by John Grant
The main problem is the characterization – without much feeling of involvement with the protagonists, any adventures they might have seem distanced, as if they were players in a tv soap opera glanced at from time to time while one's doing something else. Who really cares if Cal saves Tina from a fate worse than death at the mercy of the dragon – and at the best of times it's pretty difficult to imagine how a massive dragon is going to have its way with a small, aethereal humanoid – if in fact all three characters are merely jerkily moving puppets on someone else's stage? There's a sense, too, while reading Magic Time that the authors were likewise less than fully convinced by their own characters, rather as if they'd planned out a movie script with all the requisite stereotypes and plot events but left it to the actors to bring the characters to life, to make them people.
Another obstacle to involvement is the nature of the catastrophe. One can accept that the side-effects of the device might be pretty implausible, but there seems no rationale for the device ever having been invented in the first place. What was it intended to do? Was it some new bit of war technology? – something of the order of the Goons' Bracerot, perhaps: "The enemy will never be able to resist us if they're all turned into parsnips, Neddy." Or was it supposed to transform humanity into something superhuman, shoving us along through a passel of evolutionary leaps? Neither answer seems to be the correct one, yet there's no other on offer; with the result that we seem to be reading about a disaster that has no cause. This lack of any underpinning once again distances us from the characters: since there's no obvious reason for them to be in the situations they're in, the fact that those situations are mere artifices, mere whims of the storytellers, is constantly at the forefront of the mind, as is the realization that the novel as a whole has been written according to template.
Still, still, all could maybe be rescued if the writing itself were gripping. Sadly, it plods – and it's not helped by disruptive misspellings all over the place: "ibuprophen", "Gurjieff", "leeching" (for "leaching"), "peddled" (for "pedalled/pedaled"), "nickle" ...
There is one aspect of Magic Time, however, that is really exceptional: the cover illustration, done by Iain McCaig. This appears to be a piece of concept art for a tv series or tv movie related to the novel, and it's very striking indeed.
Pedestrian writing, cardboard characters, a plot without rationale, an adherence to template ... All of these comments might suggest that Magic Time is an out-and-out stinker. In fact, it's not quite that bad. Its real problem, for all the reasons cited, is that it's boring.
—Infinity Plus
TWO GROUP REVIEWS
Cruci-Fiction
The Jesus Thief
by J.R. Lankford
Great Reads Books, 285 pages, hardback, 2003
Cloning Christ
by Peter Senese with Robert Geis
Orion Publishing & Media, 333 pages, hardback, 2003
It seems there is a season for novels about the cloning of Jesus Christ, and we're in the middle of it; in addition to the two discussed here there has recently (January 2003) been published the first volume, In His Image, of an entire trilogy of them, James BeauSeigneur's Christ Clone Trilogy. The tv miniseries cannot surely be far away, doubtless to be followed by the reality show: Survivors of the Cross. The two novels discussed here are of astonishingly different standards; I cannot speak for BeauSeigneur's series as I have not seen it.
J.R. Lankford's The Jesus Thief is essentially a thriller with sciencefictional and theological overtones. Improbably wealthy Dr Felix Rossi is part of the latest team permitted by the Vatican to examine the Turin Shroud. He has plotted to snip a tiny thread from one of the apparently bloodstained areas in order to attempt to create a clone of Christ. His plans become more urgent when he discovers, just before his trip, that, while raised a Catholic, he is in fact the child of Jews who sought refuge from Nazism in the USA and adopted Catholicism in order better to fit in; since Jews are held responsible for Christ's death and persecuted as a result, reasons Rossi, then his restoration by a Jew might decrease the attacks.
Thread snipped, back home he goes, and he sets to work in the laboratory in his luxury Manhattan apartment. His maid Maggie, discovering what's up, volunteers herself as the vessel for the developing fetus; she, it proves, is a virgin, so could hardly be more suitable for the role.
