Locus, July 2014

by Locus Publications

  •

  In an era when fantasy seems enthralled by long series of huge volumes that seem to pass by like freight trains at a crossing when you’re trying to get somewhere, Joe Abercrombie’s Half a King serves as a reminder that there are considerable virtues yet to be found by efficient, on-the-ground storytelling propelled more by plot than by setting, with crisp dialogue, humane characters, and a distinct inward spiral of rapid-fire events. To be sure, it’s the first volume of a trilogy (although the entire trilogy promises a page count not much longer than some of those luggage novels, including a couple of Abercrombie’s own), and to be sure, it’s clearly a YA novel (though Del Rey’s price point and marketing suggests confidence that they will draw adult readers as well, which they should). But there’s certainly enough incident and background in his almost classically structured, Dumas-like betrayal-suffering-and-revenge plot to have pumped the novel up to three times its length, and while there may well be readers who would wish for that, I found myself relieved at a novel which is not only a page-turner, but in which something actually happens on the next page. At the same time, Abercrombie has found room for a few passages of extraordinarily graceful prose, though never to the point of self-indulgence or sentimentality.

  The set-up seems almost archetypally familiar. Yarvi is the younger prince of Gettland, a vaguely Viking-like warrior society, but his studious nature and a birth defect of a withered hand lead him to study to be a minister rather than to prepare for succeeding to the throne, which is the role of his more traditionally macho brother. By the end of the first short chapter, he learns that his father and brother have been killed in a treacherous attack by the rival Vanstermen, and Yarvi finds himself not only inheriting the kingdom – with absolutely no one’s confidence – but betrothed to the daughter of his father’s chief advisor. It’s not long before he finds himself the victim of treachery, and he must use his intelligence and talents not only to survive a brutal coming of age, but to collect an unlikely but mostly likeable band of former slaves and outcasts in an harrowing effort to regain his true identity. Along the way, he not only gains a radically different perspective on his world – including the feared Vanstermen and the ancient metal structures left over from an apparently superior culture called the elves – but he meets a colorful collection of secondary characters, including a spectacularly alcoholic woman ship’s captain and a strangely quiet galley slave called Nothing. A good deal of the efficiency of Abercrombie’s narrative derives from the manner in which he reveals the inevitable things-are-not-what-they seem insights without interrupting his basic action-thriller template. While at least one of these revelations seems somewhat contrived, and a couple of others are apparently coupons for succeeding volumes, the overall pace of the volume is extremely satisfying.

  In a way, there is nothing much new in Half a King for anyone familiar with the long tradition of redress adventures, but that’s not really the point. Abercrombie is not out so much to revise the tradition, or to wallow in his world-building, as to celebrate a particular kind of storytelling, not unlike the celebration of Western tropes he explored in his recent prequel to Red Country, ‘‘Some Desperado’’. If the novel introduces new readers to this kind of narrative, and reminds older ones of its virtues, he’ll have done his job. Sometimes a story is just a good story.

  •

  The promotional material for Paul Park’s All Those Vanquished Engines positions the novel as Park’s triumphant return to SF after his very worthwhile diversion into alternate-reality fantasy with his Princess of Roumania series, and indeed the novel has its share of SF furnishings, from alternate timelines to secret superweapons, clones, aliens, giant insects, pandemics, mysterious spacecraft, and eventually a rather gloomy near-future dystopia. But readers expecting a return to the late ’80s SF of Park’s Starbridge Chronicles novels may find themselves in unfamiliar territory, because the sophisticated metatextual games of the Roumania novels are back in play, and in an even more complex way than in that occasionally mind-bending series. On the other hand, those who recall Park’s Nebula Award-nominated novella ‘‘Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance’’ or last year’s somewhat expanded version of it from PS Publishing may well find considerable rewards in this fiercely intelligent yet formally challenging novel-in-three-stories, which might remind some readers of Michael Cunningham or David Mitchell, although Park is a far more personal writer than either.

