Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews
Page 36
The telling of this somewhat lightweight tale is appropriately light-hearted, but Rosenberg runs into difficulties with this style. The flipness is too often grating. The jocularities and observations on life are neither especially witty nor especially profound, and one's irritation with them is exacerbated by the fact that frequently they appear as if freshly coined at more than one point in the book – presumably a matter of oversight on the part of both author and editor. By midway through, as the annoyance factor rises, you might be tempted to put the book aside.
To do so would be a mistake. The book's great strength lies in the characterization not of Sparky, its main protagonist, but of Tenishia. This stubborn and strong-willed yet vulnerable and terribly frightened black teenage girl, suddenly plucked into an all-white world, is beautifully rendered by Rosenberg, so that all the other irritations with the book fade into insignificance beside the fact that we care so desperately about her fate, and hope so much that, despite all the odds, there'll be a happy ending to the tale for her. Some of the other characters are nicely done too – Jeffie, the local white boy smitten instantly by the newcomer to the Hardwood high school, and Bridget, Sparky's old flame suddenly reappeared in his life – but it's the brutally orphaned girl herself, even though she has comparatively little onstage time, who captures our emotion and keeps the pages turning. I suspect Tenishia will remain in my mind long after much of the rest of Home Front, including its rather humdrum plot, has been forgotten.
—Crescent Blues
Next of Kin
by Eric Frank Russell
Gollancz/Sterling, 181 pages, paperback, 2001; reissue of a book originally published as Plus X in Astounding in 1956, expanded for first book publication as The Space Willies in 1958, first published in the UK in 1959 as Next of Kin 1959
The quote on the back cover of this reissue in the no-longer-named Gollancz series of classic sf novels is fittingly from Terry Pratchett: "I wish I'd written Next of Kin." Don't we all? Before Pratchett, before Adams, before Friesner, before (but only just) Goulart, before countless others who cashed in on the craze for humorous fantasy/sf sparked by the success of (particularly) Adams and Pratchett, Russell was a giant fish in the relatively small pond of comedy in the genre literature of the fantastic. In novels such as Wasp (1957) and The Space Willies/Next of Kin and in countless short stories, many of the best of which are to be found in the quasi-fixup The Great Explosion (1962), independent-minded Earthlings succeeded, generally through use of their wits and against enormous numerical odds, in thwarting or defeating powerful bureaucracies or tyrannies – usually bureaucratic tyrannies, usually alien ones, always characterized by lack of mental flexibility.
Russell's classic novel in this wily-human-vs-dimwitted-alien-bureaucracy theme (The Great Explosion is rather different, concerning itself with a monolithic human bureaucracy attempting to deal with scattered and idiosyncratic human cultures) is undoubtedly Wasp, but Next of Kin is always cited in the following breath. This probably does a disservice to Wasp, which is immeasurably the better of the two novels.
There is no great plot to Next of Kin. John Leeming is sent on a super-fast scout vessel into the region of the Galaxy controlled by a hostile alien federation, the Combine, to report back on the strengths and capabilities of the various Combine planets. Far on through his trip his vessel packs up, and he crash-lands on a remote and unimportant Combine world. There he succeeds in avoiding the dimwitted aliens for a while, but is eventually incarcerated in a PoW prison from which escape by straightforward means is virtually impossible. Accordingly, he constructs from bits of wood and bent wire a series of gizmos through which he pretends to talk to his invisible alter ego – his Eustace, as he tells his captors. He convinces them that all humans possess a Eustace, who will avenge whatever crimes are perpetrated on the physical body and who even, where necessary, survives the death of that body in order to do so. The dimwitted aliens believe it, and so the war is brought to an end, with Earth and its allies as the de facto victors.
