Locus, May 2013
Page 13
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Aliette de Bodard’s ‘‘The Weight of a Blessing’’ (Clarkesworld, March) tells of a mother’s last visits with her daughter, who is being exiled. The point of the story is the slow revelation of the reason for this exile. The mother is a refugee from a planet torn by civil war. Her culture was trampled, in essence, and she’s made a life on her new planet, married and divorced a local man, tried to fit in. But her daughter has rejected all this and embraced a culture she never knew, and has protested the way the dominant culture of her new planet has, in essence, rewritten history. All this reads to me as a fairly straightforward allegory of Vietnam/US relations, post war. It’s well done and challenging, but despite the offworld setting and some technology that allows speaking with a version of dead ancestors, I wasn’t excited, science-fictionally. Still, one can’t deny its engagement with important contemporary issues.
Likewise, Genevieve Valentine’s ‘‘86, 87, 88, 89’’ is passionately engaged. The story is told by a member of a team working on recovery and classification of the remains of a New York neighborhood destroyed because of terrorist activity. As the story unfolds we realize that it was not an outside act of terror, but rather government reaction to suspected (and, we assume, trumped-up) anti-government activity or sentiment by some residents. The mission of the recovery team also seems (at least to readers) suspect. Are they here to understand what happened and preserve history, or to help hide what really happened? Solid work, perhaps told a bit too elliptically for my taste (in this case), and for me just a bit unconvincing, in a way that slightly blunts its impact. A.C. Wise’s ‘‘The Last Survivor of the Great Sexbot Revolution’’ is a bit different, and for me more successful in pure SF terms, telling of a meeting with an old woman who has perhaps the last remaining sexbot, an encounter through which we learn the broader history of sexbots (they gain consciousness, and not surprisingly decide they aren’t happy about being exploited for sex) and hear her moving personal story, all quite beautifully written, as we should expect from Wise.
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Both March 7 stories at Beneath Ceaseless Skies are fine work. ‘‘A Family for Drakes’’, by Margaret Ronald, follows Netta, a girl in a group of refugees menaced by magical drakes conjured for Lord Tasso. Netta and her cousin have been ostracized because of her violent reaction to an attempt to take advantage of her, so they end up companions to another isolated man, whom she soon realizes is the magician responsible for the drakes. Netta’s cousin has a family to aspire to reach – but Netta may have to find family in a different way. It’s dark-toned and clearly part of a larger work (BCS has featured a number of Ronald’s stories set in the same world). A.B. Treadwell’s ‘‘Bakemono, or The Thing That Changes’’ tells of a boy torn between his parents’ different ambitions: his mother is a high born lady of Edo, his father a soldier leading the Japanese Emperor’s efforts to put down rebellion in Russia. But it is his time in school with a horribly mistreated girl of the subjugated natives of the Russian steppes that eventually forces him to become ‘‘the thing that changes,’’ and, it seems, a creature of neither parent.
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The lead story in the April-May Asimov’s is a novella from Neal Asher, ‘‘The Other Gun’’. Tuppence is in some form indentured to his ‘‘Client,’’ and, along with a human named Harriet who has changed herself into a Troodon, he searches for parts of a ‘‘farcaster,’’ dangerous tech hidden at the end of a long-past war against the Prador. This story follows Tuppence and Harriet as they attempt to retrieve a couple of potential farcaster components, reacting to predictable treachery with predictable violence, as we learn a bit more of the backstory behind Tuppence, Harriet, and the Client. Solid adventure SF, as we expect from Asher, with his weaknesses (a certain clunkiness of prose most notably) and his strengths (a darkly wild SFnal imagination) both on display.
At shorter lengths, a couple of overtly political yet still effective stories impress. Linda Nagata’s ‘‘Through Your Eyes’’ shows us a privileged young man accidentally caught up in an anti-war demonstration that is violently suppressed, who gets an unexpected demonstration of the misuse of power. Where’s the SFnal element? It’s a bit thin: he’s wired so that his girlfriend can be remotely with him through it all. Better, or at least better in SFnal terms, is Karl Bunker’s ‘‘Gray Wings’’, about a woman altered to be able to fly, who crashes in Africa during a race, and is forced to confront (perhaps in a bit of a cliché) how the poor live. So, it’s a bit pat, but quite true seeming anyway.
