by Andy Cox
THE HOUSE OF THE FOUR WINDS
Mercedes Lackey & James Mallory
Tor hb, 304pp, $24.99
Ian Hunter
Not to be confused with the John Buchan book of the same name that featured – I kid you not – a retired grocer as its hero, this The House of the Four Winds is by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory and is ‘Book One of One Dozen Daughters’. Expect another eleven titles to follow, and maybe even the dreaded book thirteen, which wraps everything up. The prolific Lackey is possibly better known as the creator of The Valdemar Universe and its many trilogies, odd quintet and sometimes stand-alone novel that comprise it. There is also her SERRAted Edge series. She’s better known to me for the Diane Tregarde trilogy of the early 1990s that chronicled the occult adventures of witch Tregarde and was probably slightly before its time and suffered accordingly in terms of sales compared to the recent and current market which is saturated with all sorts of heroines (alive and dead and sometimes in between) who walk the dark side. As mentioned, Lackey is very prolific, which is an understatement, as, apart from short story collections and contributions to anthologies, my reckoning is that she has written (so far) 120 novels – although several series have been in partnership with other writers, most notably her husband Larry Dixon, as well as many leading female writers including Holly Lisle, Ellen Guon, C.J.Cherryh, Anne McCaffrey, Andre Norton and Marion Zimmer Bradley. Not surprisingly, she has some previous with Mallory, writing the Obsidian trilogy, the Enduring Flame trilogy, and the first two novels of The Dragon Prophecy trilogy with him.
Which brings us to The House of the Four Winds, a twelve-chapter novel that starts with a three-page scene-setting prologue entitled ‘The Parliament of Cats’, which is direct, straightforward and almost fairytale-like in its delivery. It tells us of the circumstances surrounding the Royal Family of the Duchy of Swansgaarde, which lies in a valley in the Borogny and borders on Turkey, Poland and the mighty Russian Empire, as well as the possibly even mightier Cisleithanian Empire; a precarious place to be for such a tiny state. Matters are not helped by the fact that Duke Rupert and Duchess Yetive have produced twelve daughters and then, unexpectedly, one son who, according to the laws of inheritance, will take the throne. It’s all very well for number one son, but what to do about all these princesses, and do you really want twelve daughters stomping around the castle or hidden in their chambers with the court musicians turned up to eleven? Fortunately the Duke and Duchess have had the foresight to allow their daughters, since the age of ten, to choose whatever “trade” they wanted to study. Princess Clarice Eugenie Victoria Amalthea Meulsine, the eldest of the daughters, and soon to turn eighteen, picked the sword as her trade. Now, after a family gathering, it has been decided that each princess, when they reach the age of eighteen, will go forth into the world and seek their fortune and Clarice, as the eldest, gets to go first on this grand adventure to make a new life for herself.
It’s a shame then that, with such a conceit and series set-up, this first book doesn’t exactly set the heather on fire. It reads like a Shakespearian cross-dressing romance meets Pirates of the Caribbean. Thanks to a special corset, Clarice disguises herself as a man – Clarence Swann – with the intention of working her passage on the Asesino which is sailing for the New World. Things are complicated by her burgeoning bromance with ship’s navigator Dominick, and further complicated when he leads a mutiny against the cruel Captain Sprunt. After Sprunt’s death, the crew are now branded as outlaws and pirates and have no choice but to head for the secret pirate haven known as the House of the Four Winds. Then the fun starts in a tale that involves ghosts ships, sea monsters and magic, with Clarice quickly going from a wide-eyed innocent to someone who views everything and everyone through narrowed eyes in a fast-moving, light-hearted romp – apart from the odd flogging, that is.
Given that the Duchy has another eleven daughters still to seek their fame and fortune, it will be interesting to see what other occupations and adventures they embrace. Unlike the young ladies who populate Jane Austen novels with accomplishments such as singing, playing the piano, embroidery and going for long walks, I imagine greater things await these princesses depending on the trades they have adopted. However, I suspect the only way I will find out about them in future is by reading the announcements posted on the castle gates.