There's material here for a longish novelette or perhaps, depending on how one played it, for a reasonably long novel of which the above sequence of events would be the main, but not the sole, plot strand. What Russell produced instead was a novelette expanded to fill enough pages for book publication. (This is in strict contrast to Wasp, which perfectly fits its length.) We're nearly at page 100 before Leeming gets to the prison, which is where the story proper begins. Before that we're treated to a mildly amusing opening sequence back on Earth where the free-spirited – and to be honest rather puerile – Leeming is the exasperation of his fixed-minded military superiors, then to a long account of his solitary quest through Combine-occupied space, an account whose inescapable tedium is alleviated only by one patch of brilliant comedy:
Leeming picks up the radio conversations of a species whose spoken language, while totally alien, shares enough of the basic blocks of English to sound like a mangled version of the latter language. He eventually joins in with his own nonsense. A sample:
There came another pause, then Gnof resentfully told all and sundry, "I shall lambast my mother."
"Dirty dog!" said Leeming. "Shame on you!"
The other voice now informed, mysteriously, "Mine is a fat one."
This extract illustrates another characteristic of Next of Kin: it is decidedly, well, naughtier than one expects from that era. Although the Swingin' Sixties were just around the corner, it would only be a full decade later – with the advent of the movement crystallized around Michael Moorcock's New Worlds – that genre sf would begin to swing with them.
Once Leeming is within the prison, the dimwitted aliens become even dimwitteder. And here there is a conundrum that Russell never quite succeeds in sorting out, with the result that his narrative is never fully convincing. These aliens are of a species which has successfully developed the capability for interstellar flight; although they are merely a minor constituent of the federation that is waging war against the Earth and its allies, they are nevertheless technologically able to wage that war. In other words, they cannot be that dimwitted. To be sure, we ourselves are sufficiently able to initiate an interstellar mission tomorrow if we set our minds to it – we have the technology, but lack the gumption – and to be equally sure there are plenty of profoundly dimwitted human beings around; yet we are not a universally dimwitted species. If we were, we couldn't have attained the level of technology that we have. (You might argue that foolishness is a universal human trait, but that's a different matter from dimwittedness.) Russell's aliens in Next of Kin, though, are stupid through and through ... so how come they're able to build starships?
It might seem a bit futile to question such stuff in an overtly comic novel, but comedy – unless entirely surreal, which Next of Kin assuredly is not – depends for its effectiveness on a sort of skewed plausibility. Characteristics may be impossibly exaggerated, but there has to be an underlying reality that can be exaggerated upon. Logic may be distorted to hilarious effect, but it has to have a logic of its own. Stereotypes may be guyed, but there has to be a core of truth to the stereotype. As in fantasy/sf, there is a suspension of disbelief; but, again as in fantasy/sf, either side of that suspension has to be moored in something; nothing demolishes the suspension of disbelief more immediately or more terminally than the niggling thought: "This doesn't make sense."
There's a very simple answer to this, in the case of Next of Kin. Leeming is not a normal human being at all: he is a diehard sf fan. It doesn't say so in the book, but he displays all the characteristics of that particular type of sf fan whom you must have met a million times: intelligent, yes, but able to manifest that intelligence, outside perhaps an employment that makes specific use of it, only in the form of puerile smartassery, usually at the expense of the "mundanes", whom the fan regards as a dimwitted mob incapable of appreciating the finer points of pulp sf. Next of Kin is, in effect, Revenge of the Nerds set on a movie lot of cosmic scale. The only way in which such
fictional ventures can succeed is by stereotyping all the non-nerds/fans as profoundly stupid; this fictional necessity is incorporated as if a reality into the worldview of the type of sf-fan lifestyle fantasist (to borrow Brian Stableford's term) to whom I'm referring.
Viewed from that perspective – shifting one's mind into sf-ghetto mode – Next of Kin's major implausibilities become far less troubling, and consequently the humour works far better.
Such humour as there is. As mentioned above, this book reads less like a novel than like a hugely padded novelette, and the same comment applies to the ration of humour presented in its 180-odd pages. There are some good jokes, and there are some very funny sequences; but they're spread somewhat thinly. Much the same could be said of Wasp, of course; but in Wasp's case it doesn't matter much because Wasp would still be a perfectly viable sf novel if you stripped all the humour out of it; wherever there might be a paucity of grins the story itself keeps you happily charging along. Not so in Next of Kin, where there's not really very much by way of story.
