The novella’s second act finds Jackson working in San Francisco as part of a criminal gang comprising people with gifts that are similar to his. As the story progresses, he comes to accept himself as more than human only to be approached by a rival gang who warn him about the mysterious Widow for whom he works. It is in this second act that the novella really hits its stride as Tobler guides us from monstrous street battles involving local kids to Jackson’s first visit to a burlesque club where men and women painted to look like carousel creatures promise numerous transgressive pleasures. These scenes really standout as Tobler’s parsimonious prose-style flexes and expands in an effort to describe first the adrenaline rush of combat and then hormonal bliss of teenaged desire. The moments when Jackson settles into his role as a criminal enforcer and starts to date a local girl really work as they are bookended by these moments of brilliant madness. By allowing her prose to expand, Tobler captures the ebb and flow of Jackson’s moods and so explains why he would feel so completely at home as a mob enforcer.
Unfortunately, the novella’s second act comes to a sudden halt when Jackson is forced into a magical confrontation first with the monster his boss keeps locked up in the basement and then with his boss herself. Though beautifully written and full of striking images, the third act really struggles due to its lack of foundation in the day-to-day life of the character. Indeed, the sequence at the fair works because we can sense its ‘unreality’ compared to the stripped back existence of an orphan. Similarly, the fight and burlesque-house sequences work really well because they inform and draw upon what we know about Jackson’s day-to-day existence. Given that it takes place almost entirely in a fantastical landscape involving characters whose motives are never explained, it is unsurprising that the novella’s conclusion feels like a somewhat over-inflated rush. You know an author is in trouble when their protagonist winds up asking another character what just happened and said character replies only with gnomic evasion.
I hope that Tobler plans to return to these characters and ideas as I suspect Jackson’s story would work a lot better at novel length. The problem is that the process of actualisation has stripped the story of so much potential that it feels somewhat thinner than it ideally needed to be. A bit more room and Tobler might have either fleshed out Jackson’s relationships or worked up the metaphorical aspects of his transformation into something more than human. A bit more room and The Kraken Sea could form the basis for a fantastic piece of urban fantasy as the writing and imagery on display are both top notch.
***
EUROPE IN WINTER
Dave Hutchinson
Solaris pb, 498pp, £7.99
Jack Deighton
This third in Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe sequence of novels (previous knowledge of which is not necessary for reading this instalment) starts with a bang. Under the Urals a young couple blow up both themselves and a train in the tunnel belonging to the Trans-European Republic (aka the Line.) The significance of this does not become clear till much later.
Then, what at first seems merely a re-run of the Hungarians-trash-the-restaurant-in-Kraków scene from Europe in Autumn leads to an encounter wherein chef Rudi meets an older version of himself. He is told “You, and your entire world, are very, very sophisticated computer programs”. Not much later Rudi steps out from the restaurant and the wall behind him fades. The tone of this is of a piece with other scenes in Hutchinson’s trilogy. It is present here to introduce the idea that simulations of various futures are being run in the very secretive polity of Dresden-Neustadt in an attempt to realise a prediction engine. But that concept renders the scene problematic. Indications of unreliable narration are usually welcome, but this revelation verges on the dangerous for an author. How do we then have any faith in the depictions of all that follows?
Trust, and enjoy the roller-coaster. Rudi (what we must assume is the ‘real’ Rudi), an agent for the smuggling organisation known as Les Coureurs des Bois – a more or less essential organisation for those wishing to get things across Europe’s now innumerable borders – but here seemingly more freelance, has a large part to play in the remainder of the book. His observation that “Working in Intelligence is just a case of continually winging it” neatly describes his approach but is probably more widely applicable. We are also reacquainted, from Europe at Midnight, with The Community, the parallel world created by the English Whitton-Whyte family who “seem subsequently to have lost the knowledge of how to do it. Either it was lost, or stolen, or destroyed, no one knows, not here or in the Community. There are stories of a book of instructions, floating about somewhere, which tells how to map a new landscape over an old one”. Powerful and dangerous, the Community had precipitated Europe’s ultra-Balkanisation by unleashing the Xian Flu before official contact was made with it. “There was no way to defend against an enemy who could walk across invisible borders anywhere on your territory whenever they wanted, while you were quite unable to retaliate.”