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F&SF’s May-June issue is dominated by Robert Reed’s novella ‘‘Grizzled Veterans of Many and Much’’, a characteristically intelligent extended look at the consequences of a future technology. Bradley is the grandson of one of the first people to ‘‘Transcend,’’ a process that results in living decades in a few days, but with greatly enhanced intelligence. Through Bradley’s eyes, we witness the advances gifted the planet by the Transcended, and the way the increasing rate of Transcendence alters the human population. Reed’s main interest here is this broader story, but he doesn’t scant Bradley’s personal story – scion of a rich and mostly spoiled family, at the center of this profound change, and eventually driven to an odd application of it.
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The two science fiction originals at Lightspeed in April are both decidedly dark takes on familiar themes. Desirina Boskovich tells of a mysterious box with strange powers in ‘‘Deus Ex Arca’’. A boy discovers the box one day and picks it up, to no effect, but when other people touch the box strange things happen, usually to the person who touched it. This ends up changing the boy’s life, and that of his family, and ultimately the rest of the world, in quite unpleasant but sadly believable ways. The trope Hugh Howey takes on in ‘‘Deep Blood Kettle’’ is alien invasion, as the Earth awaits the coming of aliens who have aimed an asteroid at us, and offered to divert it in exchange for half the planet. What will we decide? Acquiesce to threats? Fight back? Negotiate? The story’s view of humanity is pretty dark, and the title image illustrates it well. Both these pieces are pretty uncompromising. I confess, for all that, I was a bit disappointed, partly because neither author can really see their way clear to a solution, which may be the point of each story.
My favorite piece this month is Karin Tidbeck’s ‘‘A Fine Show on the Abyssal Plain’’, which is wry, wry, wry. Stated baldly, a woman joins a group of players after watching a play, and their performances end up at the bottom of the ocean. Of course, that tells you nothing; the story considers the relationship of the artist to the audience, interestingly enough, but it lives on its voice.
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A decade ago Small Beer Press published the Argentine writer Angélica Gorodischer’s lovely mosaic novel Kalpa Imperial, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin. Now they give us another linked collection from Gorodischer, Trafalgar, this time translated by Amalia Gladhart. The stories are all about a merchant named Trafalgar Medrano, who has a spaceship he calls the Clunker, and who travels all around the Galaxy buying and selling things, and more importantly, encountering strange planets and stranger societies.
There is a sort of club story feeling to the tales – almost a resemblance to Dunsany’s Jorkens – and there is also a hint of Le Guin in the ethnography. The book is enjoyable throughout – Trafalgar’s voice is absorbing, and so is that of the narrator (who may or may not be the same person throughout) – and the societies Trafalgar encounters are interesting and wittily presented. My favorite was probably ‘‘Trafalgar and Josefina’’, a tale told to the narrator through her somewhat eccentric old Aunt Josefina, very very funny in its framing (that is, in Josefina’s comments on the story) and turning darker as we learn of Trafalgar’s visit to a planet with a very strict caste system, ruled by a randomly chosen person of a lower caste, who makes the mistake of falling for a married woman. (It’s worth noting that stories from this volume have been featured in the May-June F&SF, and the March Lightspeed.)
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Le Guin translates 24 of Sasarman’s original 36 stories: they are clever, often elliptically political, and often delightfully imagined. It’s best probably to read them all. Were I to pick a favorite I’d go for ‘‘Sah-Hara’’, about a city discovered in the desert after much difficulty by Lord Knowshire, and about his journey to its center.
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Finally, I should mention another book from Aqueduct, a new collection of stories by Richard Bowes: The Queen, the Cambion, and Seven Others collects a set of recent pieces told in the mode of fairy tales. These are fine stories – I’ve mentioned some of the previously published ones already in this space – and the one new story, ‘‘The Lady of Wands’’, is solid as well,about detection and politics in Faerie, as the title character investigates the murder of a mortal, which might lead to secrets about past treachery at the highest levels of Faerie politics.
