IT’S THE DAY after tomorrow in London, and not a pleasant one indeed. With terrorism on the upswing, the authorities have begun rounding up the most unlikely suspects on the flimsiest of charges. One such unfortunate victim is Paul Fadhil Abbas Ali. Born in the UK to immigrant parents, Paul has assimilated to the nines, marrying an Irish wife named Doris, and authoring a novel which he fancies emulates P. G. Wodehouse, that quintessentially British writer. But he’s made one fatal error: in his comedy, two characters joke about assassinating the Prime Minister.
This horrible crime promotes Paul to the status of “Prisoner B” at the Hostile Activities Research Ministry, or HARM—in actuality, a torture camp. There, he is subjected to excruciating bodily and psychological—well, harm, to put it mildly. What’s Paul’s one refuge and retreat? Simple: he’s been a dissociative kind of personality ever since youth, due to cerebral damage inflicted by his father’s beatings. Now, he begins to hallucinate an existence on another planet, Stygia, inhabiting the persona of one Fremant.
Stygia was ostensibly settled by a lone human starship at some point in our future, after Earth’s civilization destroyed itself. It’s a grim world whose many life forms all derive from insects. Humanity can still eke out a living, hindered by one other factor: the colonists did not travel to this world as incarnate individuals. Rather, they were stored as quasi-biological personality templates, which, upon landing, were decanted into new bodies. But the decanting went awry, and now the invaders are patchwork Frankenstein monsters, at least mentally. They speak in a kind of Joycean cant, for instance, and have trouble with institutions such as democracy and religion. Of course, this hasn’t stopped them from wiping out the native sentients, the Dogovers.
As Paul’s senseless interrogation continues in London, Fremant embarks on his own quest for meaning, fighting both the planet and the short-sighted stupidity of his fellows.
This novel easily ranks among Aldiss’s finest works, a milestone achievement to a long and splendid career not yet over. It rings changes on many of his long-running themes, and also cements itself firmly into the general sf canon. Essentially, it embodies the famed oriental parable of the butterfly and the philosopher in a gripping account of man’s inhumanity to man.
On the front cover of the first edition of this novel, the one former book of Aldiss’s alluded to is Report on Probability A, and that’s no gratuitous reference, however unlikely a selection it appears to be from Aldiss’s whole oeuvre. The scenes in the present-day of Paul’s incarceration (“Prisoner B” recalls the alphabetic monikers of the earlier book’s characters) embody the transparent, objective, almost deracinated, repetitive, I-am-a-camera style of that earlier Nouveau roman-inspired book. For instance, Paul’s hazy focus on the fireplace that graces one room where he’s tortured in an old mansion renders the scene as tangible as that outside the reader’s window. Again, the lack of proper affect on the part of the interrogators echoes the earlier book, as does a multileveled ranking of observers (Stygia in this case, versus the voyeurs of Report).
But see how far we’ve come from 1968, and not in a good direction: whereas Report supplemented its dreariness and stasis and paranoia with eroticism and the possibility of change for the better, now, four decades later we have only cruel mortality and evolutionary regression. Yet perhaps, Aldiss hints, utopian 1968 was the anomaly, and mankind’s baseline condition is this naked aggression and fear. The events on Stygia seem to say so as well.
The Stygian passages also play to the same world-building strengths that Aldiss exhibited in Hothouse and the Helliconia Trilogy. And of course he’s always been politically engaged, as a book like his Super-State shows.
So here we have Aldiss presenting us with a distillation of his wisdom, in very topical clothing.
HARM also echoes many classics by other writers. First off, of course, we turn to the many dystopian masterpieces (which Aldiss names and discusses in an appended interview). There are also rich elements of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker in the cracked stories the Stygians tell themselves, as well as Kornbluthian satire on the “Marching Morons” theme. The alien Dogovers could have come out of Michael Bishop’s Transfigurations, while the manner in which Paul/Fremant ends up on Stygia, and that planet’s nomenclature, make us think of David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus.
But perhaps the main homage here is one that might go unnoticed: Jack London’s The Star Rover, in which a prisoner’s torture sends him on an astral journey.
In any case, Aldiss has succeeded in blending all these strains, personal and genre-related, into a deeply moving meditation on whether humanity can survive its own fallen nature, or is doomed to devour itself.
88
Michael Chabon
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)
WINNER of the Nebula, the Hugo and the Sidewise sf awards, and a finalist for crime fiction’s Edgar, this is a sumptuously witty and entertaining alternative history of Jewish relocation in the early 1940s to a grudging Alaska, the Destruction (with some four million fewer Jews murdered than in our Holocaust), then the atomic bombing of Berlin in 1946, and the eviction of Jews from Israel in 1948. Its reception had been prepared in the literary world by Chabon’s earlier success with The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988, when he was 25), Wonder Boys (1995), the comic book-inflected The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), which won a Pulitzer, and a prizewinning YA fantasy, Summerland (2002).