The owner of Rossi's apartment block is a Mr Brown, whose enigmatic doings are mysterious indeed; even his closest aides seem to know little of their nature beyond that some of the most powerful people in the world seem to be beholden to him. One of the building's doormen, Sam, is among Mr Brown's little army of agents-cum-hired-muscles. However, Sam falls in love with Maggie, and thereby soon becomes allied to Rossi's cause – which, for reasons scrutable only to himself, Mr Brown strenuously opposes.
Despite this opposition, Rossi has enough money to evade pursuers, with Sam's active help, and Maggie's pregnancy slowly advances ...
It's all tremendous page-turning fun, and it has also some more thoughtful elements that make it – unlike so many thrillers – a rollercoaster ride that one actually remembers after finishing the book. Here, for example, is a little bit of dialogue that not only gives the rationale for the tale but also rather nicely deals with any idea that the cloning of Christ might be in some way blasphemous:
"That's true," Maggie said. "Every Sunday in my church the preacher climbs the pulpit and talks to mostly women and children and precious few of them. Can't hardly find a man there at all. You know why? Because religions won't change. We got six billion people already, and the Pope's out telling Catholics to have billions more. People got common sense. They know better than that. The Jews are still carrying on about eating pork chops and Trick or Treating on Halloween. So is the Christian right. I mean, do you really think an all-loving, all-knowing, omnipotent God is worried about Trick or Treat?"
[Rossi] looked confused. "Then why are you doing this, Maggie?"
"Because I think we need him to come back. Religions have stood still but their congregations haven't. People have moved on and, Dr. Rossi, I'm telling you that's God's plan. It was him that made us thinkers, him that made us curious. Take a baby in diapers, put him alone in a room with a box, and the baby's gonna crawl to that box and see what's in it."
As befits a first novel, The Jesus Thief isn't entirely flawless. I could personally have done with a few less than the half dozen or so moments of spontaneous religious ecstasy (or whatever) experienced by one or other of the characters – you know: okay, so we know s/he's a holy roller, now could you please get on with the story? And just once or twice Lankford fumbles with the motivations of her characters; for example, Sam's reaction, when he first discovers that Rossi is experimenting with Maggie, seems totally out of proportion to the situation. Quite frankly, though, the tale rattles along so fast in all other respects that these minor blips are easily ignored.
The contrast with Cloning Christ, by Peter Senese "with Robert Geis", could hardly be greater. To be honest, I'm somewhat hesitant to say what I really think about this novel, because any description I give of its dreadfulness will surely come across as just a spate of negative hyperbole.
Archaeologist/geneticist Max Train, who a decade or so ago was accused and acquitted of massacring his family, is in Israel excavating with his old friend Luke Gartner and a couple of graduate students. In a cave they discover what appears to be the True Cross. As they examine further, an explosion kills all except Train, who escapes a fusillade of gunfire to bear much of the Cross away for analysis and in due course, using the bloodstains, for the attempt to clone Christ. Nasty Cardinal Anselm Mugant, hearing of this, mounts a clandestine, unsanctioned mission to stop him at all costs, including mass murder – which is carried out joyously by a psychopath called The Scorpion. We know that The Scorpion is very nasty indeed, because the authors tell us so, repeatedly; one suspects they'd have shifted to boldface in order to make this even plainer had they thought they could get away with it
.
The problem Cloning Christ has is that it is execrably written, so that for much of the time I was scratching my head trying to work out what the hell was actually going on. The main characters do presumably have motivations, but I'm as baffled as to what they might be as I was before I started reading. The blurb, perhaps, gives a clearer clue than the book itself in this latter regard:
Mugant is made to represent how Man, when completely self-serving, can actually do great harm, including the destruction of God's Way no matter his original intention... . Mugant soon enlists the services of the internationally rumored assassin known simply as "The Scorpion" to track down Max and silence him with death. The Scorpion, a one-time penitent of the Cardinal, is a force of pure evil and who challenges life. He forces this same challenge onto Max as he casts a deadly shadow over his praised soul and every move he makes.
