The trek of the creature that calls itself ‘‘Alone’’ covers a significant portion of the early human occupation of the Ship, followed by tens of additional millennia wandering its interior – and then its backstory proves to include an even longer span. In this beginning is also a kind of end, or at least a glimpse of ultimates, and what has seemed a gradual familiarization of strangeness (at least as familiar as Great Ship matters can be) unravels into a new and even stranger strangeness.
‘‘Alone’’ (which is the last-written story in the collection) also serves to introduce much about the nature and history of the Ship and its human crew. Alone encounters recurring characters: the superb engineer Assleen, captains Washen and Miocene, and the eternally married playboy-tourist Perri. (Spouse Quee Lee is mentioned but does not appear until later, in a story that also explains what a Remora is and what it means to be one.) We also discover that the galaxy (and presumably the entire universe, given the Ship’s age and extragalactic origin) is as full of life as Yeats’ mackerel-crowded seas – for millions of years there has been so much intelligent, star-traveling life that ‘‘the galaxy is laced with powerful, ancient regulations. Ownership of worlds and every fleck of dust are subject to strict, unimpeachable property rights’’ – including well-developed laws of salvage, which explains how the ‘‘baby species’’ of humankind managed to wind up running the Ship.
The humankind that managed to intercept and adapt the Ship might count as babies in the galactic polity (any number of others have been star-traveling for millions of years longer), but they are, from our perspective, post-human, practically immortal, and possessed of enormous intelligence and technological power. Humans are not unique in this: star travel is not for short-timers or entry-level engineers. Thus, Reed peoples his galaxy with upgraded creatures operating starships that tremble on the thin edge of the physically possible. And once you have the nearly indestructible body and expanded mind needed to get into the interstellar-travel club, there are interesting issues. What do immortals of any species do with an open-ended existence? They might take on gigantic engineering or pioneering projects (Aasleen), or travel and shop and socialize (Quee Lee and Perri), or pursue ages-long vendettas (see ‘‘The Caldera of Good Fortune,’’ below).
Or they might just survive outrageous dangers and disasters in the course of being born and growing up, as does the title character of ‘‘Mere’’ (2004). She has one of the more exotic roles in The Well of Stars, and this story of her origins is even stranger: posthumous child of a failed attempt to reach the Ship; born in a half-crippled lifeboat; preserved and parented by a damaged AI; marooned as an infant among the alien Tilas, who first kill her (which proves impossible to do permanently) and then make her a captive god and (long, long later) a subject of study. Her period of exile from human space covers entire cycles of Tila civilization and even planetary disaster. It’s a Stapledonian species history with speaking parts, Last and First Men with a single protagonist.
And that shows part of what Reed seems to be after in these stories: the depiction of immensity in something approaching its actuality. Some features of the universe are too big to be experienced directly – let alone worked on or with – by mere mortals. Thus the tough, repairable bodies and upgraded minds of the various star-traveling species, which allow individual and social agendas and projects that can approach the scale of the galactic environment. Yet some of those agendas and projects remain recognizable to us, even if they can be made to extend and expand to match the lifespans and powers of immortals. There are stories of escape, abandonment, sibling rivalry, cross-species cooperation, and pursuits of revenge that can last longer than civilizations.
‘‘Hoop-of-Benzene’’ (2006) offers a manageable-scale introduction to life on the Ship, as junior captain Washen navigates the complexities of alien psychology and Ship politics. The status-and-tradition-bound harum-scarums, with their elaborate levels of insult, domination, and submission, are a creation worthy of Jack Vance, and the intricacies of the human crew hierarchy are hardly less tangled and difficult.
‘‘The Caldera of Good Fortune’’ (2007) has a more typical range of brain-stretching effects. It is a tale of an implacable long-term revenge that pursues its object to the Ship, with a setting that examines the variety of ways that life finds to exploit the range of environments. The revenge drama is played out in the Shipboard realm of the mote-like, collectively intelligent Luckies (civilized ‘‘when Earth was ruled by single-celled life’’), modeled on their volcanically hyperactive home. Their cavern has been designed to faithfully reproduce not only the periodic cataclysms of their original world, but also a ceiling skyscape ‘‘managed by an army of dedicated AIs’’ and so minutely detailed that the virtual sky includes not only a virtual moon but virtual cities on that moon, inhabited by virtual citizens, along with some virtualized real beings who appeal to the Luckies to live ‘‘up’’ there.