Russell's flipness of writing nevertheless does make Next of Kin an engaging read. At the end of it, however, one is left with the nagging suspicion that one might have been better off reading something else. If you're an admirer of Russell's work overall – as this reviewer is – then you'll be mighty pleased to have this reasonably handsome reissue on your shelf. If not, then you'd be better off tracking down a copy of Wasp or The Great Explosion or ...
—Infinity Plus
Ship of Fools
by Richard Paul Russo
Ace, 370 pages, paperback, 2001
To say that a novel would make a marvellous movie is one thing; to say it is a marvellous novel is another. The two statements are usually seen as mutually contradictory.
Not in this case.
The generation starship Argonos has been travelling the spaceways for centuries, its original mission long ago forgotten. Onboard there has developed a stratified, ossified society, one that has come to depend for its survival on its remaining intact and aboard the ship: colonization of discovered terrestrial planets has turned from an aim, if it ever was one, into a taboo. The downsiders (as the lower orders are called), being little more than slaves, are eager to change this status quo; but for obvious reasons have little opportunity to do so in the hopelessly long intervals between the rare discoveries of habitable worlds. In the meantime their overlords, the upsiders, squabble and play all the games of politics and coups, even though changes of personnel will and can have little effect on the fortunes of this small floating world.
Bartolomeo Aguilera, born grossly deformed but more physically capable than most men through sophisticated prosthesis, is a sort of troubleshooter and advisor-without-portfolio to the Argonos's captain, Nikos Costa – although the captain's regime seems nearing its end because of a recent series of disastrous destination choices he has made. Chief rival in the undeclared struggle for ascendancy is Bishop Soldano, semi-charlatan head of the powerful shipboard religion, which mixes Christianity with spacefaring-tinged other elements, including the tenet that the Argonos was never created but has drifted among the stars for all eternity.
Now a new planet is visited, and it is clear that at least in the past it was colonized. Aguilera leads an expedition to the surface to investigate the enigmatic signal being transmitted from one of the ghost population-centres; sent with him as representative of the church is the priest Father Veronica. She and he discover, in the vast basement of the colony's central building, the evidence of a colossal and sadistically barbaric massacre, with even infants having been impaled alive upon metal hooks. The cruelty is all too human, they assume; what they do not find out until a little later is that their discovery has triggered the sending of a fresh signal, its destination a gigantic and seemingly dead alien spaceship beyond the boundaries of this planetary system.
Despite the gruesome evidence, the downsiders wish to disembark and recolonize the world, dubbed Antioch. Believing that Costa's regime is about to die and also that Father Veronica (his initial respect for whom is slowly turning into a near-obsessive love, possible returned) covertly approves the scheme, Aguilera abets it. But Costa ostentatiously thwarts the rebellion, thereby strengthening his own position in the power struggle.
That beamed signal was detected aboard the Argonos, and so the next port of call is the alien spaceship. It appears to be a long-dead artefact, yet its very alienness renders it lethal to the exploratory teams sent in from the Argonos – lethal in ways themselves so alien that none can understand properly why various humans are slaughtered or driven mad. A further mystery is that, in all its recorded history, the Argonos has never yet discovered so much as the slightest trace of any other advanced species, yet here is an artefact of a technological sophistication far beyond the human: how could such a spacefaring civilization not have been noticed before?
Aguilera and Father Veronica head a new expedition into the alien vessel and, through trying to accept it rather than force their own humanity upon it, seem to make progress towards unravelling its riddle. They discover the relic of a further massacre of humans – but, far more dramatically, a human survivor ...
The temptation to synopsize beyond this point is almost impossible to resist, especially since so far this might seem to be a fairly orthodox piece of hard sf. Yet to do so would be to give away too much. Way too much.
