Take Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl.
Now, I love this fine novel, and helped vote it a Campbell Award. It's pure state-of-the-art biopunk. But funky it ain't. “Grim and gritty” and “funky” are polar opposites. It's like Trent Reznor versus Lady Gaga. Unfortunately, from my humor-biased perspective, grim and gritty seems to be the default mode for speculative fiction that delves into our organic future.
To paraphrase baseball legend Casey Stengel, “Can't anybody here play this ribofunk game?”
Well, it gladdens my heart to report that at least one person can. To continue the baseball metaphor a moment, debut novelist Katy Stauber has hit a home run with Revolution World (Night Shade Books, trade paperback, $14.99, 300 pages, ISBN 978-1-59780-233-8). Fast, funny, frenetic, it has echoes of Cory Doctorow and Bruce Sterling (at his most light-hearted). If you pictured The Windup Girl re-imagined by a team of Alexander Jablokov and Donald Westlake, you wouldn't be so far off.
The time is some seventy years in the future, and the scenario is almost identical to that of The Windup Girl: Greenhouse Earth conditions causing mass deaths, scarcity, political instability and repression, with shattered societies relying for help on gene-modding and alternate energy sources. But despite this, Stauber doesn't give in to a single dystopic thought. Her characters are living their lives as best they can, with zest and panache and even glee. I'd bring up the famous lyrics by the Police—"When the world is running down, you make the best of what's still around"—but even that sentiment does not capture the genuine uplift and optimism of Revolution World. (The title, by the way, refers to a popular videogame that recreates Texas history.)
Much of the mad, infectious energy of the book derives from the nature of the players. We are first introduced to gene maven Harmony Somata, head of the bio-firm named Floracopia, and her four identical daughters, chief of whom from the reader's perspective is Clio, also a gengineer. They are a madcap family of beautiful female geniuses, counterbalanced in intensity and ingenuity only by two unprepossessing yet capable Canadians, Seth and Max. Seth and his uncle Max represent Omerta, an independent country-corporation offering secure data storage to governments, terrorist groups, and private individuals alike. They are setting up a server farm in Ambrosia Springs, Texas, home to Floracopia. The men quickly find their fates entangled with the Somata clan, which is all to the good, as only knowledgeable native guides will help the newcomers deal with Texas customs, a hostile US government, and corporate spies from Malsanto. Not to mention killer rabbits as big as pitbulls and a pack of vicious Pomeranian guard dogs.
Stauber revs her plot engines at 5000 RPM, bouncing the reader from one hilarious incident to another (alternating among many POV's to achieve her ends, even, unconventionally, leapfrogging minds from one paragraph to the next), all while making room for a developing love story between Clio and Seth. But I should make it clear that Revolution World is no Ron Goulart-style parody, however great such farces were. It's a genuine, hard-edged speculative look at a highly probable future, but cast in humorous and upbeat terms, rendering any “message” about how we've screwed ourselves more palatable and bearable.
I know it's not a valid critical method of literary analysis, a mistake akin to comparing apples and oranges, but if you ask yourself which world you'd rather inhabit—Bacigalupi's or Stauber's—I think you'll come down on Stauber's side every time.
* * * *
The Howardian Age
We are fairly unarguably in the midst of a second boom period for Robert E. Howard and his fiction, the first such heyday occurring in the 1970s and 1980s. Conan, his most famous creation, has a monthly comic book from Dark Horse (older comics featuring Conan now have handsome archive editions), and a new movie about the thick-thewed and marginally less thick-witted barbarian is forthcoming. (I believe the ex-governor of California has finally surrendered the lead role.) Lesser characters such as Solomon Kane have received cinematic treatment as well. Smart new illustrated editions of the stories, grouped thematically, appear regularly from Del Rey. The life of the author himself has merited a Hollywood biopic, with The Whole Wide World (1996). Can his enshrinement in the Library of America, along with his already enthroned pal Lovecraft, be far behind?
Scholarship on REH proceeds apace with his fan popularity. And one recent instance of the textual and cultural parsing of Howard serves as a very readable anthology for laymen and academicians alike.
