motherhood, Etc." is a riveting and moving piece of work – a woman has been "infected" with hermaphroditism by her lover, and is being tormented by male bureaucrats and researchers attempting to find out what's happened. The story's effect is utterly destroyed by its sciencefictional denouement: the lover is a humanoid xenoanthropologist from an extraterrestrial civilization; he and his fellows, stranded on Earth through technological malfunction, have formed a wainscot society whose rules he has broken by interacting with a human female. Ah, so that explains everything. Fifty years ago in a pulp magazine, or even today in a mainstream novelist's critically acclaimed experiment in science fiction (à la Martin Amis or P.D. James), this might be regarded as a startlingly imaginative or otherwise satisfying deus ex machina, but in the context of our modern literary expectations it is nothing but a copout, a debasing use of a sciencefictional cliché as if, somehow, by throwing in a reference to offworlders the story is justified – if the author can't think of a mainstream, fantastic or even originally sciencefictional rationale for the tale, then chuck in a few ETs who can't phone home and at least those thickwitted sf-reading anoraks will swallow it.

  This argument can be extended to at least one of the other stories, "Chemistry" (1993) by James Patrick Kelly, which, along with "Eat Reecebread", is the most overtly sciencefictional tale in the anthology. Here a young woman in search of thrills goes to a Hothouse, a technological singles club where people's pheromonal responses are artificially enhanced so that for at least a while they have the sensation, no matter what the partner they select for the night is actually like, of being in emotional and physical love. Our protagonist encounters a balding, tubby little man – not her type at all – and discovers that even after the enhancements have worn off the attraction remains: this is the Real Thing. It's a trite enough moral (it's the person who's important, not the packaging), but the tale is beautifully handled and the sciencefictional underpinning fits perfectly with the rest. Yet it's hard to regard this as a piece of sf, because the tale would in essence remain totally unaffected if, in place of all the guff about pheromonal enhancements and the like, one substituted the word "magic". In short, it's a technofantasy: the beautiful princess has kissed her frog and now sees him for the handsome prince he is.

  Several of the other tales assembled here are, like "The Lovers" (didn't someone else write a story called "The Lovers" which actually was sf?), similarly fantasies with a smattering of sciencefictional terminology or an artificial sciencefictional frame. Carol Emshwiller's "Venus Rising" (1992), which one might say was the best tale in the book were it not for the fact that at least half the others could reasonably be adjudged likewise, is a beautifully realized bit of fantasy. The intruder who disturbs a water-dwelling mammalian culture on a planet that is not Earth (in other words, is a fantasyland) himself is described as from yet another planet. Surely this means that the story is sf, plain and simple? Well, since his plan is to impregnate as many females as possible through sexual intercourse, the sciencefictional underpinning works only if one accepts that his starfaring culture knows less about genetics than the average ten-year-old ... or middle-American religious fundaloon. One senses, possibly incorrectly, that the bit about him having come from space was grafted on for marketing reasons. Ian McDonald's "Some Strange Desire" (1993), again excellent, is a technofantasy based on vampirism. "Forgiveness Day" (1994), the other long Le Guin piece here, is a superb story in which a male of a culture wherein women are regarded as airheads and property, Learns Better; what is especially impressive in this story, bearing in mind the heavy-handedness of much feminist fiction, is that the woman with whom he falls in love proves to be not his intellectual superior but his equal, which is as it should be.

  The remaining stories do not pretend to be anything other than what they are: fantasies – and one of them, R. Garcia y Robertson's "The Other Magpie" (1993), an evocative tale about Native American transvestism at the time of the Battle of Little Big Horn, qualifies as fantasy only because the protagonist is guided by a ghost which may in fact be only a rationalization of her own quasi-instinctive knowledges. "Food Man" (1994) by Lisa Tuttle is an allegorical fantasy which disappointingly opts for what is euphemistically called visceral horror in its last few paragraphs. "And Salome Danced" (1994) by Kelley Eskridge actually is a horror fantasy, and a deliciously chilling one: the story hinges on a hermaphroditic psychic vampire, who uses her/his sexual power for purely selfish reasons, delighting in the directly consequent destruction of her/his partners. "Young Woman in a Garden" (1994) by Delia Sherman is an entrancing ghost story involving a lesbian relationship. Finally Ian MacLeod's "Grownups" (1992) is a first-rate mature fantasy set in a culture that could be our own were it not that humanity has three sexes and the attainment of adulthood involves acute (in the medical sense) physiological and traumatic psychological change – to borrow terminology from zoology, his adolescents are neotenous larvae who, in the normal way, go through a brief pupation analogue before achieving the adult form.