Every city on the visible hemisphere was real…. Each city had its population, and every citizen had a name and address and life and loves…. And that was why the Luckies could demand fortunes from those souls who were desperate enough or odd enough to have themselves killed: Killed so those strange mite-sized creatures could tear their minds apart, revealing every memory, every cherished secret, and then slather whatever they learned to the plaster on their busy ceiling.
Not to take anything away from the intricate chase-and-escape, feint-and-parry plot machineries of the foreground story, but it was the Luckies, their evolutionary history, and their old and new homes that I remembered most clearly when it came time to draft this piece.
‘‘Rococo’’ (2006) combines sibling rivalry of a kind (engineered by parents as long-distance revenge and punishment) with alien design and psychology (the Scyphas, which are one ‘‘lineage’’ of the not-a-species kind). Aasleen the consummate engineer is sent on an assassin’s mission, to deal with her more-than-estranged brother Rococo, who in turn is involved with the Scyphas’ competition with evolutionary rivals in their home system. Again, the long-term backstory of alien life-forms and environments is as compelling as Aasleen’s pursuit of her brother across the light-years. The description of the Scyphas’ natal world, Chaos, belongs to a long tradition of planetological writing that includes Poul Anderson and Paul McAuley: the poetry of geological and solar-system forces that shape worlds and thus the life that arises on them.
That poetry of physical forces and processes and million-or billion-year vistas and especially the endless, dizzying variety of life is the strong force that binds the imaginative universe of the Ship.
Drips and sacks of alien fluid walk on bony legs, or they have jointed exoskeletons, or they make do with mobile roots or perfumed trails of slime…. Liquid water is a necessity, or liquid methane, or molten sulfur, or ammonium hydroxide, or perchlorate, or silicone, or a different flavor of silicone, or gases compressed to high densities. Yet there are biologies that have no use for fluids. They can be machines or entities indistinguishable from machines, and there are species that don’t pretend to belong to one camp or the other – cyborgs born from old traditions or difficult environments, or perhaps recent marriages between unlikely, loving mates.
There is nowhere near enough space here to unpack all the marvels, delights, surprises, trapdoors, cross-connections, and imaginative free-falls contained in this volume. The last two stories, ‘‘The Man With the Golden Balloon’’ (2008) and ‘‘Hatch’’ (2007) address matters of origins and the Ship’s fate that should remain behind the Spoiler Curtain (even for those who have read Marrow and The Well of Stars), but they do what I would have thought hardly possible – they open the story space out even farther. Robert Reed has never been shy about taking on immensity, and these stories give even his scarily cosmic Sister Alice sequence some serious competition in the head-exploding sweepstakes.
–Russell Letson
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LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: ADRI
ENNE MARTINI
Beautiful Wreck, Larissa Brown (Cooperative Press 978-193751331-3, $14.99, 460pp, tp) February 2014.
Heirs of Grace, Tim Pratt (47North 978-1477823644, $14.95, 284pp, tp) June 2014. Cover by Galen Dara.
Koko Takes a Holiday, Kieran Shea (Titan Books 978-1-7811-686-08, $14.95, 336pp, pb) June 2014.
California Bones, Greg van Eekhout (Tor 978-0-7653-2855-7, $24.99, 304pp, hc) June 2014.
Rogues, George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois, eds. (Bantam 978-03-455-3726-3, $30.00, 83pp, hc) June 2014.
In the 22nd-century Iceland of Larissa Brown’s Beautiful Wreck, most Icelanders are trying to escape their daily lives, which doesn’t sound all that different from the developed parts of the world in the 21st century, come to think of it. Larissa Brown’s Icelanders, however, escape through either living history projects where they live in the real world as a Viking or a Ninja, or through simulated worlds where they immerse themselves into a virtual reality.
