Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #211

by TTA Press Authors

  Tom Dreyfus is, of course, a cop with a secret, one that dates back eleven years to when the cops of the Glitter Band had to deal with an apparently inexplicable machine intelligence known as the Clockmaker. Everyone thought the Clockmaker had been destroyed, but now it seems he's back. Unfortunately the Clockmaker, implacable destroyer that he is, may not be the worst enemy that Dreyfus has to face. Because the destruction of habitat Ruskin-Sartorius turns out to be more than the act of revenge it first appears, but rather the first step in an attempt to take over the Glitter Band by the mysterious Aurora, the lone survivor of a long ago attempt to create digitally immortal humans. Dreyfus finds himself standing almost alone between these two superhuman entities, with the lives of millions at stake. His task is made no easier by a traitor in his own organisation, and by the fact that one of his trusted lieutenants is trapped on one of the first habitats taken over by Aurora.

  The Prefect is, as this brief summary might suggest, a book that is almost overloaded with plot, though there are times when Reynolds can't quite get the pacing right, occasional longeurs when he can't kick-start the next piece of action, and a climax that is suddenly rushed. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that it is a book with more technological wonders and epic set pieces than it has characters, it is in the main a gripping action adventure that sits well with the on-going development of this particular future universe.

  Copyright © 2007 Paul Kincaid

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  Death's Head

  David Gunn

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  US edition also received

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  As with any sub-genre, military SF has its clichés. David Gunn's Death's Head ticks off pretty much all of them. Sven Tveskoeg is a rebellious hard man in a légion étrangère on a desert planet. About to be flogged to death, he's saved by the fortuitous attack of humanoid monsters who turn out to be handily telepathic. Since it just so happens he can help them recover a lost chieftain's skull, they don't kill him.

  This is merely the first fortuitous occurrence that ensures an essentially passive hero survives and prospers through a series of loosely-connected events. He's rescued from the monsters; drafted into an elite fighting force; spends time on a prison planet; gets sent on an assassination mission. Then in an abrupt shift that jars even in the absence of a coherent narrative thread, he's defending a besieged city with the requisite raw recruits, hard-bitten mercenaries, ineffectual officers, steely-eyed foes and treachery on all sides.

  This is very much a book of two halves, and for me, it was a no-score draw. Writing in first person present tense is a problematic choice for any author, only really effective when there's genuine doubt as to the central character's fate. That's a lost cause for me when lucky coincidence saves our hero twice inside the first hundred pages. If the supposed urgency of this central narrative voice is intended to engage the reader with Sven's inner character, I simply didn't find he had one. If Sven's two-dimensional, the characterisation of everyone else is paper-thin and yet awkwardly inconsistent in places. I soon found the principle role of women as perfunctory sex objects as tedious as the largely unvarying narrative pace and the by-the-numbers battle scenes. When lives are at stake, I expect to find my emotions properly engaged.

  Every SF and Fantasy writer inevitably draws on predecessors in books, film and TV. That should mean more than lifting characters, gadgets and incidents, barely bothering to file off the serial numbers before bolting them on. I'm simply not entertained by spotting magpie gleanings from Star Wars (original and new), Stargate SG-1 and any number of old WWII movies. When reading future-military SF, I prefer a sense of coherent technology, plausible political systems and actual reasons for warfare in the background.

  On the other hand, of course, clichés used with wit and self-awareness can provide a framework for insightful parody. Unfortunately I'm seeing no such satire here. Sven's black metal prosthetic arm only reminds me how I found the adventures of Bill the Galactic Hero much more entertaining and thought-provoking. There's no exploration of the human condition or broader political debate underpinning this haphazard odyssey in Death's Head.

  Am I demanding too much? Perhaps but that's my prerogative as a reader. I like chewy books with layers of flavour and texture to savour. But there's room in the marketplace for the equivalent of a late-night kebab on the way home from a weekend unwinding session at the pub. If that's what takes your fancy, enjoy.

  Copyright © 2007 Juliet McKenna

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  Lightning Days

  Colin Harvey

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  Imagine Raymond Feist's Riftwars crossed with Stephen Baxter's love of large timescales and you're starting to appreciate the story in Colin Harvey's Lightning Days.

  There's a huge story trying to get out of these pages. A reconnaissance satellite detects an apparent massing of forces in Afghanistan and spy Cassidy is sent in to investigate at short notice. With virtually no preparation time, he takes the only troops available with him—a regiment of freshly trained soldiers, utterly unused to the harsh mountain environment. What they discover are a tribe of Neanderthals, looking for a safe haven to settle after a long journey folding themselves through many different parallel realities. But the Neanderthals’ arrival is the beginning of the end for Cassidy's world...

  Harvey has cherry-picked morsels of genre and carefully blended them together in Days—we experience many different planes of reality; travelling between them is achieved via magical and ritual; and there's espionage, romance and outright adventure thrown in too. The underlying structure is solid and plot developments arrive accompanied by inexorable logic, their combined weight gradually building to the final conclusion.

