The New York Review of Science Fiction Issue 310, June, 2014

by Kevin J Maroney

  Moorcock’s collection of the shorter Cornelius stories is titled The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius: Stories of the Comic Apocalypse, and in the Introduction he tells us explicitly what haunted him in history, “Until recently I always claimed that I had enjoyed the Second World War.... Yet it now seems I was successfully repressing the emotions generated by those associations.” Later, he says:

  Jerry’s a pretty light-hearted existentialist. He once claimed to be too shallow to hold on to his miseries for very long. I think he also said somewhere (or I might have said it for him) that it isn’t especially important if all we’re doing is dancing forever on the edge of the abyss. It’s scarcely worth worrying about. The really important thing, of course, is the dance itself and how we dance it. (vi)

  To quote M. John Harrison, Jerry Cornelius is “not so much a character ... as a technique.”

  For Caleb Carr, the intricate dance to the haunting music out of history includes the more personal cast of his father’s saga as a member of the New York Beats. I came across a beautiful account of this savage incident involving Caleb Carr’s father, Lucien, just as I was absorbed in his son’s richly resonant story of an earlier New York City. The elder Carr was convicted of second-degree murder, a story well told by David Krajicek in the alumni magazine for Columbia University. The reporter tells how Lucien Carr survived the horror of the event of killing a man and of serving two years in prison to become an important news analyst for United Press International and a family man. The younger Carr, then, has gone on to become a military historian and a fine fictionist. Not all the steam power in history burns. Some soothes if, as Moorcock says, the dance is learned well.

  A characteristic of steampunk is its energy and youth of narration, even as the genre from which it emerged has become old and burdened. Stevie Taggert, an even younger hip “spy” than Jerry Cornelius, narrates The Angel of Darkness as a kind of storytelling competition, squaring off against his friend, John Schuyler Moore, a hard-drinking New York journalist. Moore narrated the earlier novel The Alienist, and Stevie can never resist the chance to get in a dig at Moore, asserting that his storytelling skill is the better of the two. Both novels are outstanding, but the sequel told by Stevie wins the evolutionary battle in my mind. Stevie is entrepreneurial and nimble. As Jerry Cornelius rides the war-filled twentieth century, Taggert manipulates his own narrative of murder and mystery in New York City and upstate New York during the “Pax Brittanica”—though the resonance stretches into our century. Stevie is just thirteen at the time of the story he tells. His birth year of 1884 is the same as that of Eleanor Roosevelt, and his movements and instinctive choices are peace-making like hers. But he is a fierce warrior activist too and aspires to be fully a member of the Merry Band of investigators led by Dr. Kreizler, the “alienist” or forensic child psychiatrist. Stevie’s chosen role and the intricate dance he performs in that role go far beyond crime detection and spycraft. In fact, his prime role, like that of Cornelius, is storyteller and veritable muse dancing “on the edge of the abyss.” What is remarkable is Carr’s nimble use of voice and of tone and his clever collapsing of real history into the storytelling.

  Outside the fiction and outside the legal and moral issues in Stevie’s story, the big issue for America here (and for genre literature) is, again, empire. In both Alienist novels, Carr shows his admiration (and the admiration of his characters) for Theodore Roosevelt. The Spanish-American War frames the action in Stevie’s story, representing both the end of Spanish empire and the start of the American.

  Carr moved along the edges of genre in his earlier novels, blending mystery, historical, and technological materials before moving into fantasy with The Legend of Broken (2012). In his acknowledgement, Carr says that he put its first scenes on paper in 1984. It is a massive and masterful work, fated never to be a quick or popular read. It is the final “military historian” fiction on war. The writing is elegant and eloquent. Here is one of the descriptions of the problem of war itself, the problem of empire and territoriality:

  ... Arnem can further see that the coming fight, during which his men must try to fend off and then retreat ... is indeed reminiscent (as Akillus attempted to express) of some diseased, maddened beast that gnaws at its own flesh, torturously destroying and consuming itself from its tail and feet forward and upward with burning mind and slashing teeth, for reasons that the agonized creature itself does not understand. (285)

  Carr’s approaches to this beast are multi-faceted and intense. Part of it is scholarly, “steampunk,” self-conscious and referential. Like Asimov, he bridges back to the Roman Empire and to ancient wars—ancestral wars. The notes to the tale are massive, even encyclopedic, so that one reads the book like fighting a war in moving back and forth from the front to the back. The basic story frame is a lost document shared by Edmund Burke with Edward Gibbon and now found and translated for us. Many of the notes are pure Gibbon from the Decline and Fall, most of them fictional emulation by Carr himself as literary and military historian. This extends Asimov’s technique of the false encyclopedia a long step forward. Many of the notes are by Carr himself, signed “CC.” The urgency in the complex tale is such that present tense prevails most of the time. I cannot begin to unpack or paraphrase the tale itself except to say that it captures and attacks war, empire, and disease on a vast stage that stretches from Rome to our own Enlightenment to this warlike and beastly moment in time. Critics may argue whether this upstart son of the mid-century Beats in America is doing science fiction or not. But with this masterful work that he has nursed for three decades to its recent publication, he is surely working in the Coleridge tradition of writing of our ancestral, and prophesied, war.

  Donald M. Hassler lives in Kent, Ohio.

  Works Cited

  Bradbury, Ray. “Introduction.” In The Best of Henry Kuttner. New York: Ballantine, 1975.

  Carr, Caleb. The Angel of Darkness. New York: Random House, 1997.

  ——. The Legend of Broken. New York: Random House, 2012.

  Crain, Caleb. “Four Legs Good: The Life of Jack London.” The New Yorker, October 28, 2013.