I am pointing now to The Robert E. Howard Reader (Borgo Press, trade paper, $14.99, 212 pages, ISBN 978-1-4344-1165-5, edited by Darrell Schweitzer. Schweitzer has rendered admirable yeoman service to SF/F/H over the years with several volumes of essays and interviews that capture lots of critical insights into fantastika, as well as primary-source recollections from the creators, and this volume is no less of a valuable accomplishment. Mixing new material with reprints, it offers everything from personal musings on Howard to close analyses of the primary texts.
We start with a chatty reminiscence from Michael Moorcock about what Howard means to him, and how his early reading of Conan was instrumental in creating Elric. This is a fine opener, and leads naturally to the next piece by Leo Grin, which charts the rise and fall and rise of REH's popularity, including the current boom. L. Sprague de Camp offers a broad but handy outline and weighing of the kinds of fiction Howard wrote, followed by Poul Anderson's personal appreciation of the work. Fritz Leiber and Robert Weinberg dig hard into the unique stylistic bag of tricks Howard employed, while S. T. Joshi goes deep into the correspondence between REH and HPL (400,000 extant words!).
Mark Hall examines the anthropological roots of the Hyborian Age, while Charles Hoffman takes an early story ("Xuthal of the Dusk") and contrasts it with its late-career reworking ("Red Nails"). “Howard's Oriental Stories” are summarized and investigated perceptively by Don D'Ammassa. Schweitzer doffs his editorial hat and puts on his critic's cap to look at Kull as a prototype of Conan, and Robert Price examines the actual depth of Solomon Kane's Puritanism.
The story “Beyond the Black River” gets a close reading from George Scithers, and Gary Romeo offers a fascinating catalog of all the times REH himself has appeared as a metafictional character. Surely the funniest and oddest piece here is Howard Waldrop's “A Journey to Cross Plains,” which is the contemporaneous account written by twenty-year-old Waldrop upon his visit to REH's hometown—with footnotes from Waldrop's putative maturity added! And rounding out the volume are Scott Connors with his examination of the marketplace realities of pulp magazines, and Steve Tompkins on REH's literary heirs.
By the end of this fine assemblage of essays, the reader—novice or expert—will feel invigorated and eager to return once again to Howard's undying, crimson-shadowed pages.
* * * *
Lovely Zita, Meteor Made
Problem Number One: Not enough YA fiction is science fiction; the majority of YA fantastika is overbalanced in favor of fantasy.
Problem Number Two: The audience for comics is greying; there are not enough titles that serve as gateway drugs for younger readers.
Combined Solution to Both Problems One and Two: Zita the Spacegirl (First Second Books, trade paper, $10.99, 192 pages, ISBN 978-1-59643-446-2), written and drawn by Ben Hatke. This nifty offering, promising to be merely the first volume in a series, does everything right to lure young readers, keep them entertained, and hook them on science fiction. And guess what else? I, an adult reader of some mumblety-mumble decades worth of prior reading, found the book absolutely charming and rewarding as well.
Let's look at the volume in three ways: the sheer story, the art, and the subliminals.
One afternoon, spunky yet average Earthgirl Zita (pre-adolescent, maybe ten to twelve years old) and her pal Joseph are roughhousing in a field when they come upon a smoking crater with a meteoroid at the bottom. (Nerdy Joseph is very particular about the term “meteoroid,” and I have betrayed his scientific accuracy in my section title only reluctantly, to achieve the proper Be
atlesque pun.) Protruding from the meteoroid is a gadget. Zita grabs the device and boldly yet unwisely employs it, opening up a stargate through which Joseph is immediately snatched by a fuzzy tentacle, before the rift snaps shut. After a brief interval of panic and despair, Zita reopens the boomtube and follows.
She emerges on a planet overstuffed with weird sophonts of a thousand races, most of whom just ignore her. Her stargate device shattered by the clumsy footstep of a hulking giant named Strong-Strong, she quickly learns the planet is under death sentence from imminent collision with an asteroid, and that Joseph is the captive of a race called the Sciptorians. Getting advice and help from a fellow human named Piper, a duplicitous rogue, she embarks on a journey to the Scriptorian castle to rescue her buddy, picking up friends and helpers along the way, including a giant mouse, a braggart battlebot, and a timorous junkbot.