  There are just two things that let the story down. The first is the blurb on the front page—by giving too much of the story away, you know what's going to happen and the first half of the book takes too long getting to the point. Which is shame because those pages are actually packed with a host of adventures as Cassidy experiences the Neanderthal history first hand.

  Secondly, the passive writing style used undermines the impact of the story. The narrator's voice is distanced from the action and scenes that should have had a fierce emotional kick are delivered too matter of fact. Like when a Neanderthal is tortured and murdered: “Pagoter's death was slower and more agonizing than any torture training Cassidy had ever undergone.” (53) Even taken in context in the narrative, the line delivers no sense of suffering at all.

  You will find good ideas aplenty in Lightning Days, but you can't help but feel that it could have been so much more.

  Copyright © 2007 Sandy Auden

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  Divergence

  Tony Ballantyne

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  Science fiction is particularly adept at asking and answering the big questions. Such philosophical conundrums were once the sole province of religious thinkers. Tony Ballantyne's Recursion introduced readers to a near future where the concept of free will took a good kicking at the hands of The Watcher, an all-powerful AI born in this century that may (or may not) have ended up controlling the fate of all human kind, with the help of the perhaps mythical woman, Eva Rye. He followed Recursion up with Capacity, set in worlds both virtual and ‘atomic', once again examining the Augustinian concept of predestination, or programming as it has become in the parlance of the genre. In that novel, Ballantyne introduced Judy, an employee of The Watcher's ‘Social Care', with a dozen digital duplicates playing over variations on her life in virtual worlds. The stories of Judy and the Watcher conclude in Divergence, which indeed does no less than to ask and answer the biggest questions of all. If Saint Augustine were writing science fiction, we might hope it would come out as entertaining and thought provoking at these books.

  The series is tightly woven, to the point where chapters from Recursion only get followed up in Divergence. Read the books in order, and
don't think of them as stand-alone works. That said, each novel does function in its sort of virtual world, introducing new characters and situations and admirably allowing the reader to make the big connections. As Divergence begins, we meet a group of passengers aboard the spacecraft Eva Rye. When they come upon what may be a robot or a spaceship, they decide to engage in a trade. In order to ensure that they aren't cheated, they engage Fair Exchange (FE) software. What they receive in return is Judy, along with orders to return her to Earth, not a choice destination. Now the passengers are trapped in series of escalating exchanges that will bring them in contact with Von Neumann Machines and things perhaps more deadly.

  Ballantyne's finale to the series is properly recursive and thoroughly entertaining, even as he wrestles with the big philosophical questions about free will and predestination. The author is amazingly adept at setting up seemingly simple situations with complex consequences. Particularly interesting are Ballantyne's notions about capitalism which, when viewed with his science-fictional lens, becomes an insidious sentient computer virus. Though much of the novel is set aboard a spacecraft, the feel here is closer to Philip K. Dick than Peter F. Hamilton. Like Dick, Ballantyne is using science fiction to tread through realms that were once consecrated to religious thought. The results are entertainingly intelligent.

  Copyright © 2007 Rick Kleffel

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  Helix

  Eric Brown

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  In a previous interview in Interzone, Brian Herbert explained that he believed the decline in SF reading was due to the inaccessibility of the genre—that many readers were put off by self-referential jargon. If this is the case, then we have a saviour in Eric Brown. Helix is an uncomplicated SF novel, veering more towards classic space adventure and removing any need for technological jargon despite having a subject which could easily have been converted into a hard SF novel.

  The story itself centres largely around two contrasting groups of entities. The first group are human colonists who have crash landed on an alien world whilst seeking a utopia, after climate change and terrorism have utterly devastated Earth. When they step out into a polar environment, their shock from the crash turns to awe at the sight they behold spiralling high above them—a huge string of land made up of thousands of cylindrical worlds spiralling around a central sun. The revelation of their surroundings sends them on a remarkable journey up the spiral to discover a habitable region to colonise and ultimately the true meaning of the Helix itself.

  The rest of the story is told from the point of view of one of the native alien races on a cloud covered world within the Helix. A religious race, they believe they are an isolated world, alone in the Universe. Any deviation from this belief is punishable in the extreme by their seemingly tyrannical church.

  With such a vivid and heart wrenching depiction of a decaying Earth in the near future, the story moves into a slightly disappointingly predictable arc of humanity seeking salvation and freedom against oppression. Despite this or perhaps because of it, Brown concentrates on stunning landscapes and in the way he conveys the conflicting points of view between races. Flicking between perspectives and keeping the language barriers of each species in place, means that no matter how familiar each character becomes, they continue to appear completely alien when viewed through the opposing set of eyes. Brown has a casual and unpretentious style and although some hard SF fans expecting deep scientific detail could pick holes in the plausibility of much of the story, the accessibility, the tenderness between characters and more importantly the scale of wonder involved are what makes this highly enjoyable escapism.