THE BEAUTY
Aliya Whiteley
Unsung Stories pb, 100pp, £9.99
Stephen Theaker
The Beauty is a story told by Nathan. Telling stories has been his job ever since the women and girls first began to fall sick and he stood up at the commune’s campfire and retold the story of a famous boy wizard to keep away the silence of the night. It has now been six years since the last women in the valley died, all of them victims of an aggressive fungal infection. The future is bleak, but he tells the surviving men and teenage boys tales of the past, doing his best to keep the women alive, in their thoughts at least. For sex and love the younger men make do with each other. That brings comfort, but there’s no future in it for the species, and no hope, even for a community that was self-sufficient before the disaster.
That is, until Nathan’s encounter in the woods with what he calls the Beauty, a being very like a woman in some ways, disturbingly different in others: “It has breasts, globes of yellow, and rounded hips that speak to me of woman, of want, and that disgusts me beyond words.” His return to the commune with his Beauty, and a crowd of others like it, changes everything, and those changes are not welcomed by all. But he finds an unexpected ally in his Uncle Ted, who till now had lived out in the woods, up to who knows what, and the teenagers are very enthusiastic about the new situation: they “wear skirts, and cite the ease of joining with their Beauties – no more zips to undo, simply lift the material!”
This is a short book with a lot to say, all of it interesting. About what people are prepared to do in order to survive, and how far others will go to prevent change; or, if we step back from Nathan’s point of view, a book about collaborators, and how collaboration can corrupt and degrade. On another level it’s about how men are affected by the absence of women, and later how they might react to losing their ill-earned place as the dominant gender: some with relief, others with murderous rage. Or it could be taken as an interrogation of that male fantasy, the all-sex all-the-time relationship, the always-available partner; it suggests how quickly life with a sexbot (or here, a sex mushroom) might lose its shine. Though it’s not quite a horror novella, its awful transformations of the flesh would do David Cronenberg proud.
Most of all it’s about the power of storytelling to preserve our past and shape our future, and so one can see why it would appeal to an imprint called Unsung Stories; on this evidence a name to look out for. The Beauty is intellectual and visceral, frightening and thoughtful, an adventure and a meditation. Letting my copy of Whiteley’s Mean Mode Median go unread for so long has clearly been a huge mistake.
THE COLLAPSE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway
Columbia University Press pb, 104pp, $9.95
Paul Graham Raven
Frederic Jameson is often quoted as saying that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism; the popularity of predominantly dystopian narratives of futurity – whether delivered as multiplex blockbusters or economic forecasts – would seem to bear him out. But the sfnal dystopian tradition has long had a cautionary and critical backbone to it, with the implication being that a grim future more fully explored might be more easily avoided; Huxley, Wells and Orwell all depicted dystopias for rhetorical purposes, and “if this carries on…” has been implicit in the standard plot engine ever since. The endurance of classic dystopias as touchstones suggests there is considerable power in presenting a worst-case scenario as a fait accompli; the techniques of narrative can bring disaster to life, make consequences feel more concrete than the mere recounting of facts.
I feel safe in
presuming that a similar conclusion prompted Oreskes and Conway, two science historians, to write The Collapse of Western Civilization. Purportedly originating in “the Second People’s Republic of China” and published “on the 300th anniversary of the Great Collapse”, the text takes the form of a fairly dry academic précis of the socioeconomic and ideological drivers that led to the titular Great Collapse of 2093. A thrilling page-turner it ain’t – the narrator effaces themselves from the text in the grand academic tradition, and settles for simply recounting the choices which led to our inexorable run-in with global ecological market-failure. You know the culprits already: neoliberalism’s contradictory obsession with free markets and deregulation; logical positivism and the epistemological hubris of technoscience; the economic dogma of competition, growth and progress; a money- and blood-soaked century of path-dependency politics and infrastructural lock-in. There’s no McGuffin needed for this denouement, no jonbar point on which our fates might pivot – merely business as usual.
Dystopias of ecological collapse aren’t rare, though few are so rigorously researched as this one. But therein lies the rub: with its dry style, The Collapse of Western Civilization is unlikely to reach a popular audience who prefer their dystopias to thrill at least as much as they scare. And that’s a shame, because it sneakily does something sorely lacking in the environmental discourse: it depicts drastic climate change as something which, given the appropriate social and political will, might be recoverable from in the long run.