Adding intricate subterfuge to the plot is the existence of Mugant's "Fifth Crusade", five international industrialists with great power and reach devout in the Cardinal's perspective on human genetic science. Together, Mugant launches an all-out attack to find the ancient artifacts in Train's possession, and prevent the genetic scientist from doing the unthinkable in his eyes – announcing to the world a cross containing bodily remnants could indeed be the True Cross of Jesus of Nazareth – and clone the body of Christ!
I've quoted a little more of the blurb than need be in order to give you a flavour of the writing; please let us have no cheap jokes about the phrase "prevent the genetic scientist from doing the unthinkable in his eyes". The text is littered with homophones – "threw" for "through", "shown" for "shone", "their" for "there", "scene" for "seen", "peaked" for "piqued", etc. – but the problems go far, far beyond mere lack of proofreading. Or lack of copy-editing, come to that: a kindly copy-editor might have introduced the authors to the pluperfect ("He clapped his hands in song, participating in the gypsy-like festivities that occurred daily on the Spanish steps for centuries") and other items of basic grammar:
Rapid sonorous beats of turmoil and uncertainty pulsed in his head to near unimaginable proportions as the potential ramifications perpending if what he expected to discover was to come true overtook him.
Here are some further curios that any competent copy-editor would surely have picked up:
His itinerant brown eyes darted onto the dim city street outside.
Presumably they were on their way to some gypsy-like festivities.
The Scorpion smirked before sending a bullet into Francesco's forehead. Looking around the blood and gut-spattered dining room, the killer ...
How a single bullet to the head could have spattered the room with guts is anyone's guess.
"The Crusader vision of our equestrian order is at the service of our faith" were words from Muhlor's investiture into a centuries old order of Church knighthood that he carried with him everywhere.
A weighty religious burden indeed. And:
The patron licked his fingers with saliva.
It is of course a great shame for Lankford that these two novels, with such similar themes, should have come out almost at the same time, since word of mouth about the Senese/Geis book will inevitably affect sales of hers: "You know that novel about cloning Christ? Well, I found it unreadable ..." It's worth your effort to make sure you have the two clearly distinguished in your mind, because The Jesus Thief is a thoroughly entertaining tale with just about the right amount of thought-provoking ingredients in the mix.
—Infinity Plus
Across the Sea of Genre
Vitals
by Greg Bear
Del Rey, 368 pages, hardback, 2002
The Visitor
by Sheri S. Tepper
Eos, 416 pages, hardback, 2002
The Dragon Queen
by Alice Borchardt
Del Rey, 480 pages, hardback, 2001
This is a column about three fantasy novels. To be sure, two of them would be more generally described as science fiction, but we should bear in mind the final, all-encompassing definition of sf as promulgated by none other than this reviewer, who should therefore know if anyone does: "Science fiction is that subgenre of fantasy which panders to the scientific pretensions of its readers and writers." So here are three novels which, between them, cover the full spectrum of fantasy from hard(ish) sf to the purest stuff itself.
I suppose Greg Bear's Vitals is more likely to find its way onto the technothriller shelves than the hard sf ones, despite Bear's excellent credentials in the latter discipline. Gene scientist Hal Cousins is a researcher into immortality, his approach being that Death entered the ecosystem not at the same time as the emergence of Earth's first lifeforms but some little while after. Accordingly he retrieves from the deep ocean trenches some of the most primordial organisms there are, and finds that indeed his hunch is backed up by the facts. What he doesn't know is that others have been here before him; not only are they murderously eager to protect their secret but they have learnt how to use what are effectively the same techniques to create insane monsters out of the innocent. Researchers into longevity, including Cousins's own brother, are being knocked off on all sides, and it is soon brought dramatically to his attention – not least by the endeavours of an enigmatic eccentric called Rudy Banning – that he's more or less next on the list. Naturally, Cousins teams up with those he assumes are the good guys in order to counter the secret tyranny of the quasi-immortals ...
