by John Grant
The five long stories are "Looking for Kelly Dahl" (1995), "Orphans of the Helix" (1999), "The Ninth of Av" (2000), "On K2 With Kanakaredes" (2001) and "The End of Gravity" (2002; original to this collection). The first of these is fantasy; the next three are science fiction; and the final piece is less a story than an edited movie treatment that has touches of quasi-magic realism but is really a straightforward fiction concerned with the roughly contemporary Russian space program.
"Looking for Kelly Dahl" is the story that you're likely to want this book for. Its narrator is a reformed-alcoholic ex-schoolteacher who, in a fit of depression, commits suicide by driving into a disused pit only to discover that, rather than dead, he is in a world created by one of his old pupils, Kelly Dahl, an obviously troubled, intelligent, sexually abused girl who oddly fascinated him while he taught her but of whom he has long ago lost track. He and Kelly are the only occupants of this world, which is composed of tracts of Colorado drawn from different epochs of historical and geological time. Kelly spells the rules out to him on his arrival: the game is that they are to hunt each other, most likely to the death. At the end of the hunt he returns to his original reality – but to discover that there's been a slight change: now there never was a Kelly Dahl under his tutelage; she has existed only in his memory.
A lesser writer would have tied all this together with some neat explanation – some explication of a mechanism that would make all the pieces of the story make sense. Wisely, Simmons doesn't do this: such a reduction would detract from the tale. The piece is beautifully written in a slow leisurely style that adds to the feel of its strangeness.
Unfortunately, the rest of the book is a bit of a downhill slide, and matters aren't helped by the somewhat overblown and certainly overlong introductory material scattered through the book. (I'm a great fan of authors' introductions to their stories, but I several times grew impatient with these.) In his introduction to "Orphans of the Helix" Simmons tells us how he dickered over making it a Star Trek screenplay rather than a story, and was pleased that he chose the latter option. Unfortunately, it still reads like a Star Trek scenario with the names and details changed a little; it also seems more than somewhat derivative of Larry Niven's The Integral Trees (1984), among others.
"The Ninth of Av" has much of the feel of Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time tales, although its far-future decadence plays out against a more "realistic" backdrop – sciencefictional rather than fantasticated. In his prefatory remarks Simmons tells how the piece was commissioned for an anthology of tales set in 3001; racking his brains for something that wouldn't so have changed in the course of a millennium as to be unimaginable today, he came up with the notion that one permanent element of the human condition was antisemitism. Well, ho hum. A potentially fairly strong story is wrecked by this conceit.
Far closer in the future is the setting of "On K2 With Kanakaredes". The Kanakaredes of the title is a young member of a party of alien visitors who have arrived on Earth to observe us from their allocated settlement in the Antarctic. Kanakaredes wishes to experience mountain-climbing, and a somewhat amateurish trio of human mountaineers is dragooned into taking him along on an alpine-style assault up K2. Although somewhat longer than its paradigms, this is really just a straightforward sf tale of the type found aplenty in the US magazines thirty or so years ago – complete with the cheesy denouement. It's not boring, but neither is it especially interesting; it'd help pass a train journey.
The final piece is just plain annoying. The place for movie treatments is, in almost every case, on the desk of a potential movie producer, not in a story collection. It has a plot (of sorts) that might work on the screen but doesn't on the printed page; the characters never materialize because they would require actors to make them complete. There are some nice moments, but ...
By book's end one has the feeling that this whole effort has been rather half-hearted – an impression not one whit dispelled by the sloppy proofreading throughout. Neither is one cheered by the fact that this title was used for a Joe Haldeman novel only a decade ago; surely Simmons and his publisher must have been aware of this, so it's as if they couldn't be bothered looking around for something a tad more original. (It wasn't, to be honest, among Haldeman's more inspired titles to begin with.) One superb story, three acceptable ones and a swiz do not a collection make. We can only hope that Dan Simmons – the real Dan Simmons, one's tempted to say – is back putting his whole heart and soul into his next book.