  Shrewdly, Park begins his multipart narrative with a fast-moving suspense tale set some decades after the Civil War, when a young woman named Paulina Claiborne, preparing for a kind of society debut, finds her room invaded by a military officer intent on rescuing her, telling her that the woman she thinks is her grandmother is not, and is in fact planning to murder her. Soon we realize this is not quite the Civil War of our own history – this war ended in an accommodation between the ‘‘empress’’ of the north and the Confederate states – but Pauline has entertained herself writing a kind of SF novel set in 1967 in a world in which Lee had surrendered at Appomattox. The fragments of Paulina’s unpublished fiction are only the first of many such interpolated documents that pepper the novel, ranging from sermons and memoirs of Park’s alleged or real ancestors to a transcript of a court martial hearing to bits of a novel Park actually wrote for Wizards of the Coast – under the pseudonym Paulina Claiborne. We quickly begin to get a sense of the kind of origami folds that are going to make up Park’s larger narrative.

  The second novella is set in a time very like the present (but apparently not in quite the same alternate history as the first part), in which an initially unnamed narrator is trying to get a WWII veteran to remember details of a secret superweapon project he had worked on, involving the manipulation of sound waves. This, in turn, gets conflated with Park’s account of an actual collaboration with sound and installation artist Steven Vitiello at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (in an abandoned factory that may be the same one used during WWII), as well as Park’s relationships with his writer mother, a rather mysterious character named Jack Shoots, and a student in a writing class Park had taught. The third part of the novel – largely the same part published as that PS novella – imagines Park as an older man in a diminished future world plagued by pandemics and power shortages, with military convoys on the roads and vaccination checkpoints at state borders. Park is tracing elements of his family history (though this world may again be discontinuous with the first two sections), including his family’s involvement in the Civil War Battle of the Crater and an ancestor whose late-18th-century sermon seems to describe a Wellsian-style alien invasion, and how all this may bear on his present, nearly desperate condition.

  Although the welter of narrative voices and variant timelines may seem daunting at times, Park offers several clues regarding his narrative strategy. In the first story, the young Paulina muses, ‘‘How can we live… when memory tells us one thing, reality another, and imagination a third?’’ In the second section, the abandoned factory furnaces in Massachusetts – some of the ‘‘vanished engines’’ of the title – are described as located ‘‘in fact, in memory, and in the imagined present,’’ and still later Park recalls a favorite Escher drawing of two ‘‘identical hands drawing each other,’’ which also serves as a kind of image of Park’s mirror-maze of imaginary characters imagining other imaginary characters, some of which turn out to be real. Closer in form to Borges than to Wells, All Those Vanished Engines is not so much a return to science fiction as an effort, maddening and brilliant by turns, to reinvent it as a way of understanding our own tangled histories.

  –Gary K. Wolfe

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  REVIEWS BY FAREN MILLER

  Myths, Metaphors, and Science Fiction: Antique Roots of the Literature of the Future, Sheila Finch (Aqueduct 978-1-61976-055-4, $12.00, 126pp, pb) April 2014. [Order from Aqueduct Press, PO Box 95787, Seattle WA 98145-2787; .]

  The Queen of the Tearling, Erika
Johansen (Harper 978-0-0622-9036-6, $26.99, 448pp, hc) July 2014.

  Child of a Hidden Sea, A.M. Dellamonica (Tor 978-0-7653-3449-7, $25.99, 334pp, hc) June 2014.

  Immortal Muse, Stephen Leigh (DAW 978-0-7564-0956-2, $24.95, 536pp, hc) March 2014. Cover by Tim O’Brien.

  A Barricade in Hell, Jaime Lee Moyer (Tor 978-0-7653-3183-0, $25.99, 334pp, hc) June 2014.

  Faced with two novels where our modern world confronts its own likeness in the distorted mirror of magic – two journeys, both with young heroines – I tended to ignore the links between them, until a slim book of essays by noted SF writer and scholar Sheila Finch brought about a shift in my perspective. Myths, Metaphors, and Science Fiction explores themes and variations that arose in some preliterary dawn-time, moves from creation myths to tales of Gilgamesh and Odysseus, onward through Shakespeare’s Tempest, to works from the past two centuries and the new millennium. After 30 years spent teaching ‘‘creative writing and the literature of science fiction,’’ Finch sees the whole thing as a living continuum, rather than the shattered kingdom where some academics try to maintain increasingly rusty barriers between fantasy and science fiction, high art, and popular entertainment.

