by John Grant
So much for the trees in the large forest of this book; what about the forest itself? It is hard to accept that The Mechanics of Wonder will, as the blurb promises, "stand among a small number of crucial texts [...] which every science fiction scholar or prospective science fiction scholar will have to read" for, as noted, its primary thesis can be outlined very briefly and most of the rest is taken up with what could be regarded as over-detailed substantiation of the claim. Also, it is hard to agree with its attempts to establish a new, Gernsbackian (as it were) definition of what sf is, because what this new definition accurately describes is only what could be called Gernsbackian sf, and a history of sf derived from use of the definition would not surprisingly start with Gernsback, as Westfahl finds himself claiming the history of all sf does.
That said, this is for the most part an extremely entertaining and challenging manifesto, and can be highly recommended as such. Had Westfahl's blurb-writer been only a little less ambitious with that claim ("will stand among a small number of crucial texts which every science fiction scholar or prospective science fiction scholar ought to read", perhaps) it would be easy to applaud the statement.
—Extrapolation
God Save the Mark
by Donald E. Westlake
Forge, 268 pages, Paperback, 2004; reissue of a book originally published in 1967, with a new introduction by Otto Penzler
One in Forge's "Otto Penzler Presents ..." series of reissues, complete with a new introduction by Penzler himself, this publication sees the welcome reappearance of Donald Westlake's 1967 comic delight God Save the Mark. It's not among the very best of Westlake's deliriously inventive capers, but it's close to that leading group – and certainly it's good enough that on first publication it received an Edgar Allen Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America.
The premise here is that Fred Fitch has what is almost a psychic talent or superpower for attracting confidence tricksters and associated fraudsters: he can barely walk to the local newsstand without someone smoothly conning him out of his wallet. This characteristic, while naturally irritating for poor Fred, makes him quite useful to the police: if there's a new scam on the street, within seconds Fred will have fallen victim to it, and through his friendship with the cop Jack Reilly the details will shortly be in the hands of the Bunco Squad.
But now Fred's troubles are about to enter a new and altogether more serious phase. His Uncle Matt, a fabled confidence trickster, has been murdered, and has left Fred an inheritance of three hundred thousand dollars as well as his deliciously earthy ex-"showgirl" Gertie Divine. With that amount of loot on its way, Fred obviously becomes an absolute magnet for every conman and conwoman on the Eastern Seaboard – among the latter, he strongly suspects, being the domineering Gertie, who has promptly moved herself into his apartment and more or less taken it over. But then there's also his dead uncle's shyster lawyer Goodkind, who would give weasels a bad name. Even Fred's eccentric wannabe-writer neighbor Wilkins is trying to persuade Fred to dedicate some of his hard-inherited cash to publishing Wilkins's unpublishable novel.
Of course, Fred's blood pressure isn't helped by hearing from Gertie that whoever killed Uncle Matt is out to get Fred next ...
All the elements are here for one of Westlake's classic romps, and he doesn't fail to deliver. Here's a sample, as Wilkins describes his historical novel Veni Vidi Vici Through Air Power:
I've kept the historical facts, kept them all. The names of the barbarian tribes, strength of armies, the actual battles, kept everything. All I've added is air power. Through a fluke of fate, the [ancient] Romans have aircraft, at about World War I level. So we see the sort of difference air power makes by putting it in a historical setting where it wasn't there. [...] Well, it doesn't change history that much. [...] After all, Caesar won almost all the battles he was in anyway.
This reader confesses he was filled with a powerful yen to get hold of a copy of Veni Vidi Vici Through Air Power, but, that aside, God Save the Mark satisfies on all counts.
Now, if only Forge will see fit to rerelease Westlake's I Gave at the Office ...
—Crescent Blues
Love Spell
by Karen Williams
Rising Tide, 156 pages, paperback, 2001; reissue of a book originally published in 1993
The town of Broome has a new vet, Kate Gallagher. She's adjusting well to her fresh locale but is romantically lonely, despite the presence nearby of best friend GiGi. One Halloween she encounters a green-skinned woman, Allegra, dressed as a witch on her way to a children's reading, and the attraction between them is immediate and overpowering. That night they attend a Halloween party, then go back to Kate's home and make love. The following morning when Kate wakes Allegra is gone, and over ensuing days and weeks all that Kate has of what she assumed would be a lifelong love are bittersweet memories and the occasional delivered gift.
At length GiGi spurs her to track down Allegra. Kate is at first revolted to discover that what she assumed was a cosmetic effect is genuinely green skin – that Allegra is truly a being of supernatural origin, one of a whole community of them living in and around Broome. But in due course love conquers all ...
This is an enjoyable enough romantic comedy (with an extremely explicit four-page sex scene in the middle seeming somewhat incongruous), and the fantasy elements – of which there are many more than noted here – are well blended into the rest of the froth. One does tire a little of the innuendo-ridden badinage not just between the two lovers but in virtually every conversation between the women of Broome, an astonishingly high proportion of whom appear to be gay; weak double entendres can be fun in real-life conversation but are not so much fun to read. Otherwise this deliberately lightweight novel is readable and really quite jolly.