That’s where our hero comes in. Jen is a designer of these virtual worlds and Brown opens on her visit to an unreal Atlantic City cage match, where the air smells of stale beer and ‘‘the language [around her is] punctuated with jabs and dramatic eyebrows.’’ Jen drifts through her days as many in their 20s have, searching for the person or work or situation that makes her feel of use.
And then she is sent, Outlander style, into 10th-century Iceland, where she is rescued and adopted, sort of, by a Viking village. Here she falls in love with the cursed chief Heirik and, eventually, finds herself in the right place at the right time with the right level of anger and courage.
That doesn’t really need a spoiler alert, by the way. Beautiful Wreck trades on a relatively familiar plot where the girl loves the boy, obstacles occur, but you know that it will all work out in the end even when it looks like it really, really won’t. Like Outlander, that romance is the heart, no pun intended, of the story. What is less predictable is how engrossing the story is despite that. Brown has built a Viking village that seems both true and peopled by actual people. That – plus her strong voice – is where this work shines.
Tim Pratt’s writing just keeps getting better and better. In Heirs of Grace, his voice feels dialed in. The writing is tight and sassy without wasting one word – and he makes it seem easy.
Of course, it helps that his protagonist, Bekah, a fresh college graduate/visual artist who has been willed a house by an unknown relation in North Carolina, is her own smart force to be reckoned with. Even when stuff in the house gets weird – self-healing doors are only the beginning of the strange – Bekah is cool but not frozen. She is an active (and smart-assed) agent in her own story, which is a refreshing change.
All of the characters are drawn as finely, too, from Bekah’s best friend Charlie to her potential love interest Trey to the antagonist Firstborn, who starts the book as an evil cartoon but blooms into something much more interesting.
Heirs of Grace does more, however, than tell a story about a woman discovering who she is while she negotiates with fantasy elements; it also gets meta about being a book as well as taking on the nature and purpose of art. ‘‘But taking something that exists only in the mind and turning it into something other people can see, can touch, can take in and be changed by – that’s always felt like the greatest possible magic to me,’’ Bekah says. She’s talking about her paintings, but the idea applies to nearly any creative endeavor. And Heirs of Grace performs this magic well.
•
Kieran Shea’s debut science fiction novel Koko Takes a Holiday is almost a really great ride.
The set-up is top-notch: Koko, a former mercenary turned brothel manager, justifiably shoots a couple of patrons and is forced to flee the Sixty Islands, which are where the monied and violent vacation. Koko runs skyward and finds herself on the Alaungpaya, an orbiting barge/city. Here she runs into Flynn, a freshly retired cop who is hours away from suicide, and is pursued by savage assassins sent by her former boss Delacompte.
In the win column is the fact that Shea has created an intriguing, 400-years in the future world that is gritty and violent, yet totally grounded. He breaks up the nonstop action with snippets of ads that give even more texture to his background, Koko and Flynn seem well drawn enough to work, and Shea’s chapter titles, like ‘‘Oh Fucking Come on Already’’, give a great edge to his voice.
There are two issues that keep Koko from being the ride it wants to be. First, Delacompte is so over-the-top-capital-E evil that she chews up most of the scenery before we can enjoy it. Second, the book is uneven. Snappy chapters butt up against flabby ones and cause the plot to lurch.
Still, Shea’s almost there and it’ll be interesting to see how he develops in the already announced sequel Koko the Mighty.
•
Imagine a California where osteomancers can absorb the magic they consume via the bones and, sometimes, flesh of other magic users. This leap is a smaller one if you’ve already read Greg van Eekhout’s ‘‘The Osteomancer’s Son’’, but it’s not a hard one even if California Bones is your first trip into this world; van Eekhout is a very good writer who knows just how much to reveal as the story revs its engines.
We open on our hero, Daniel Blackland, as a boy being shown the ways of consumption by his osteomanic father. Dad is killed and eaten in fairly short order and Daniel is scattered to the winds. When we check back in with him as an adult, he’s a rogue who works the public markets of Southern California – and he’s about to find himself and his crew pulling an Ocean’s Eleven-style caper. There are other forces at work, too, and it becomes challenging to pick sides, which is a feature, not a bug.