  Though mainstream fiction tends to internalize its quests while science fiction operates more like myth, significant voyages recur often enough to form a common bond between them: ‘‘In one sense, the vast majority of science fiction stories – perhaps western fiction in general – are quest stories; the major character has a goal to achieve and obstacles to overcome on the path toward that achievement.’’

  The book goes on to consider a host of archetypal characters (goddess as maiden/mother/crone, trickster gods, Holy Fool, monsters close enough to humankind to scare us all the more, etc.), and looks at ‘‘landscapes and adventures’’ that touch the traveler in many kinds of quests, down through the millennia. Whether the driving force behind their voyage is Fate or unbridled curiosity, somewhere along the way they’ll feel what Finch calls ‘‘the tingle of the ineffable’’ – a concept better known (if less vividly evoked) in terms like Jung’s ‘‘the numinous,’’ or science fiction’s ‘‘sense of wonder.’’

  •

  A skill discussed in Myths, Metaphors, and Science Fiction helps bring new life and a unique voice to a very old plotline in Erika Johansen’s debut The Queen of the Tearling, first volume in a trilogy. Though the galley arrived with promotional material that trumpets its sale to a major film company, sets the action firmly three centuries in the future, and reduces the plot to a few familiar tropes (‘‘A Young Woman, A Kingdom, An Evil Enemy, a Birthright Foretold…’’), Johansen won me over with something Finch sensed as a girl reading stories by Ray Bradbury and gradually came to understand as ‘‘the apparently effortless ability of simple words’’ – images – ‘‘to stir emotion.’’

  Here’s the teenage heroine’s initial response to a palace bedroom:

  Kelsea woke in a deep, soft bed hung with a light blue canopy. Her first thought was a trivial one: the bed had too many pillows. Her bed in Barry and Carlin’s cottage had been small, but clean and comfortable, with a single serviceable pillow. This bed was comfortable as well, but it was an ostentatious sort of comfort. The bed could easily have held four people, its sheets were pear-colored silk, and an endless vista of small, frilly white pillows stretched across the blue damask coverlet.

  She concludes, ‘‘My mother’s bed, and just what I should have expected.’’

  Raised by a pair of guardians on a homestead far from Tearling’s royal capital New London (where her uncle became Regent upon her glamorous mother’s early death), Kelsea Glynn is a tall, rather ungainly 19-year-old girl who loves to read, likes to eat, isn’t afraid to dirty her hands with practical matters, but has no real experience of the world. Now that she’s finally old enough for some politicians in New London to proclaim her its rightful queen, she can’t dismiss self-doubts with confidence in a Birthright Foretold, and has little idea how to approach the job. Nonetheless, she’s intelligent and observant, with an ethical backbone that will keep her steady in circumstances where others might be tempted to institute widespread purges, or yield to prevailing corruption. Confronted with an active slave trade that periodically sends a slew of victims to the neighboring kingdom where the Red Queen reigns, this unheroic heroine resolves to stop it – immediately!

  Life has a nasty tendency to mess up major thought experiments, subverting efforts to change the course of history and achieve utopia. Several hundred years before this book begins, the bold explorer William Tear and some fellow idealists took matters into their own hands and made The Crossing, a journey from our world to one left unspoiled – somehow – by overpopulation, high tech or established religion. (Johansen reserves explanation of the method used, and exactly where it took them, for later volumes). Like most raw settlements with a few relics and dwindling memories of past sophistication, theirs devolved. The loss left room for other elements to intrude: strange magics, and equally mysterious jewels that counter the worst kinds of strangeness and amplify the good.