This is all promising stuff, of course. Throw in a loony scientist or three – which Bear dutifully does – and you have all the makings of the standard technothriller. The trouble is that Bear, while getting the "techno" part right, paints in the "thriller" aspects as if by numbers. Yes, there's the paranoia of not knowing whether any particular character among the goodies can actually be trusted, because the baddies have spies and double agents everywhere; and there's the added paranoia that the insane-monster syndrome can be spread merely by touch, the more intimate the better. But the reader is only halfway through the first quick paranoid frisson when a recently introduced addition to the band of goodies promptly starts boffing our hero, behaviour unusual in one who's only just been bereaved of a spouse. Well, lemme guess, Watson, who the traitor might be ...
Those fairly detailed sex scenes are about as erotic as a catalogue: "Positions #41 (lite version, omitting live octopus), #76 and #129-#131 inclusive", perhaps. Similarly, there are shoot-ups galore, but they appear on the page as dry, accurate and somehow rather academic descriptions of events rather than as incidents in which one feels at all involved: as per a police report, there is no whiff of blood or gunpowder in the reader's nostrils.
Bear is manifestly capable of much more enthralling writing than this, and one can only assume – perhaps wrongly, but this is the way the book feels – that this essay at the technothriller discipline was born more of a desire to move into a subgenre where sales, and hence royalty earnings, are generally rather higher than for sf proper, that the lack of excitement in the book reflects a lack of genuine interest on the author's part.
~
Sheri S. Tepper is an author who has probably never written an uninvolved novel in her life – although a few of her earliest attempts are somewhat rote and some of her efforts of the 1990s smack a little of the formulaic (to be fair, the formula is one of her own devising). In the course of her extremely distinguished career she has established a sub-subgenre of her own that so far doesn't really have a proper descriptive term in the critic's vocabulary. A good term would be "science fantasy" except that that's already been largely appropriated for tales of sword 'n' sorcery on exotic planets where technological development has come grinding to a halt with the invention of the loincloth. Yet Tepper's novels suit the term far better than this: for the most part they can be read either as fantasies that are eventually shown to have a scientific rationale or as exercises in sf that nevertheless deploy all the tropes and characteristics of high fantasy. Such matters of definition, of course, are hardly germ
ane to the average reader, who sensibly ignores them altogether and just judges each book according to whether or not it's any good.
Tepper's novels are generally not just good but extremely good. Even the weaker among her recent offerings – such as Singer from the Sea, The Family Tree and especially Gibbon's Decline and Fall – are nevertheless more interesting and conceptually challenging than most other novels on the fantasy/sf shelves. Still, there's been the undoubted sense that it was about time for Tepper to return to the very peak of her form, and this coming April sees that joyous event with the publication of The Visitor.
It's fair to say that the plot begins with the discovery by astronomers, in the near future, that a rogue cosmic body is on an impact trajectory towards Earth. Accurate but misleading, I should hastily add before your eyes glaze and images of Bruce Willis and a team of moronic but plucky, goddammit plucky, all-Amurkan miners come to mind. This is not a disaster novel in any accepted sense of the term. The main action concerns the aftermath of the holocaust that occurs when the object hits, but not the immediate aftermath; instead the setting is many generations later, when science is, as it were, a dead language and the route to knowledge is seen as lying along the road of magic – more specifically necromancy. This future Earth is a world in which the case for magic is actually quite a good one, for supernatural monsters – with some of whom humankind operates in uneasy alliance and of others humans are rightly terrified – are all over the place. The biggest and most psychically powerful of all these monsters is the Visitor itself, the main raison d'être for the coming to this planet of that rogue celestial object: the Visitor squats enigmatically over much of the Arctic, but is known to have the ability to move elsewhere should circumstances so advise.