Van Eekhout has honed his voice from his debut adult novel, Norse Code, which was strongly written if not smoothly paced. Here he showcases his wit and humanity as well as his knack for character, and he works the magic that the best writers can: the story feels alive just a few pages in.
But what pushes this tale from fun to fantastic is how van Eekhout isn’t content with a simple coming of age story. He pushes his hero further than he has to. Blackland finds himself up against his father’s inheritance in ways that most protagonists never need to – and to tell more would be too spoilery. Blackland’s discovery of this dubious gift, however, transforms California Bones from a really good fantasy heist story into something with a little more meat on its bones, which you can greedily consume in several tasty bites. Even though Bones stands alone for the most part, there are two more meals in the series on their way.
•
George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois have struck gold again with their anthology Rogues, which, like Dangerous Women and Warriors before it, takes a very deep dive into a relatively narrow topic and comes back with mostly great stories that slice through the restrictions of genre. While a couple of stories don’t quite hit the mark, the bulk of the tales more than make up for those few well-intentioned clunkers.
There’s a little something in Rogues for most readers, genre fans or no. Take, say, stories based in Texas, like Joe Lansdale’s ‘‘Bent Twig’’ or Bradley Denton’s ‘‘Bad Brass’’. Both are fairly straightforward short fiction that grittily blend landscape with character study. Or a story that lets a well-known writer play with the mechanics of telling a story, like Paul Cornell’s ‘‘A Better Way to Die’’. Or stories from Connie Willis (‘‘Now Showing’’) and Lisa Tuttle (‘‘The Curious Affair of the Dead Wives’’) which couldn’t be more different in voice or more alike in loveliness. Or stories that make it clear rogues can also cross gender, like Gillian Flynn’s ‘‘What Do You Do?’’, which deftly skips from earthy humor about a particular sex act to gothic horror, and back again (and again.) Or in the standout Scott Lynch story, ‘‘A Year and a Day in Old Theradane’’, in which a female rogue gets pulled back into the game just one more time.
Where the real genius of this anthology lies is in how it lets really great writers revisit some of their most loved characters or universes, but without
having to manage the pressure of a full-blown novel. Many will buy this anthology simply for another sliver of Westeros from Martin in ‘‘The Rogue Prince, or, the King’s Brother’’. Here Martin fleshes out more of the Targaryen line in perfectly fine fashion. Patrick Rothfuss’ ‘‘The Lightning Tree’’, Michael Swanwick’s ‘‘Tawny Petticoats’’, and Walter Jon Williams’ ‘‘Diamonds From Tequila’’ are like beautiful postcards from their respective worlds that any fan of the author’s work will enjoy. And, of course, there is the oft-hinted-about-but-never-seen ‘‘How the Marquis Got His Coat Back’’ by Neil Gaiman, which returns to the world of Neverwhere with a deceptively simple story well told.
–Adrienne Martini
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US FORTHCOMING BOOKS SELECTED BY AUTHOR
The following list includes current or past books we haven’t seen, plus upcoming releases. Hardcover and trade paperback books are so noted. If there is no indication, books are mass market paperbacks or we’re not sure.
There are two lists; the first, selected titles, all originals, is arranged alphabetically by author. This listing includes simultaneous UK & US publications and 1st US editions. The second listing is complete, arranged by publisher and by month. We are no longer listing stock reissues unless there is some indication (such as a price or cover change) the book will actually have a new printing.
This listing contains about 1,800 titles, approximately 1,250 of them originals.
We try to keep our database as accurate and up-to-date as possible. Please send corrections and updates to Carolyn Cushman, c/o Locus.
The list is tentative and subject to change, especially in later months. Unless otherwise noted, books are originals. (r) is reprint, (h) horror, (ya) young adult, (nf) non-fiction, (c) collection, (a) associational, (na) novella, (nv) novelette, (ss) short story, (om) omnibus, (tp) trade paperback, (eb) eb, (gn) graphic novel, (x) media tie-in, (ph) pamphlet.
Locus, June 2014 Page 11