  George, David R. Star Trek Typhon Pact: Raise the Dawn. New York: Pocket Books, 2012.

  Hassler, Donald M. “The Relation of Story to Idea: The Vines of Nancy Kress and Other SF Women.” The Yearbook of English Studies 37:2 (July 2007).

  ——. “The Space Merchants.” In Political Science Fiction, D. Hassler and C. Wilcox, eds. Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 1995.

  Heinlein, Robert A. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1965). New York: Tor Books, 1997.

  Krajicek, David J. “The Last Beat.” Columbia Magazine, Winter 2012–13.

  Kuttner, Henry. “Cold War” (1949). In The Best of Henry Kuttner. New York: Ballantine, 1975.

  Moorcock, Michael. “Introduction.” The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius: Stories of the Comic Apocalypse. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows Press, 2003.

  Rich, Mark. C.M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland Press, 2010.

  Richter, Virginia. Literature after Darwin: Human Beasts in Western Fiction, 1859-1939. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. J. Bristow, ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

  Seed, David. Under the Shadow: The Atomic Bomb and Cold War Narratives. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2013.

  Westfahl, Gary. “Space Opera.” In The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, E. James and F. Mendlesohn, eds. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

  Photos from California, May 2014

  Liz Argall and her astonishing Hamlet pants, at the Nebulas, May 2014

  The Nebula winners & acceptors flanking SFWA Grand Master Samuel R. Delany, at the Nebula Awards ceremony, May, 2014

  Three eras of awesome: Terry Bisson, Daryl Gregory & Samuel R. Delany, SF in SF event, May 2014

  Trina Robbins, showing off her latest book, Pretty in Ink, at the Big Wow ComicFe
st, San Jose, May 2014

  Helen Pilinovsky and Veronica Schanoes, at the Nebulas, May 2014

  Sunil Patel, Anne Leonard, Sofia Samatar, Nalo Hopkinson & Emily Jiang on the “Increasing Diversity in Writing” panel,

  at the Nebula Awards gathering, May 2014

  Editorial

  The Hidden Text

  Well, we did get the May issue out on time, and then promptly followed it with this, the latest issue so far. This failure is completely down to me; I had several opportunities to get the issue done in a timely manner and, overwhelmed by circumstances or just inertia I allowed it to fall to the side.

  Next issue is going to be a close call; July has always been a very difficult month for us. One weekend is absorbed by Independence Day; then another by Readercon, which almost everyone on staff is attending. I myself am not, because the Monday immediately following Readercon is my departure day for a week-long vacation in Detroit. The three of us will first visit Bernadette’s family in Ann Arbor, and then we are delighted to be, as a family, the fannish co-Guests of Honor for DetCon1, the 2014 NASFiC. I hope that we will see many of you there; it looks like great fun.

  Anyway, so I’m going work very hard the last week of July to get issue 311 out before the end of the month. We have a lot of great material queued up--though we’re always hungry for more, so keep those articles rolling in.

  So. On the principal of “this is my editorial and I get to talk about what’s bouncing around in my mind,” I’m going to talk about historical criticism of the gospels. For reasons that are still not completely clear to me, about 15 years ago I developed an interest in the composition of the Bible, particularly in the composition of the canonical Gospels. I was raised Catholic, but this aspect of church history was never part of my instruction.

  (For the sake of clarity, when I just say “the gospels,” I mean the four canonical gospels that almost every modern Christian denomination accepts—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.)

  The gospels fall into two broad categories—John and all of the rest, the Synoptics (from the Greek “seen together”). Even a casual reading of the Synoptics reveals that they have a lot of text in common with each other, often verbatim or nearly so, while the content of John is very different. From the evidence of these similarities, scholars in the early-to-mid-nineteenth century developed a hypothesis that these three gospels were primarily drawn from two sources. One of the sources was the Gospel of Mark itself, either as it is known now or a very similar version; the other was a document that came to be called “Q” or even “The Q Gospel.” Q comprises the material common to Matthew and Luke that is not found in Mark. Matthew and Luke also each contain some material not in any other source, most notably the completely non-overlapping birth narratives. Mark is a very narrative work; Q, in contrast, largely consists of sayings, short speeches, and a handful of anecdotes; it’s often called a “sayings gospel” (or logia), distinct from the gospel narrative of Mark. The Two-Source Hypothesis posits that the authors of Matthew and Luke, working independently took these two main documents, rewrote them together, and added other stories and teachings to form what they each expected to be the definitive treatments of the life and teaching of Jesus the Galilean. Meanwhile (or much later, depending on who you agree with), the author of John wrote down a completely separate work—a distinct narrative gospel, itself incorporating long digressive prayers and speeches that seem copied from various sources.

  Now, here’s where things get (to my eye) really cool. When Weisse, Schleiermacher, Holtzmann and the others settled on the Two-Source Hypothesis in the 1820s through the 1860s, they were completely fabricating the idea of a sayings gospel. Working the word “logia” in a few early writings, they described something unlike any other early Christian work that was known to actually exist. And then in 1897, one turned up. The Gospel of Thomas, the shining spark of the archeological discovery known as the Nag Hammadi library, matches the sayings gospel form of Q fairly closely. The description of Q was a prediction that other logia existed at the birth of Christianity, and the finding of Thomas in a trash heap in Egypt fulfilled that prediction like a prophet.

  Foremost among the features of a good explanation is that it is applicable outside of its immediate circumstances. This is true regardless of the subject matter, and the pleasure of seeing the puzzle pieces fall into place is one of the great joys of study.

  —Kevin J. Maroney

  and the editors