—Infinity Plus
Cavalcade
by Alison Sinclair
Millennium, 299 pages, hardback, 1998
Stop me if you've heard this one before.
A huge and inscrutable alien ship arrives in the Solar System, and gives Earth a single message: all those who wish to be transported to another star, with no promise of a return, should stand at the bank of a body of open water at a specific time. So thousands upon thousands of the disaffected, the adventurous, the criminal and the saintly do as instructed and, the next thing they know, find themselves waking up within the alien and enigmatic biosphere that is the ship's interior. Everything electronic immediately malfunctions, so the motley band, perhaps a couple of hundred thousand strong, discover they're back to basics. However, the environment seems tailored to adjust to their needs: they can build elementary structures, they can eat the gunk extruded from the walls ... and they can segregate themselves according to their social beliefs.
There is a plague, and some people die. Two of the social groupings have a short-lived war. For a while it seems as if everyone will perish, for the biosphere – seemingly made up not of naturally live material but of an infinitude of cooperating nanogizmos – starts to die off, so that the worst-affected regions become incapable of sustaining human life. Luckily the intuitions of a brilliant scientist and an idiot savant pregnant girl save the day and at last let the characters (and us) solve the mystery of the ship.
Well, you should have stopped me, like I said.
Yet this book should not be so easily dismissed. To be honest, it has further flaws, the most serious of which is that, for the first third or more, nothing much happens apart from scene-setting, and the second most serious of which is that Sinclair fails to convey any sense of scale: this must be a truly huge enclosed space, a volume made up of bubbles linked by complexly intertwining tunnels, and yet there is never any feeling that it's larger than a village. Matters are not helped by poor copy-editing and proofreading, so that time and again I was tripped up by unparsable sentences. (And, if I may add a personal beef, it is infuriating that the artist responsible for the rather attractive cover is nowhere credited.)
There is, though, nothing wrong with putting a late-'90s gloss on elderly themes, and so I persevered. In fact, that late-'90s gloss never appeared – apart from a few cusswords, this novel could have as easily been published in the 1950s or 1960s – but the perseverance was nevertheless plentifully rewarded. Because, after the early plod, a first contact of sorts is established with the ship's alien crew, and gradually the text is imbued with that Sense of Wonder that is as rare to find as it is hard to define. Sinclair's characters, who had earlier been merely rather ponderously portrayed stereotypes (with the exception of one marvellous secondary character, the soldier A.J. Lowell), come to life; and it is for this reason rather than because of any original or exciting adventures that the book becomes engrossing: we are affected by the Sense of Wonder not through any startling literary marvels (there is still little by way of original conceit here – the only truly innovative notion is bundled into the last couple of pages and expanded upon hardly at all) but because we are seeing everything as if it were we who were there.
This is, of course, what most novels set out to do, but it is something hardly ever accomplished as completely as here. While reading Cavalcade the predecessor that sprang most frequently to this reviewer's mind was not the obvious homogenous mass of dimly remembered Edmund Cooper novels but George R. Stewart's E
arth Abides (1949); it likewise is utterly absorbing today, even though, to the modern reader, there is nothing in it that hasn't been read a thousand times elsewhere, because of the strength of its character creation and consequent reader identification. Here, as there, one cares about these people.
So, although with this novel there is, as noted above, a lot that has to be forgiven, readers are likely to be, as I was, more than prepared to forgive.
Perhaps even forgive the ending. The book's major baddie – whereabouts unknown for the last third of the book, so that he supplies the storyline with a dynamic in that he is an omnipresent threat to any stability – is conveniently annihilated offstage thanks to the idiot savant's burgeoning psychic powers and the cooperation of the quasi-living ship. The mystery of the ship itself is at last explained, but only part-explained (no rationale for its collecting intelligent species is properly expounded) and in only a few sentences. Sinclair's wrap-up is dismayingly rapid, almost as if she were a Lionel Fanthorpe just told there were five pages to go. And there is a general feeling, right at the end, that things are being set up for volumes two and three of a series.