To say there are constant surprises in store for the reader would be to mislead. Any competent tale-teller will make sure to have up his or her sleeve an abundance of plot twists with which to startle the reader – the apparent goodie who proves to be a baddie, and all the rest of the rigmarole. Russo goes far, far beyond such cosmetic mechanics. Not only are we forced to realize that much we have accepted at face value is in fact otherwise, but even the tale itself is otherwise, as is its telling: its motivation is not what you have been lulled into expecting.
Let's jump off this train of thought; to continue it would again be to spoil the book for you.
An important underpinning of the novel concerns the nature of religion. Bishop Soldano, with his publicly pretended beliefs and private lack of faith, might seem to be a set-up, stereotyped target for atheistic darts; yet in fact his belief system proves to be far more complex than his self-prepared veneer would suggest. Much more interesting, though, is Father Veronica, whose faith, however misguided one might believe it to be (and the word "believe" is here double-edged), is not just sincere but properly coherent. It is entirely understandable that Aguilera should fall so much in love with her; the fact that she is a woman of some physical attractiveness is almost irrelevant beside her quality of mind and her humanity.
(This entire strand of the novel is superbly handled; as Aguilera falls in love with Father Veronica he sees her with progressively greater clarity. Initially all he sees is the packaging: she is a "striking woman" rather than any great beauty. Later she is fairer by far than the stars and all under them; his initially vaguely carnal inclinations intensify and then become almost unimportant to his love. I cannot easily recall having seen, in any form of fiction, this process of tumbling into love so accurately and honestly depicted.)
Contrasted against Veronica's faith is Aguilera's atheism; with a sweetness of thought, the two worldviews are found not incompatible: Veronica's belief system may not be valid, because its axioms are not valid, yet it has full validity as a model of reality. This causes us to think – as it certainly causes Aguilera to think – about the status of his own atheism: does it reflect the truth, or is it merely another model? His own axioms are being shredded by the presence and nature of the alien starship; he clings to them, regardless, despite realizing that perhaps they are as faith-bound as Father Veronica's.
Also of great interest is the writing style. To generalize, the mode of writing used in the modern "literary" novel is one that seems designed to distance the reader from any direct involvement, as if storytelling (an art shameful, because millennia-old) were the ant
ithesis of fiction. Russo nonetheless deploys this mode; his doing so should clash wildly with the parameters – with the raison d'être – of storytelling in general and of hard sf in particular, yet it works superbly well. Aguilera and the rest work, as characters, even better because you have to grope to reach them; the action sequences work at least doubly well because so understated.
At one level, this is an outstanding piece of hard sf. But the book is much more than that: it has subtexts below subtexts below subtexts. It's the kind of book that people pin you to the bar about at parties; it's the kind of book that academics will argue over; it's the kind of book you'll start off reading with the expectation of some Sense of Wonder and discover you never before fully understood what the expression "Sense of Wonder" actually meant; it's the kind of book that would make a marvellous movie ... but a movie after the watching of which the cognoscenti would say: "You thought that was good? Wait'll you read the novel ..."
—Infinity Plus
Drive
by James Sallis
Poisoned Pen, 158 pages, hardback, 2005
If you're going to start to play tricks with the styles and conventions of noir fiction, you have to be pretty certain you know what you're doing and why you're doing it. Although in general I'm a great fan of James Sallis's work, I found that his new revisionist-noir novella Drive fell down on both counts. The tale could have been told far better without all the undoubtedly clever but soon irritatingly confusing flashbacks: there was no need for the telling of the tale to have been made artificially convoluted; and, even if there had been, the execution is fumbling.
The story's in fact pretty straightforward. The central protagonist, Driver, is good at only one thing: driving cars, at which he's not just good but superbly good. For this reason he has become a movie stunt-driver while also developing a lucrative sideline as a confidential driver for criminals, or even as a getaway driver in the perpetration of heists. Inevitably, the seedier side of his life begins to take over, however hard he attempts to distance himself psychologically from the crimes: he's not in fact a criminal, he persuades himself, just a driver-for-hire who takes on commissions from whoever might offer them.