Hutchinson’s unravelling of the interactions between the (by now essentially former) EU – “The Schengen era was just an historical blip, an affectation” – the Community and an entity known as The Realm (up to something in Luxembourg) is never straightforward but always intriguing. He also finds time to comment on the proceedings. “It had been an eventful day; if he had ever been unsure of what the word infodump meant, he wasn’t now.” Despite the appearance of SF grace notes – stealth suits reduce you to a transparent patch of barely-roiling air; there are time dilation effects between the Community and Europe with even longer ones in a certain cottage by the sea; someone steals part of the Community, it in turn steals Heathrow – the overall treatment is less redolent of the genre. “A solid reliable fellow” is not common SF phraseology. And not many SF novels mention a spectacularly catastrophic bowel movement, or AJP Taylor or, indeed, deliver an amusing aside on the interrogation methods of TV detective Columbo. Other allusive touches include the punning chapter title “The Justified Ancients Of Muhu” and a character named László Viktor. Another character opines “England is a constant pain in the arse; always whining, European only when it suits them”.
Rudi’s attempts to comprehend the convoluted relationships between the Realm, the Community, his father’s involvement in a billion-dollar trust fund, the murder of a Professor Mundt, the significance of a photograph of attendees at the Versailles Peace Conference, and the importance of a group of mathematicians, topologists and cartographers known as the Sarkisian Collective are never oppressive. His discovery of just what his role in Les Coureurs des Bois actually is adds an ironic twist.
Europe in Winter’s essence is really that of a Cold War spy thriller but in SF terms it does not add much to the two previous novels. That, though, is a strength. When a novel deals with an organisation which is capable of rewriting worlds, that looking-glass, nothing-is-quite-what-it-seems ambience may be the only suitable medium. Hutchinson executes it superbly.
***
THE TOURIST
Robert Dickinson
Orbit pb, 283pp, £12.99
Duncan Lunan
This novel comes with the promise that it’s “The most original conspiracy thriller of the year”, and is accompanied by your personal boarding pass to admit you to the Tri-Millennium Tour Company vehicle taking you back to the present day. I regret to say that, for me, that was where the originality came close to ending. The first chapter begins with an unnamed individual in a prison cell, and it’s written in second person, which normally I don’t mind, but this time I was far into the book before I realised who that person is. As the alternating chapters are written in first person, I had a lot of trouble keeping track of who was who, and perhaps more importantly who was when. As the whole novel takes place within a larger frame of ongoing time travel, events occur to the characters in different order both from how we experience them and how we are told about them. Those characters have recognisable names like Spens, Riemann, Cantor, Aldis and Mond, which seem as if the
y ought to be significant but apparently don’t relate to their present day or historical counterparts. Even the locations have anonymous and confusing designations like “City Two East”, and although it appears that some of them were major townships in Russia ‘you’ can’t remember the name of the most important one. It’s like reading the recent thrillers Bloodlines: Touch Not the Cat and Bloodlines: Traces, by Thomas McKerley and Ingrid Schippers, where the action alternates between the 1890s and present day, but without their family trees and careful specification in each chapter of where and when we are.