But, to stress, for a couple of hundred pages Cavalcade splendidly reminds us of why it was that we started reading the literature of the fantastic in the first place. Which is no mean achievement.
—Samhain
What Rough Beast
by Harry R. Squires
iPublish, 434 pages, paperback, 2001
London in 1903, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle agrees to accompany Harry Houdini on an expedition to reveal occultist Maximillian Cairo as the fraud Houdini believes him to be. Along with a half-dozen or so others, they attend one of Cairo's séances, and Houdini does indeed expose the whole affair as a sham; but Cairo, furious, tells the party to return the following night for a demonstration of his genuine occult powers. This they do, and are treated to a dramatic display which convinces all but Houdini that Cairo has indeed succeeded in calling up the god of excess, Dionysus. The sceptical Houdini breaks the septagram that has been caging the god, and the spirit of Dionysus escapes to infect not just the participants in the rite but, progressively, the whole population of London. Mad crimes and madder orgies proliferate until our friends return Dionysus whence he came, thereby saving humanity ... or maybe not.
Since Sherlock Holmes, having briefly been out of copyright, is now, through changes in copyright law, firmly back in it for another few years, authors wishing to write recursive Holmesian fiction have had to use the stratagem of turning instead to Doyle as a protagonist – frequently ignoring the fact that if anything Doyle should be a Watson character and giving him Holmesian powers of ratiocination. The best-known of what is now a flourishing minor subgenre of fantasy is probably Mark Frost's The List of 7 (1993), which has Doyle and a purported Holmes prototype battling occult Evil and meeting all sorts of larger-than-life historical personages, such as Helena Blavatsky.
Frost's Doyle books – there's at least one sequel to The List of 7 – are very enjoyable romps, but What Rough Beast surpasses them. The pace is fast and furious, the writing is a delight, and the characters are extremely well drawn: while grinning and thrilling, just as one ought to do, one also becomes genuinely involved in the characters' fates – something quite unusual in romps. There is just enough of a telling subtext to increase the enjoyment without distracting from the action.
Squires also manages his atmospherics well, conjuring up Edwardian London with admirable vividness, a very creditable achievement for an author who is American rather than British. Inevitably there are a few gaffes. The "explanation" of the game of cricket is so excruciating that it's perhaps best simply to draw a veil over it. Holloway Prison is in Parkhurst Road, not Parkurst Road, and I believe it's the case that even by 1903 it was a prison for women, not for men. But such minor cavils are easily ignored in the course of a yarn as ripping as this one.
The novel offers plenty of twists and surprises along the way – again as a good romp should – but the biggest surprise of all is that What Rough Beast wasn't snapped up by one of the major commercial publishers, instead appearing from a print-on-demand house, a short-lived experiment mounted by Warner Books as a way of testing the waters with promising new writers. That stratagem suggested the publishers lacked confidence in the writers concerned, which is why the experiment didn't last long. In the case of What Rough Beast one wonders what on earth Warner's editors must have been thinking. It's among the most straightforwardly enjoyable books I've read all year.
—Infinity Plus
Heart of Ice, Blood of Fire
by Thomas Staab
Crazy Wolf, 215 pages, paperback, 2000
Hyper-selfish rich brat Patrick once fell in love with the beautiful Angela; when she did not return his love he killed her in frustration. Patrick's father helped cover up the murder, then introduced the lad to a sinister Turkish necromancer who taught him the trick of using "Magik" (sic) to travel among many alternate realities, in each of which Patrick discovers different versions of his lusted-after Angela. Alas, all of the Angelas, young or old, spurn him as the heartless swine he is, and so he murders and posthumously rapes them each in turn before moving on to the next world, where he hopes he'll find the Angela who will love him – or, to be more objective, who will subjugate her will to him and pander to his every whim.
Patrick really is not a nice guy.