  Copyright © 2007 Kevin Stone

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  Reaper's Gale

  Steven Erikson

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  With the release of Reaper's Gale, the seventh novel in his Malazan Book of the Fallen series, Steven Erikson takes us away from the Malazan Empire and back to the crumbling empire of Letheras that we were first introduced to in Midnight Tides. The immortal and increasingly insane emperor, Rhulad Sengar, still rules in name, but he has been isolated from his Tiste Edur by the machinations of his human chancellor. Meanwhile, a new secret police force, the Patriotists, roams the streets, brutally crushing dissent.

  Into that unstable situation come the unstoppable Toblakai warrior, Karsa Orlong, and Icarium, the half-Jaghut with no memory of his past and enough power to destroy the world. Rebellion rises in the empire's border colonies; Tehol Beddict steps up his scheme to single-handedly collapse the Letherii economy; and the battered Malazan 14th army arrive on the shores of Letheras, intent on a punitive invasion. Meanwhile, Silchas Ruin, released from millennia of imprisonment at the end of Midnight Tides, searches for the soul of his old enemy, the Tiste Edur ascendant, Scabandari Bloodeye.

  Erikson's novels have fast been redefining the definition of ‘epic'. With stories whose origins reach back hundreds of thousands of years, dozens of intersecting storylines and hundreds of characters, these novels are some of the most ambitious and imaginative works of fantasy of recent years. With every book, the layers have grown more complex, assumptions have been reversed and previous actions re-evaluated.

  Reaper's Gale, along with Midnight Tides, is probably Erikson's most humorous novel. While Erikson has always used understated humour, particularly among his soldiers, the combination of Tehol Beddict and his manservant, Bugg, gives him the platform for genuinely funny exchanges. It is also his most political novel. Letheras is an ultra-capitalist, expansionist empire. The critiques delivered by some of its opponents are devastating, and its fall inevitable.

  Steven Erikson is sometimes seen as a rather unforgiving writer. He rarely reminds the reader of previous events, expecting you to remember them instead; and he never explains character motivations, preferring to demonstrate them through their actions. If all of that makes Reaper's Gale sound dry or hard-going, it isn't. Like all the Malazan novels, this is a book full of assassins, mages, politics, intrigue, humour, intense action, vivid characters and a completely original take on magic. Erikson specialises in weaving plot threads into explosive climaxes, convergences of vast power that leave the participants devastated and the balances of power disrupted.

  If you've never read a Malazan novel before, Reaper's Gale probably isn't the place to start. If you have, you should get this as soon as possible, and re-immerse yourself in one of the most original and engrossing fantasy series of recent times.

  Copyright © 2007 Stephanie Burgis

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  [Back to Table of Contents]

  MANGAZONE—Sarah Ash's Regular Review of Manga

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  Ikki, the swaggering, precocious hero of Air Gear, lives with the four Noyamano sisters. Every day he watches a mysterious girl, Simca, performing gravity-defying stunts on her Air Trecks, the must-have battery-powered roller skates which enable the most gifted users to ‘fly'. Ikki is smitten. But little does he know that in going in pursuit of Simca and a pair of Air Trecks of his own, he will be become a trespasser in the dangerous World of Night. Drawn into a series of increasingly epic race-duels, Ikki is driven to battle to overcome impossible odds to win the coveted badges of this hidden world and seek out the legendary team known as ‘The Sleeping Forest'.

  Air Gear is a dazzlingly exuberant manga by the cheekily-named mangaka Oh!great (we're told that this is how his real name, Ogure Ito, sounds to Western ears). Oh!great is already notorious for the blisteringly violent fights and scantily-clad heroines (not so much ‘panty', as ‘no panty’ shots) in his break-out manga Tenjho Tenge.

  Air Gear is aimed at a young shonen audience, although Del Rey still class it as 16+ and deliver it shrink-wrapped, a sure sign that the publishers think that there's ‘unsuitable content for younger readers’ inside. Odd too, given the 16+ label, that its hero is described as thirteen! So why does
it merit its 16+ label and shrink-wrapping? Fan service; the four sisters are frequently portrayed naked in the bath so that interested readers can check out their pneumatic credentials. But such gratuitous pictures go with the territory these days. More disturbing is the brutal and humiliating punishment meted out to Ikki by a rival gang. When they eventually leave him, half-naked and battered, he picks up his bike to try to ride home, only to see it fall apart. His face crumples and he breaks down in tears. It's a truly moving moment which gains sympathy for the tough, cocksure boy known as ‘Babyface'.

  With colourful and grotesque characters, a likeable hero and bucket-loads of technical Air Treck details to please even the most obsessive fan, Air Gear is uncompromising in its portrayal of gang warfare—and brilliantly, breathtakingly drawn.

  Oh—and there's not only an anime TV series, there's been a live musical version in Tokyo!

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  For all the fanfares that preceded its publication in translation, award-winning Mushishi is as subtle and muted as Air Gear is brash and hyperactive. Yuki Urushibara has also invented a fascinating mythos of her own, rooted in Japanese folklore, yet with a horror-driven science-fictional sensibility. ‘Some live in the deep darkness behind your eyelids. Some eat silence. Some thoughtlessly kill. Some drive you mad. Shortly after life emerged from the primordial ooze, these deadly creatures, mushi, came into terrifying being.'