If I have it right the time travel operation is controlled from the 24th century, to which nobody from earlier times is allowed access. Tourists go back to the early 21st century, to carefully controlled venues in which the everyday action of our times is re-enacted, but seriously undermined by the official time travellers and by those who’ve “gone native”. Researchers travel further back, but at increasing risk of being killed or stranded, and great significance is attached to collectors who’ve gone back to early performances of classical music and found them to be different. Why that’s so significant I’m afraid I failed to grasp. The tour companies run their operations from domes and underground enclaves which are protected by heavy security, much to the resentment of the locals, and the tour guides are pushed around by the staff of future agencies with dystopian names like Awareness, Happiness, Safety and Facilitation, who know what’s going to happen in the immediate future but can’t come out with more than the odd frustrating remark like “You will be sent back, a month from now, because of a major breach of protocol”. There is apparently a central control in Geneva which knows more, but can’t or won’t say, and everyone is hampered by a huge lacuna in the “late 21st” records called the N.E.E. (Near Extinction Event) which apparently involved a nuclear exchange and a global computer crash as well as a catastrophic weather event called The Cloud, but whose causes are unknown.
Spens, with the shadow of his near-future “breach of protocol” hanging over him, has a routine assignment to take a tourist group by bus on a trip to a shopping mall, which will be enlivened by a minor road accident on the way back. When everyone’s rounded up afterwards, a woman tourist is missing. In the investigation which follows it emerges that she may be a drug smuggler, she may be an assassin, she may be the agent of other groups with secret agendas, or the innocent pawn of any of the above. She is present at, but may not be involved in, the death of a 21st century man who may or may not be a neo-Nazi, while being followed by 21st century criminals who may or may not know who she really is, and all this may or may not be related to a protest movement which is attacking the future by hiding radioactive materials in caches to be opened on the far side of the N.E.E., whom it may or may not be possible to stop, and whose actions may or may not have led through a loop in time to the N.E.E. itself. Finally Spens boards a transport back to the future, which crashes at an unoccupied underground enclave in featureless country where eventually he dies, hallucinating that he’s at one of those great classical concerts.
I realise that if ever commercial time travel becomes a reality it could end up as messed-up as this, with nobody sure what’s going on and bad decisions being taken in consequence. But I have to say that I was left as puzzled and frustrated as the characters.
***
INVASION
Luke Rhinehart
Titan pb, 441pp, £8.99
Duncan Lunan
After the frustrations of The Tourist, it would be hard to find a bigger contrast than Luke Rhinehart’s Invasion. Set in the present day, with plenty of contemporary references and asides, it follows the incursion into our world of creatures shaped like hairy beach balls, though they can change shape and do so with increasing frequency as they get the hang of it. They come from another reality (“another dimension”, as we would once inaccurately have said), and although they are subject to the physical laws of our continuum now they’re here, they are so flexible, so mobile and so damn clever that very little we can do impedes them. (Our authorities get better at that as time goes on, but with generally fatal results.) They reproduce by fission, but are capable of simulating our method with generally satisfying results. And their purpose in visiting us, and other civilisations elsewhere, is simply to play.
In short, they are nothing like any normal conception of extraterrestrial invaders, from The War of the Worlds onwards. If they confined themselves to playing beach games and frolicking with dolphins (with whom they get on very well), they might have met with a more general welcome. But once they start playing with people’s bank accounts, particularly those of governments and large corporations, and once they start intervening in wars, the powers that be take an increasingly dim view.
We see this happening through the narrative of Billy Morton, a semi-retired commercial fisherman who would not be out of place in either a Hemingway or a Heinlein novel, alternated with excerpts of minutes from increasingly desperate government meetings. Morton’s generally sceptical and tolerant attitudes sit well with Louie, the first of the visitors to arrive, and they quickly bond with his children. But as his wife is an environmental lawyer, drawn into defending the rights of the visitors in court, the family find themselves the centre of attention as the situation develops – amusingly at first, but something they like progressively less as they’re classified as terrorists, become chat show stars, fake their own deaths in an attempt to escape the publicity, adopt increasingly elaborate disguises and end up in Witness Protection, constantly dragged further away from their own lives by the close relationship they have to Louie, his friends and descendants.