In those other alternate worlds he romps through, though, he discovers as well different versions of himself, and most of those Patricks do not share his psychopathic failings. They, too, are in love with the appropriate Angela; some are wooing her successfully, others are worshippers from afar, yet still act out of love rather than greed for her. In order to keep his Magik at full throttle, Patrick needs to bathe periodically in "the blood of his blood"; his alternate selves are the ideal suppliers of this. He therefore enslaves all the alternate Patricks, to be his craven servants and/or to be bled dry at an appropriate moment.
In the particular alternate world where this novel is largely set, Angela is recovering from the death, a couple of years ago, of her husband and her infant son. She is admired by, and admires, the socially inept Christopher, who is this world's version of Patrick. Never before has the central, reality-hopping Patrick come across an Angela or a version of himself powered by such steely resolve as these two. It's hardly a spoiler to say that, by book's end, his murderous career is stopped by them.
The central premise of Heart of Ice, Blood of Fire is a very interesting one; unfortunately the execution doesn't live up to it.
At the mundane level, the publishers, Crazy Wolf, might have afforded Mr Staab a copy-editor and a proofreader. Grammatical and spelling errors abound; throughout we have "reign" instead of "rein", "masque" instead of "mask", "pouring" instead of "poring", and countless other examples. At a more significant level, Crazy Wolf should have given him an editor. Here and there there's a shining instance that demonstrates what a fundamentally good writer Staab could be were his prose not dogged by the sort of stuff any competent editor, copy-editor or proofreader should have picked up:
Patrick was startled by the brownstone he and his Father stood before; he could have sworn there was nothing in that space a moment before.
"Wasn't there a vacant lot here?" Patrick inquired softly, his voice sounded as if he was speaking through a cardboard box, hollow and distant.
"It's an illusion he uses to ensure his privacy," James said mounting the stairs of the building... .
There's some nice work, and it is this sort of imagery that keeps one ploughing on through Heart of Ice, Blood of Fire. But it's often a pretty difficult plough. Each freshly introduced character arrives with a physical description and psychological analysis that goes on for page after page; dull stuff. All the central characters have inner voices with which they endlessly discuss their inmost motivations; the contributions to these dialogues of the alter egos are typographically distinguished, but unfortunately not consistent
ly so (where, again, was the copy-editor?), with the result that it is often hard to work out who's saying what. As a result of all these flaws and more, characterization suffers grievously, so that it becomes pretty difficult to care what happens to the goodies – to Angela and Christopher.
That said, there is easily enough in this novel to tell us that Mr Staab is an author to look out for in the future. He clearly has interesting ideas – not at all as common a trait as one could wish for among horror novelists – and every now and then, as noted, he comes up with a scintillatingly bright piece of observation. What Heart of Ice, Blood of Fire shows is a promise as yet not fully realized.
—Infinity Plus
Has Science Found God?
by Victor J. Stenger
Prometheus, 373 pages, hardback, 2003
Stenger has set himself a phenomenally ambitious task in this book: in order to counter those popular-media and other claims that science has found evidence for the existence of God, he surveys all that we currently know about the universe around us and about ourselves to see if there is any such evidence whatsoever – and, indeed, if it is possible to enter God into the equations, as it were, without irremediably destroying them.
As he states near the outset, believers present the rationalist with the false challenge of effecting an impossible proof, the nonexistence of something that does not exist (try proving that there aren't Martians among us), while at the same time ducking entirely something that should in the abstract be far easier: a non-faith-based proof of God's existence. Consequently, it's not open to Stenger to present a simple, elegant five-line proof of his case; instead, he must (and here one's reminded of the enormously lengthy iterative proofs done a few years ago by computer of Fermat's Last Theorem) perform his extensive survey in countless fields of knowledge to produce what is, in the end, a proof by statistics. In this he succeeds, and a great deal of what he tells us along the way is fascinating; the only problem with the book is that, necessarily, it is thematically if not factually repetitive.