Immediately, the seasoned reader can sense that Hatke has tapped into some rich Ur-tropes. Abducted friend, dangerous quest, stranger in a strange land, outlaw crossroads of the universe— He's on the same wavelength as Heinlein's Have Spacesuit—Will Travel (1958), Laumer and Brown's Earthblood (1966), Bogie's Casablanca (1942), and any other number of epic fish-out-of-water-in-an-exotic-place tales. In fact, the sophistication of the narrative, with a minimum of handholding infodumps, is essential to the book's allure. After all, trying to catch kids who have grown up on Futurama is a little more difficult than the task that, say, Eleanor Cameron faced with her Mushroom Planet books.
And so on a pure story-telling level, Hatke delivers all the laughs, suspense, drama, fun and speculation that we can ask for, leaving Zita at book's end preparing to embark on a long and no-doubt adventure-filled journey home in Piper's starship.
But what of the art? After all, with a graphic novel, that's more than half the freight.
First off, Hatke's style is charming, a soothing blend of Watterson, Bodé, and Knight (that would be Hilary Knight, of Eloise fame). His character designs for the humans and aliens are bright, whimsical and attractive. He can brightly render great techno-urban landscapes, as well as pastoral ones. His page layouts are refreshingly uncluttered and active, with a sensible use of full-page spreads. There's even a bit of Moebius in his crowd scenes. Colors are subdued yet vivid. All in all, the package is clean and enticing, fun and inviting.
The last thing to examine are the subliminals. By this I mean any kind of non-explicit message. Of course, having a female protagonist is a message in itself, the main one, but it's a bit of preaching that Hatke delivers in a subtle and unbiased fashion. Making the helpless captive victim be Zita's male buddy is also a contradiction of cliché, and a welcome one. But Hatke does other clever things to reinforce his point of girlish competence, such as on page 34, when Zita steps through a gap in a wall. We see she's emerging in the middle of a poster touting the adventures of an adult female action hero. It's as if Zita is stepping into her own future role.
But all these subliminals—including ones about friendship and duty—pale when placed next to the sheer excitement and zest of Zita. Let's hope Hatke can pull off at least a hat-trick of two more books.
* * * *
Into the Moorcockian Web
Editor John Davey, along with publishers David Britton and Michael Butterworth, as well as designer John Coulthart, can all give themselves immense pats on the back for the artistic and editorial triumphs that are exemplified by their latest production, Into the Media Web (Savoy Books, hardcover, (pounds) 48.00, 720 pages, ISBN 978-0-86130-120-1). This book is brilliantly designed, lovingly researched and assembled and illustrated and printed, and amounts to a pinnacle of the bookmaker's art. Well done, chaps! Now, let me see, who else deserves congrats for this awesome project. . . ?
Oh, yes, there's a little matter of the fellow who wrote all the text, probably, at a rough guess, upwards of a quarter of a million words! I think his name is Michael Moorcock. Let me just check the title page. . . . Yes, that's it, this volume purports to be MM's “Selected short non-fiction, 1956-2006.” But it certainly can't be the work of just one man. There has to have been a team behind the text. . . .
All kidding aside, this incredibly diverse and bountiful omnibus by Grand Master Moorcock is overstuffed with an immense range of his writings, a spectrum and abundance that I defy any other living SF writer to duplicate. Oh, sure, some talented genius like Bruce Sterling or Robert Silverberg may have penned a fair variety of non-fiction pieces, but in such quantity? No way! Moorcock stands amazingly alone in his career totals.
The contents here are arranged in a zigzag manner meant to encourage our appreciation, not following a strict chronology of publication. We begin, appropriately enough, with a bit of autobiography, gaining a sense of Moorcock's formative youth and subsequent maturity. Then, it's off to the races!