Increasingly it seems that the visitors are doing more harm than good. It’s funny when they incite schoolchildren to defy their teachers en masse and spend the day on the beach, funnier when the police and finally the teachers join in. But if all the children do from now on is play, will that be sufficient preparation for adult life? If the parks are now huge adult playgrounds, never mind who’s minding the store, who’s manning the hospitals, fighting fires, restraining criminals or doing any of the things we actually need to keep our civilisation running? In short, it’s very kind of the visitors to come and teach us that all we need to do is have fun, but we didn’t ask them to do it.
For the military and most of the government, there is of course no question that all this is a bad thing, and there’s a darker undertow to the fun and games, in the attempts to find a hidden agenda, as they are actually injuring, capturing and killing visitors in increasing numbers, even if the big attempt with a nuclear weapon kills only a few of them. The willingness of the media to endorse the government line, attributing every accident and problem to the visitors, is perhaps all too realistic, but the keenness of the scientific community to add fuel to the flames with ever more bizarre and imaginary threats is perhaps uncomfortably close to the mark. The US President appears to be gifted with some common sense, but is given little chance to use it under pressure from his advisors to take ever more drastic measures. As the authorities try to stop the giant Fun-ins in Central Park, the National Rifle Association and other Libertarian groups turn up to protect the “rebellion”, and that quickly leads to a firefight. Initially casualties are light, but a more serious confrontation is pending. At the end, which is very sudden, matters are coming to a head when abruptly we are promised “Book Two, The Hairy Balls and the End of Civilisation”.
I’m not one to read the end of a book first, so I didn’t see that coming. I don’t know where it’s going to go from here, but I expect it will be entertaining. What I can’t predict is whether those more serious underlying questions are going to be resolved.
***
CHRIS BECKETT: EDEN
Review & Interview by Juliet E. McKenna
DAUGHTER OF EDEN
Chris Beckett
Corvus hb, 394pp, £16.99
After the gripping and thought-provoking dramas of previous books, I’m keen to see where Chris Beckett takes this stor
y of communities descended from two hapless astronauts stranded on a remote, perpetually dark world. Initially I’m surprised to find this volume open with Angie Redlantern, a character from Mother of Eden. So there’s no generations-long interval as there was after Dark Eden. But why resume the narrative with a character from the isolated Knee Tree Grounds? These people deliberately steer clear of the conflicts between Johnfolk and Davidfolk. Their ancestor Jeff advised concentrating on the here and now. Indeed, it was his approach, tackling the most immediate challenges one step at a time, which proved central to humanity moving beyond the Circle Valley landing site.
But is Jeff’s philosophy as idealistic and as unrealistic as John’s dream of exploration and David’s lust for dominion over all Eden’s people? The Knee Tree Grounders cannot stop traders or shadowspeakers visiting their homes out in the shallow coastal waters of The Pool. Davidfolk guards demand tribute in goods or the sticks that now function as money if they wish to trade on the mainground. As the population along the coast has grown, Knee Tree folk suffer like everyone else as the bucks they all hunt become scarcer and other resources are exhausted. More than that, they’re increasingly left behind as technology advances elsewhere. Such change is being driven by those who refuse to settle for merely what they have here and now.
Angie couldn’t settle for never knowing what happened to her lost friend, Starlight Brooking, whose story we know from Mother of Eden. Maybe that’s one reason why Angie left Knee Tree Grounds years before with shadowspeaker Mary, even though the Kneefolk agree that anyone claiming to hear Mother Gela’s voice is a liar and only out to trick foolish people out of presents and sticks. Even though Mary tries to stamp out the Secret Story passed from mothers to daughters since Gela’s day. John’s descendants and David’s alike insist the only story that’s told is the one they approve. But Angie’s travels show her how many different stories are told across Eden, for good and for ill, by people longing for something more than the here and now, and by those who are ready to lie to get the possessions or power they seek. There’s no definitive, written record after all, in this illiterate world.
Interzone #267 - November-December 2016 Page 14