  Or so it seems. Johansen leaves room for other possibilities by emphasizing how human all the characters can be (even the long-lived Red Queen) and showing the world in glimpses, from many angles. Like Kelsea, we’re strangers who can only try to piece together the bigger picture from fragments – for us, these are chapters that move among a number of viewpoint characters; for her, snatches of dream-vision that culminate here:

  Kelsea glimpsed wonders, so briefly that she didn’t have time to understand them, or even to mourn their passing. She could see everything, the future and the past, her vision stretching into a place where time and land merged into one.

  Despite the evanescence, it leaves her with a sense of mission and adult responsibility.

  Finch noted how some fiction (from Ender’s Game to tales of Harry Potter) discards logic yet grabs the imagination with the primal archetype of ‘‘the unlikely person called to right a wrong,’’ the Stranger bound to bring healing and redemption to a Wounded Land. The Queen of the Tearling portrays the early stages of a quest where reason may be more relevant than you might expect.

  •

  One of the things Queen leaves unresolved is the identity of Kelsea’s father. The same question plagues Sophie Hansa, heroine of A.M. Dellamonica’s Stormwrack series opener, Child of a Hidden Sea. She grew up with a foster family in California and has finally managed (at the age of 24) to track her absentee mother to San Francisco, but that harsh encounter leaves her no wiser about her roots. When we first see Sophie, she’s sinking in an unfamiliar ocean – not the Pacific. Accustomed to bopping around earthly seas with daredevils and scientists on research expeditions, she’s savvy enough to fend off drowning with a scissor kick, take hold of a fellow drifter, and stay afloat till a fishing boat comes along – but she knows nothing about her new surroundings, or why she’s here.

  The other drifter turns out to be her aunt, whom she’d been trying to rescue from attack in San Francisco when both were flung into the waters around the Stormwrack Archipelago (where most of this book takes place). But Aunt Gale won’t be with her long enough to explain much about their ties to a ruling family in this patchwork of island territories with many different languages and cultures. The mystery only deepens when Sophie looks through the purse her aunt left behind, a satchel that opens and closes in some way she can’t perceive, let alone understand: ‘‘Nanotech? Robots? That was the stuff of science fiction.’’

  She still has her cell phone, but there’s no way to contact her ‘‘kid-genius’’ foster brother back in California, no Internet connection. All she can do is store up messages, take digital photos with a waning battery, and gather a few specimens of the local ecology (some familiar, others quite strange) to show him if she gets the chance. Instead of high tech or more futuristic gizmos, experts here make artifacts like the etched shell that gives her the ability to speak, and more tentatively read, a language comm
on to these seas. ‘‘It’s magic, has to be magic; you’re not in Kansas anymore, Sofe.’’

  The shell is a rare gift in a place that devotes far more effort to rejection, like her birth mother expanded to a planetary scale. Though one group of rebels finds a way to use her diving skills for their own dark purposes, most of the Archipelago (and its various magics) seems aligned against her. Locals unlucky enough to get too close may not survive the experience. Much as this shames her, and however strong the outrage, Sophie can’t imagine going up against slave-drivers and necromancers with grand ambitions, or fighting for a lost birthright like some fairytale heroine. She wants to stick around on her own terms, to feed her rampant curiosity, observe and analyze a world whose moon looks so familiar that it could be our own.

  Wherever the series may go, Child of a Hidden Sea links it to the Earth of iPods, fluorescent lights, and pizza in shopping malls. Sophie Hansa still belongs here, and will never stop loving it with all her wild and crazy heart.

  •

  In New York City, a woman with eclectic interests meets a talented photographer whose marriage is unraveling; they begin a tentative affair that will attract unwanted interest from a serial killer. Currently known as Camille Kenny, the heroine of Stephen Leigh’s Immortal Muse spends most evenings with a little ‘‘entourage’’ of friends and lovers at a bar whose ironic name and seedy atmosphere suit her unpretentious spirit: ‘‘The Bent Calliope reeked of spilled beer and desperate egos.’’

  While the novel combines elements from many kinds of fiction (urban mystery, modern relationships, historical, occult), its nine sections – one for each muse, and like a cat’s reputed lives – begin here, and the city proves to be more than an easy reference point for contemporary readers. This is the book’s emotional core, where events reach their crisis.