We find everything here from his earliest fanzine pieces—even then exhibiting sophistication and catholicism and style—to paeans to writers and other creators whose work he loves, to journalistic review stints, to polemics, to epistolary reportage, to diary entries, to letters to fans, to accounts of musical escapades, and on to travelogues. Throughout, we can only marvel at Moorcock's knowledge and experience, his professionalism and, in the best sense of the word, his amateur enthusiasms. The man knew practically everybody worth knowing in the span covered here, and was present at the birth of so much critical genre history. Any SF reader with an ounce of interest in the backstory of our field will find countless fascinating incidents retailed here. Want to know how Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron came to be written and printed? Or how UK comics were produced in the 1950s? Just dip into this book, and you'll soon find out that data, or something equally eye-opening.
The fact that the majority of these pieces are only a few pages in length, and unconnected or non-sequential, encourages random dipping. This is a book that will reward idle browsing.
Which is not to say there is no heavy meat here. Take a piece like “Jack's Unforgettable Christmas.” This is Moorcock's summary of his long friendship with the writer Jack Trevor Story (a figure too little known in the USA) and that writer's sad career arc following a police brutality incident. (Shades of Peter Watts's recent misfortunes, though Peter's fate is hardly yet written.) In this essay, we see the best of Moorcock and his writing. A passionate involvement in the matter at hand; a comprehensive grasp of all the details and subtleties; an abiding sense of friendship; an eternal quest for justice; an appreciation of life's bitter ironies; a wise philosophical stance regarding the possible limits of one's actions against the universe. You could take that catalogue of virtues and apply it to his fiction as well, but it's even more apparent in this form.
Moorcock turns seventy-two this year. Last year he published his most recent book, a Doctor Who novel titled The Coming of the Terraphiles. So far as I know, he had never previously done any franchise fiction. But with nothing left to prove, he was willing to venture into new territory even this far into his career.
Now that's what I call a Grand Master!
Copyright © 2011 Paul Di Filippo
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Department: TWENTY-SIXTH ANNUAL READERS’ AWARD
It hardly seems possible that we could be up to the January issue already, but that's what the calendar says—and that means that once again it's time for our Readers’ Award poll, which is now in its twenty-sixth year.
Please vote. Most of you know the drill by now. For those of you who are new to this, we should explain a few things.
We consider this to be our yearly chance to hear from you, the readers of the magazine. That's the whole point behind this particular award. What were your favorite stories from Asimov's Science Fiction last year? This is your chance to let us know what novella, novelette, short story, poem, and cover, you liked best in the year 2011. Just take a moment to look over the Index of the stories published in last year's issues of Asimov's (pp.109-111) to refresh your memory, and then list below, in the ord
er of your preference, your three favorites in each category. By the way, we love to get comments about the stories and the magazine, so please free to include them with your ballot. Please note: unless you request otherwise, comments will be considered for publication with attribution in the editorial that accompanies the announcement of the Readers’ Award Results.
Some cautions: Only material from 2011-dated issues of Asimov's is eligible (no other years, no other magazines, even our sister magazine Analog). Each reader gets one vote, and only one vote. If you use a photocopy of the ballot, please be sure to include your name and address; your ballot won't be counted otherwise.
Works must also be categorized on the ballot as they appear in the Index. No matter what category you think a particular story ought to appear in, we consider the Index to be the ultimate authority in this regard, so be sure to check your ballots against the Index if there is any question about which category is the appropriate one for any particular story. In the past, voters have been careless about this, and have listed stories under the wrong categories, and, as a result, ended up wasting their votes. All ballots must be postmarked no later than February 1, 2012, and should be addressed to: Readers’ Award, Asimov's Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 267 Broadway, 4th Flr., New York, NY. 10007. You can also vote online at [email protected], but you must give us your physical mailing address as well. We will also post online ballots at our website, so please check us out at www.asimovs.com.
Remember, you—the readers—will be the only judges for this award. No juries, no panels of experts. In the past, some categories have been hotly contended, with victory or defeat riding on only one or two votes, so every vote counts. Don't let it be your vote for your favorite stories that goes uncounted! So don't put it off—vote today!
Asimov's SF, January 2012 Page 19