Recommended Stories:
‘‘Gray Wings’’, Karl Bunker (Asimov’s 4-5/13)
‘‘Trafalgar and Josefina’’, Angélica Gorodischer (Trafalgar)
‘‘Painted Birds and Shivered Bones’’, Kat Howard (Subterranean Spring ’13)
‘‘Grizzled Veterans of Many and Much’’, Robert Reed (F&SF 5-6/13)
‘‘Sah-Hara’’, Georghe Sasarman (Squaring the Circle)
‘‘The Indelible Dark’’, William Browning Spencer, (Subterranean Spring ’13)
‘‘A Fine Show on the Abyssal Plain’’, Karin Tidbeck (Lightspeed 4/13)
‘‘Bakemono, or, The Thing ThatChanges’’, A.B. Treadwell(Beneath Ceaseless Skies 3/7/13)
‘‘The Last Survivor of the Great Sexbot Revolution’’, A.C. Wise (Clarkesworld 3/13)
–Rich Horton
Semiprofessional magazines, fiction fanzines, original collections, original anthologies, plus new stories in outside sources should be sent to Rich Horton, 653 Yeddo Ave., Webster Groves MO 63119,
Return to In This Issue listing.
LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: GARY K. WOLFE
London Falling, Paul Cornell (Tor UK 978-0230763210, £12.99, 400pp, tp) December 2012. (Tor 978-0765330277, $24.99, 416pp, hc) April 2013.
Martian Sands, Lavie Tidhar (PS 978-1-848635-98-2, £11.99, 213pp, hc) April 2013. [Order from PS Publishing, Grosvenor House, 1 New Road, Hornsea, East Yorkshire HU18 1PG, England;
Squaring the Circle: A Pseudotreatise of Urbogony, Georghe Sasarman, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin (Aqueduct 978-1-61976-025-7, $16.00, 126pp, tp) May 2013. [Order from Aqueduct Press, PO Box 95787, Seattle WA 98145-2787;
Spin, Nina Allan (TTA Press 978-0-9553683-6-3, £6.00, 96pp, tp) March 2013. [Order from TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, UK;
There’s a lot of respectable thriller DNA in Paul Cornell’s first urban fantasy novel London Falling. From one perspective, it’s simply an account of the worst football fan in the world. From another, it joins the great game of Hidden London novels, which has seen recent entries from writers as diverse as Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, Dan Simmons, and Ben Aaronovitch; and from yet another it’s a well-researched police procedural with a gritty and convincing sense of setting. From still another, it invokes the venerable tradition of Second Sight – the capacity to see supernatural manifestations invisible to most of us (and sometimes to foresee the future), which we can trace all the way from Homer to Haley Joel Osment. Perhaps most important, at least in terms of the possible sequels that are clearly prepped in the end, is Cornell’s not-too-unlikely band of heroes – four metropolitan cops who, without aid of supernatural powers themselves, must face down seemingly all-powerful demonic forces. The most famous template for this is probably what Dracula critics have taken to calling that novel’s Crew of Light – a term equally apt for London Falling – and Cornell even provides a kind of analogue of Mina Harker in his formerly victimized female team member, but most modern readers are more likely to be reminded of Buffy’s Scoobie Gang. In other words, Cornell is pushing a lot of classic buttons here, and he knows it. While it’s easy to see novels like this as derivative, the traditions they invoke are so well established that they might more productively be seen as explorations of and variations on a particular form.
The novel lays out its police procedural street cred up front, beginning with undercover cops infiltrating the gang of a powerful drug lord named Toshack, who has somehow taken over most of London with the aid of some shadowy, unnamed assistants that even his gang members have never seen. It starts getting a little odd as he leads the gang from one empty house to another, looking for something, but gets odder fast, after Toshack is taken into custody and, just as he begins a promised confession, explodes in a torrent of blood in the interrogation room. With little to go on, Detective Inspector Quill, aided by a brilliant intelligence analyst named Lisa Ross and two of the undercover cops, Costain and Sefton, start investigating Toshack’s background, and discover his connection with a legend that anyone scoring a hat trick against the West Ham football team gets gruesomely murdered – but the legend goes back decades before Toshack could have been involved, and eventually leads them to the aforementioned football fan from Hell, a woman named Mora Losley, who we eventually learn has a history far deeper and more ominous than Toshack’s. As the team begins to zero in on Losley, encountering ever-more-bizarre experiences, such as houses that seem to fold in on themselves (this sort of ‘‘folding’’ also figures in Cornell’s series of Jonathan Hamilton steampunkish SF stories), they come in contact with a kind of magical substance that may be the source of Mora’s power, and become gifted with the aforementioned Second Sight, enabling them to see ghosts, demons, even a ghostly bus, that are invisible to just about anyone else. (In case you’re worried this is a spoiler, the book’s cover blares ONLY THEY CAN SEE THE EVIL). London becomes a lot more interesting, and Cornell makes the most of this new oneiric city, at times coming up with impressive setpieces worthy of King or Straub in their most pyrotechnic mode.