  To repeat, most of these are fictions that would be outstanding in any other context, and even the couple that are less interesting would probably seem fairly distinguished if read in an anthology of average quality. Since all were published within a very short timespan, the three years between 1992 and 1994, it is good to know that the genre of fantastic literature is in such raucously good health. However, taken as a whole, they cannot be said to be "works of science fiction" – or at least not without heavy qualification – so in this sense they fail to match the first part of the definition we started with.

  What, then, of the second part? Do they "explore and expand gender roles"?

  Well, yes and no. Hermaphroditism is a recurring theme, yet there is not much by way of exploration of the condition of being a hermaphrodite in any of the stories here except MacLeod's "Grownups", where anyway one is stretching the term if one describes his adolescents as hermaphroditic (although the third of the sexes, one possibility awaiting them on becoming adult, seems to be hermaphroditic). Another recurring theme is of a male-dominated, female-dominated or homosexuality-dominated society in which a pair of oppositely sexed protagonists in one way or another buck the system. Here we do indeed have some in-depth psychological examinations of gender, but as the exploration is of a condition which most of us experience daily it can hardly be regarded as a brave voyage into any terra incognita where there might be dragons; to take "The Lovers" as an example, it would be interesting if the tale explored the condition of lesbianism in the same way that it explores the condition of awakening heterosexuality, since most of us aren't lesbians and don't know what it's like to be one (any more than a woman can understand what it's like to be a man, or a man a woman). Others of the stories seem to have nothing much to say on the subject of gender at all – "Venus Rising" and "Young Woman in a Garden", fine as they are as stories and as pieces of writing, both fa
ll into this category.

  So, in the end, we have to assume that, whatever the parameters used by the judges of the James Tiptree Jr. Award in deciding upon their shortlists and winners, they are not the parameters set out in the informal description of the award's purpose contained in Notkin's introduction to this anthology. These are imaginative stories largely centred on sexual relationships or the relations between the sexes (in some, notably "The Other Magpie", even this is peripheral), and to claim that they are anything more than that is, in the correct sense of the word, merely pretentious.

  Yet, to repeat, this is an anthology of a quite phenomenally high standard. It is a pity that it will almost certainly not receive the attention it merits because of the amateurishness of its production and publishing. (a) The title leaves a lot to be desired. (b) The cover design is Hellish Tasteful in all directions, but its designer has ignored the fact that it might be desirable for people to be able to read the title: the copy in front of me is, it seems, called Flying C & Sauce. (c) Although there is a section at the back lovingly detailing the fonts used, unfortunately nobody seems to have bothered proofreading the backmatter. Despite all these cavils, though, your shelf is incomplete without this book.

  —unknown venue

  Phoenix Fire

  by Tim O'Laughlin

  BodhiDharma, 343 pages, paperback, 1999

  Between the covers of this book there lurks a very good novel trying to get out.

  A group of friends in California adds to its number retired psychiatrist Larry, who has had a long interest in past-life hypnotic regression. He tries this out on first one and then all the individuals of the group, and they discover it is not accident that has brought them together in this lifetime: they have been friends, spouses, etc., in previous incarnations, notably in Nazi Germany and, before that, as members of a massacred Sioux tribe. They are older companions than they have known. A dramatic manifestation occurs when Larry realizes that in countless previous lifetimes Audrey, who is not part of the group, has been the spouse of Ryan, who is; when the two are introduced they instantly "recognize" and are in love with each other.