That a post-capitalist China should play poster-child for that recovery is no mere ironic device, either. It may be harder to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the world, but happy endings have always been the hardest to write convincingly.
COMPANY OF SHADOWS
Paul Gerrard
Paul Gerrard Publishing hb, 135pp, £29.99
Simon Marshall-Jones
During the latter part of the seventies and the early eighties there was something of a vogue for SF and fantasy-based artbooks, made particularly famous by the imprint Dragon’s Dream, who showcased works from the likes of Roger Dean, Chris Foss, and Patrick Woodroffe. They were avidly collected by many, opening up the realms beyond in bright technicolour realism, perhaps replacing the drab reality of that era with a dream of better lives and more colourful worlds.
It was also around this time that the late H.R. Giger had made a seismic impression on SF, particularly in the cinematic field, when he was asked to design the iconic Xenomorph in Ridley Scott’s Alien, a creature so startlingly original in conception and execution that the artist was immediately thrust into the media spotlight. Such was Giger’s impact that there have been numerous imitators spilling out of the decaying corners of rusting machinery around the world ever since. Most are abysmal and shameless copies but, just occasionally, there comes along an artist who takes the spirit and intention of what Giger set out to nail to his canvases, and mixes it with his/her own blighted vision. One such is Paul Gerrard, a film/TV concept artist who attempts (and manages) to transcend both the SF and horror genres, resulting in some gleefully insane amalgamations that are at once repulsive and yet strangely intriguing, attractive even. Monochrome hues clash with technicolour brightness, encapsulating a nightmarish inversion of all that is safe and right. Furthermore, as well as the Giger influence, one can detect a vein of melting Baconesque surrealism, along with hits of Ernst and perhaps Dali.
Pascal Barre’s introduction says of Gerrard’s works that they “may seem … separated from nature, but are of nature, possessing positive and negative, good and evil characteristics.” This is as succinct as any definition of the images contained herein, but one could go further in stating that this nature has been fuelled by a nuclear imagination, where mutation and evolution have collaborated in some unholy magical rituals and subversion of science. The genetic perversions resulting from these ceremonies are what are depicted here, which Gerrard refers to as ‘The Shadow Cast’. They inhabit a world which has long since passed into darkness – and the way in which they’ve been rendered implies that maybe these are his front-line reports.
As well as his personal work (accompanied by stories and details), the book showcases his creature-concept work for Jonathan Liebesman’s Wrath of the Titans, plus sketches and behind-the-scenes photographs of his own obsession, Hellraiser: Origins. For anyone longing to be a witness to a vision going beyond the norm, this is a good place to start.
THE CYBERIAD
Stanislaw Lem
Penguin Modern Classics pb, 290pp, £9.99
Andy Hedgecock
Thirty years ago I was a postgraduate student struggling with the philosophical background to Simulation and Modelling. I’d been told the thought experiments of Raymond Smullyan and Douglas Hofstadter were an accessible starting point, but these weren’t much fun: contrived fictions without a heart – arid, unconvincing and emotionless renderings of ‘problem themes’ into story formats. Then the cavalry arrived: “If you want to understand the philosophical implications of simulation,” said my supervisor, “you need to read Borges, and Lem.” I’d already dipped my toes into the metafictional paradoxes of Borges but I’m ashamed to admit that I knew nothing about the Polish SF writer Stanislaw Lem in the autumn of 1984. At that stage I wasn’t even acquainted with Andrei Tarkovsky’s film version of Solaris.
Fortunately, Brunel University Library located a copy of the 1975 edition of The Cyberiad. It was a revelation: not only because Lem augmented my understanding of the risks and dilemmas of artificial intelligence, but because here was a writer who used an unfamiliar, disconcerting and hugely entertaining set of literary forms to tackle morality, politics and the collision of cognition and consciousness. Far more sophisticated and resonant than Smullyan and Hofstadter, Lem’s fiction is a kissing cousin of magic realism but there are hints of experimental SF, informal anecdotes and traditional Central European folk tales. Imagine a collaboration between the Brothers Grimm and John Sladek and you’ll be thinking along the right lines.