—Infinity Plus
The Rift
by Walter Jon Williams
HarperPrism, 726 pages, hardback, 1999
The disaster novel, of which this is an example, is a subgenre in desperate search of a genre to be sub. Closer to the adventure thriller than to anything else, although quite distinct from it, disaster novels are more frequently lumped in with science fiction on the basis that the catastrophes that are their mainspring are somehow regarded as sciencefictional. Impacting comets – them's yer astronomy, and astronomy's a science so a novel involving them must be sf. In this instance the catastrophes are earthquakes – them's yer geology/geophysics, and so this novel is being published by an sf imprint and will doubtless be reviewed (or, more likely, disparagingly not reviewed) as a work of sf. Yet the "pure" disaster novel is in no sense sciencefictional: the underpinning calamities are not countered using scientific/technological means – indeed, in general they cannot be countered at all, merely survived.
Stories in which the disaster is successfully averted are a different kettle of fish, of course. Arthur C. Clarke's The Hammer of God is indubitably an sf novel (assuming one chooses to describe it as a novel), as is the movie Armageddon – though Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle arguably isn't. Post-holocaust novels generally sit happily within the sf framework, in that their concerns are with sociological implications and "sociofuturology" (even if represented only in microcosm) rather than with the disaster per se. And there are novels in which the central concern is indeed with the science, such as Richter 10 by Arthur C. Clarke and Mike McQuay, which deals not so much with earthquakes-as-disasters as with earthquake prediction and earthquake control. But none of the books here cited can be regarded as examples of the "pure" disaster novel.
So the writers of "pure" disaster novels are confronted by a marketing problem, and The Rift is no exception: as noted, it is being published as sf; as hinted, it will thereby be ignored by a huge proportion of its natural readership. And there is a further problem for these writers: disaster novels have a formula that is imposed not by literary convention – as is, for example, the formula of high fantasy – but by the nature of the subject matter itself. There is thus not a great de
al that can be done to alter it, to introduce new wrinkles.
The formula goes approximately like this:
• Stage One: Before the Disaster We are introduced to a bunch of characters who we know will survive the cataclysm. We follow them as they go about their daily lives, the purpose of such a treatment being to make sure we thoroughly identify with them – know them – so that we'll fully appreciate the rigours they will later undergo. (One or two of the lesser characters involved in this Stage may be snuffed out in Stage Two or even Stage Three. Because of their thorough introduction here we will be properly affected by the poignancy of their subsequent demise and thus convinced that this particular disaster really is, you know, big.) All of these characters, no matter where their starting points, will eventually be brought together and made to interact with each other by the dictates of the plot.
• Stage Two: The Disaster Itself Millions of spear-carriers meet their ends. Our plucky heroes have lots of jolly exciting adventures while losing a few supernumerary friends and relatives and being amazingly stiff-upper-lipped about these bereavements.
• Stage Three: A New Era Dawns The comet/earthquake/defective nuclear reactor/whatever has done its worst, and the significant characters from Stage One stagger around in the sudden preternatural silence as a new order is established either worldwide, or over a significant part of the globe, or merely within the characters' immediate surroundings. Martinets spring loathsomely from the debris of society, and can be regarded as sub-disasters or (fittingly in The Rift's context) aftershocks of the main one; they must in turn be survived and in due course erased. People learn things about themselves they never knew before and indeed would never have discovered had they not been subjected to conditions of extremis. New alliances are formed, often between odd couples ("I never dreamt that I, a lesbian professor of Greek philosophy in an obscure Midwestern university and part-time lecturer on the works of Eric Satie, would fall in love with a homophobic, Harley-Davidson-riding, rap-"singing", multiply tattooed bodybuilder half my age, but we've saved each other's lives three times now ..."). By the final page either some kind of post-disaster society is well on its way towards stability and an exciting future or the US Cavalry, in the form of outside governmental aid, has come charging over the hill to the rescue.
Constrained by this formula, the writer of the disaster novel must perforce concentrate her or his attentions on matters other than the injection of anything new into the overall plot. Obviously one major concern must be to make this a better page-turner, a rippinger yarn, than any of the competition; this is exactly the concern of the non-disaster adventure thriller, which is nothing if it can't be an unputdownable read. On a different front, the disaster novel is obviously an excellent venue in which to make acerbic social comment, and here it has immense flexibility in that not only is the field wide open for the writer to generate whatever post-disaster society s/he chooses – whatever villains, whatever saints – but also in that s/he can select at will the particular focus of the novel through choice of the group(s) of characters, among the many millions involved in the catastrophe, whose stories will form the story. Or the writer may elect to use the story as a means of drawing a moral – whether it be that nuclear reactors are the preserve of God, not Man; or that there is something rotten at the core of any democracy which chooses to ignore for political reasons (e.g., getting votes by keeping taxes artificially low) any likelihood of future mayhem on the grounds that it almost certainly won't happen in this US President's term of office; or that we tolerate neo-Nazi enemies within society at our peril; or that ...