But London Falling, at its center, is not really a horror novel, despite such delicious touches as a mental trick that can cause parents of kidnapped children to forget they ever had children. Cornell keeps his focus on the procedural aspects of the story – they keep their operations board updated even as events clearly spiral beyond any normal investigative tactics – and on his Crew of Light, whose members are astutely chosen for a possible series – the stalwart Detective Inspector Quill, the brilliant analyst Ross (whose own backstory provides her with a grim connection to Toshack and Losley), and undercover agents Costain and Seften, both black, one gay, each with a particular set of London visions that seem appropriate to their character and background. Except for a couple of chapters, the novel never fully makes use of the weight of historical injustice that we’re meant to see as underlying the whole mythical backstory (backmyth?), but Cornell takes full advantage of his choice of football matches as a framework for the playing out of ancient curses, and gives us a band of likeable heroes we’ll look forward to meeting again. Ross is the most interesting and fully developed of the heroes in this novel, and Quill seems cut from the same cloth as any number of such wise and competent coppers, but this really just leaves room for every team member
to get their moment in the spotlight later on. I suspect we’ll be glad to see what they’re up to.
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Lavie Tidhar must be a voracious reader. For a young writer, he seems unusually steeped in the lore and traditions of pop and pulp fiction, and seems to delight in jumbling together historical and fictional characters, most notably in his steampunk Bookman series, while in his short fiction he’s resurrected oddball gonzo adventure writers like the German Karl May. Even bin Laden became a pulp villain in his World Fantasy Award-winning novel Osama. Equally important, he has mastered the idiom of noir with a stone-sharpened voice that sometimes falls just short of parody; he takes to heart Raymond Chandler’s famous adage ‘‘When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand,’’ and that’s exactly the way he opens one of the chapters in Martian Sands, his new short novel. But Tidhar is also familiar with his SF forbears, and part of the fun of this rather chaotic little novel is spotting all the callouts to everyone from Burroughs to Heinlein to Bradbury to Farmer to Dick and even to L. Frank Baum. Another part of the fun involves Tidhar’s by now familiar games with reality, texts, and consciousness, and another part of the fun is (for some, at least) trying to figure out what on Earth is going on.
The novel begins with a tantalizing presence identifying himself as Bill Glimmung, who appears in Franklin Roosevelt’s office on December 7, 1941, claiming to be from the future and urging FDR to shift his priorities toward the prevention of the Holocaust, in exchange for which Glimmung will provide futuristic weaponry to defeat the Nazis. Glimmung turns out to be a central figure in the novel as it unfolds, a popular fictional hero of endless novels and movies, and a kind of cross between Philip Marlowe and a Watchman. The action immediately shifts to Mars, and in particular to New Israel, where we meet Josh Chaplin, a struggling salesman for a manure firm; Miriam Elezra, a government officer who has ordered a simulacrum of Golda Meir to replace Ben-Gurion as the literal figurehead of the Jewish government; and Carl Stone, who works at the simulacrum shop but fancies himself to be an ancient Martian warrior named K’t’Amin, part of a secret society of ‘‘Born-Agains’’ so devoted that they’ve added a second set of arms, like Burrough’s Tharks. All these characters come together briefly in a violent scene in a hashish bar, during which Josh’s girlfriend is killed (by an ambitious, self-aware bullet), and all are involved in a persistent rumor that the inhabitants of a remote kibbutz are secretly developing time travel. But funny things happen on the way to the kibbutz: Carl finds himself transported to the ancient Mars of his dreams (which actually looks more like Leigh Brackett’s Mars than Burroughs’s), while Josh somehow finds himself in Auschwitz (but in which historical thread?), and Miriam teams up with Golda Meir (who, simulacrum or not, is the best character in the book) to witness an apparent terrorist attack on government offices. It’s all complicated by such off-the-wall inventions as ambitious bullets and the omnipresence of Others (digital entities which have evolved self-awareness and sometimes attach themselves to people), various incarnations of the legendary Bill Glimmung, multiple time tracks, and some dandy Martians who at one point recall the Tin Man, the Lion, and the Scarecrow.