This new edition of The Cyberiad provides a welcome reminder of what I’ve enjoyed about Lem’s work. If the stories belong to any subgenre, it’s faux-medieval futurism: there are kings, knights, princesses, and intelligent robots with the ability to create conscious machines of their own. The bulk of the tales relate the adventures of two meta-robots, Trurl and Klapaucius, with the apparent capacity to engineer a limitless range of conscious and unconscious machines and entities. These ‘constructors’ are essentially well-meaning but compete in the application of their technological abilities, sometimes with unexpectedly complex and regrettable outcomes. Much of the humour is derived from situations in which technique outstrips wisdom. Several of the stories involve the constructors’ ongoing quest to achieve the HPLD civilisation: the Highest Possible Level of Development. It is in the failure of the constructors’ magnificent and idealistic designs that Lem’s sureness of touch in melding morality, invention and exuberant tragicomedy is most apparent.
The most complex tale, at least in terms of structure, is ‘Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius’. This Chinese-box of stories offers an insight into the bleak, bizarre and transcendent nature of existence as anything by Pinter or Pirandello.
Christopher Priest’s sharp and informative introduction highlights what is unique about Lem’s work. It also places Lem in a tradition and considers his work against the backdrop of the upheavals of life in twentieth century Poland – the censorship, suspicion of non-realist art in Warsaw Pact countries, and suspicion of Eastern European writers in America. Particularly those who outsold American SF writers. It gives a fascinating flash of the connection between Lem’s life and the work and leaves you wanting to know more.
It takes a talented artist with an idiosyncratic vision to illustrate the comic or the fantastic. John Tenniel’s images complemented Lewis Carroll’s words brilliantly, of course, and Boswell, Hoffnung and Searle did a damn fine job on The Exploits of Engelbrecht:
Daniel Mróz deserves to join this pantheon. There’s a risk of diminishing the written weird by instantiating it in images, but Mróz’s economic and elegant black and white graphics (clearly reproduced by Penguin) add another dimension to Lem’s lavish imaginings.
Finally, it should be noted that Michael Kandel’s excellent translation (retained from the original UK/US publications) is vital to the accessibility and success of Lem’s tales in English. The crisp, restrained style of Lem-Plus-Kandel, an engineered consciousness to rival the creations of Trurl and Klapaucius, is the perfect vehicle for the ebullience of the author’s dry wit and baroque invention.
This is an excellent edition of a fine collection that has not merely stood the test of time but has, if anything, grown in stature as the language of simulation and cybernetics has taken a grip on the cultural mainstream. Go on, treat yourself.
A KILL IN THE MORNING
Graeme Shimmin
Bantam Press pb, 384pp, £12.99
Ian Sales
It is 1955. World War II ended in 1941 when Britain signed a peace treaty with Rudolf Hess, and now the Nazis control Europe… If there are two well-populated, perhaps even over-populated, worlds in our alternate histories, it’s Hitler victorious and the South winning the American Civil War. So any novel settling in either of those lands needs to be special if it’s to stand above the competition. Shimmin’s approach is to throw Ian Fleming and Nazi occult science into the pot.
At first glance, James Bond and a Nazi-controlled Europe feels like a good fit – just swap in the Germans for the Russians, and the Cold War remains essentially unchanged (although, interestingly, it would make the British ideologically and politically closer to the “enemy” than was the case in the real world). But doing so does seem somewhat pointless – such an easy alteration begs the question, why bother doing it? Which is where the Nazi occult science plays a part. In the seventy years since the end of World War II an entire mythology has grown up around the fringe science the desperate Germans allegedly turned to in the latter days of the war – flying saucers, Feuerball missiles, secret bases in the Antarctic, atomic bombs, Repulsine engines, the Bell… Not to mention the actual documented stuff they did do, like the V-1, V-2, Natter, Me 163, all the aerodynamic work on delta platforms and flying wings by Horten and Lippisch…