It is manifestly evident that Walter Jon Williams, a deservedly eminent writer of science fiction, was aware of all these problems and constraints when he sat down to write The Rift. So far as sf was concerned he had little latitude, and so he confined himself on that front to first-rate descriptions of and explanations of earthquake mechanisms; indeed, as a seismological primer alone this book can be recommended to the lay reader for its fascinating infodumps. He therefore determined to write a hell of a good yarn in which social comment about the restless state of the contemporary USA, and in particular about that country's racial disharmonies and the sheer barbarism of its white-supremacist racialists (the novel's title is of course a pun), would be omnipresent without ever becoming hectoring.
To take the first of these aims first, how does The Rift shape up as an adventure thriller? The quake occurs not along the San Andreas Fault but in the major fault complex underlying the Mississippi/Missouri; since this is smack in the US heartland the consequences in terms of both social infrastructure and, more importantly, human lives are far more devastating than could be those of a Californian quake, located on the nation's periphery. Furthermore, there are three major temblors – all in the Richter 8+ region – rather than just the one (although the third of these has little impact upon either an already devastated land or the plot, so one wonders why it was introduced unless for symbolic/allegoric reasons that have escaped this reviewer). The central characters introduced in Stage One are: a black divorced male and a rebellious white adolescent male, Nick and Jason, who are thrown together immediately after the first quake and whose joint story is the backbone of the novel; a vile Ku Klux Klan male sheriff, Paxton, who with his even viler supporters will have an extermination camp up and running by Stage Three, so that they can be satisfyingly squelched by the good guys (and, yes, this reviewer raised a cheer when Paxton Got His); a white male fundamentalist Christian preacher, Frankland (not, repeat not, Falwell) and his simple-minded disciples, who believe the quake heralds the gaudier bits of Revelation; and the female General Frazetta, in charge of the military's attempts to ameliorate the consequences of the situation. Williams effects the convincing portrayal of these characters with differing degrees of success, achieving his aim with exceptional skill in the case of the heroes: Nick and Jason, with whom his heart and soul clearly lie, and Frazetta, who's just eminently likeable and as a result very immediately engages our understanding (although it grates that in the narrative she's referred to usually as Jessica, whereas a male equivalent would be referred to almost always by surname).
Williams has less success with the two groups of extremists. In order to round them out as people rather than paper tigers he struggles to show they're not entirely bad. Paxton is not as murderous as the psychopaths around him, and his attempt at mini-genocide is generated partly from weakness of character and partly from that in other contexts laudable characteristic, family loyalty, taken to ridiculous extremes: he encourages mass murder in order to protect his repulsively homicidal son (who doesn't even have the excuse of being a semi-literate dimwit, since he's a college boy an' all). Similarly, the much more interesting character Frankland, despite starting out as a caricature, becomes a sympathetic angel of mercy – feeding and sheltering local refugees, doing his best to make sure the sick are tended, etc. – before force of circumstance (folk have this irritating habit of wanting to leave his encampment and its nonstop diet of shrieked sermons) reveals the true sinisterness of his bigotry. Yet neither character entirely convinces – Paxton because who the hell cares if a psychopathic racist has a minor redeeming feature (to be fair, in the very late stages of the book there are some attempts to explain the cause of his racism) and Frankland because the earlier caricature is so beautifully executed that it's impossible for later developments to shift it from one's mind. Thus, quasi-paradoxically, it's easier for the reader to be chilled by the villain who is less of a real person and more of a cypher; an observation that could perhaps be tailored to equate with the technique whereby racists deliberately pervert their acolytes' (and their own) perceptions of the victims to mere cypherhood.
But, as noted, Williams's character portrayal is first-rate where it matters most: with Nick and Jason. They spend much of the novel travelling down the river in a not particularly waterworthy small boat, encountering friendly or hostile strangers and journeying towards Nick's reunion with his daughter
and ex-wife and, although this is of course unplanned by them, Jason's unconsummated union with Nick's daughter, a practical demonstration that the racial rift of the book's title is an artificial one rather than something inherent in the human psyche. (The fact that scapegoating, of which racism is merely a very significant but hopefully transient facet, seems more deeply ingrained is an issue which Williams probably wisely avoids.) Perhaps more than half of this exceptionally long novel is devoted to their adventures, and as a result the tale rattles along at a satisfyingly accelerating pace; only the dullest of sticks would fail to find themselves reading later into the night than they'd intended. Williams's skill in this respect is best demonstrated by the lengthy passages located on the river, where a succession of seemingly unrelated adventures might well have become boring (one thinks of John Grisham's attempts in similar circumstances in his recent legal thriller The Testament) but are in fact thoroughly engrossing. As a direct consequence, Nick's and Jason's later travails under the temporary subjugations of first Frankland and then the murderous Paxton suitably raise the adrenalin levels: the turning pages become a bit of a blur. Also as a direct consequence of the strength of those river scenes, the denouement – whereby, although Nick has the anticipated happily-ever-after outcome, Jason achieves only a stage-backdrop Promised Land whose thin card ripples even as you watch – carries a truly powerful bittersweetness.
The writing of all this is hewn rather than crafted. To choose a passage at random:
All he asked was that someone go to his house to make sure that his wife was okay. It turned out that one of his own people could do that on his way to his own family, so that Jessica didn't even have to detail one of her own.*