While some Jews, such as Einstein, managed to escape Germany in the early years of Nazi rule, widespread racism in the rest of the world made it hard to find a new homeland. In our 1940, President Roosevelt considered allowing Jews to settle in Alaska, but this program was successfully blocked by the Democratic Party representative for the Alaska Territories, Anthony Dimond. In Chabon’s counterfactual history, Dimond died in an accident, clearing the way for the settlement of millions of Jews on the western fringes of the then-Territory, around Sitka. But this life-saving gesture has a time limit: after 60 years, at the start of the 21st century, Reversion will return these lands to the USA, and Jews once again will be forced into a Diaspora.
That is a setting fueled for a revival of Messianism, especially among the black hats, or Chasidic Jews. The (imaginary) Verbover sect has clawed its way back from cruel wartime reduction to just eleven members, and under the grossly obese Rebbe Shpilman is now the Jewish equivalent of a Mafia family, armed to the teeth, festering with every manner of crime, but suffused with a belief in the imminent appearance of Messiah. This long-prophesied miracle will bring peace to the world and see the return of the Jews to the Promised Land of Israel, from which they were brutally evicted in 1948. In the murky background, an equally fundamentalist Christian President of the USA is eager to see the Jews return to rebuild the Temple on the Dome of the Rock, since this marks the return of Jesus, and the last days. How these factors entwine and work themselves out is one of the driving forces in Chabon’s mystery, which on the surface seems to be a murder mystery: Who shot and killed a junkie in the sordid hotel where dwells Detective Meyer Landsman, divorced, guilty over the abortion of his son and the suicide of his father (recurrent Abraham and Isaac motifs), in squalor and a haze of booze?
The ghetto atmosphere of this doomed shtetl landscape winds ever more suffocatingly around the narrative as linkages are discovered between the most unexpected players. Yet the mood of the novel is often antic, not remotely gloomy, a sort of Woody Allen handwringing hysteria blended with hard men, and a few hard women, working for high stakes. These Sitkans speak in Yiddish, rendered in a delightfully but always totally understandable skewed English, with occasional lapses into “American” for outbursts of profanity. Their cell phones are Shofars (for the ramshorns used to wake the soul to repentance), their guns are sholems, for the peace work they do, or threaten to do. A familiar greeting is “What’s up, yid?” The wit is exactly what we think of as characteristically Jewish. “He’s a bad man,” Landsman says. “And he always was.” His cousin B
erko, with a Tlingit Indian mother murdered in a Jewish-Indian riot orchestrated by his father, replies, “Yes, but he made up for it by being a terrible father.” Landsman and his estranged wife, Bina Gelbfish, now his commanding officer, fall into the same tense, affectionate, exasperated banter. One of the pleasures of the novel is watching these two middle-aged and lonely, abrasive people work their way toward a kind of reconciliation.
Another pleasure is Chabon’s expert guidance through this oddly warped history that is not ours and yet reflects some of the more dismaying tendencies in our own. A failed war in Cuba, which returned its American warriors broken and rejected at home, is an equivalent of Vietnam, but President Kennedy escapes assassination and marries Marilyn Monroe. There is no 9/11 tragedy of the falling towers, but the Holy Land of three faiths is torn asunder by endless squabbles among the Arab and other remnant nationalities; without Israel, without Jews in Jerusalem, one gathers that terrorists and religious ideologues developed other obsessions—but the mad leaders of the USA, driven by dreams of making the Book of Revelation come true, work covertly with radical Jews to create the magical circumstances for a Jewish return (or military invasion) of their Holy Land, spearheaded by the criminal black hats.
It is a rich stew, and so are the aromas of the novel, steeped in cuisines from old Europe, not to mention the Filipino-style donut or shtekeleh: a “panatela of fried dough not quite sweet, not quite salty, rolled in sugar, crisp skinned, tender inside, and honeycombed with air pockets. You sink it in your paper cup of milky tea and close your eyes, and for ten fat seconds, you seem to glimpse the possibility of finer things.” So, too, with the book itself.
Life and death chase each other in the headlong gallop familiar from the noir novelists Chabon tips his hat to—Hammett, Chandler—as Landsman is shot at, wounded, stripped, tied to a bed, hurls himself barefooted into snow to make his escape, seeking the killers of his murdered sister and the brilliant chess-playing junkie who proves pivotal to the whole bedlam of faith and crime, corruption and redemption (of sorts), while his cousin Berko is yet again a prospective father, and Landsman and his tribe gain some hopes for their dispossessed future. Aside from the nimble plotting and the mayhem, Chabon’s characters are memorable and starkly individual. This might be the best alternative world novel we’ve seen to date.
89
Carol Emshwiller
The Secret City (2007)
AT NINETY YEARS of age in 2011, Carol Emshwiller was undeniably the First Lady of Sf, the reigning female avatar of the genre and its rich, unexhausted possibilities. In small part this status originally derived from the record of her helpmate and muse duties with her much admired husband, Ed Emshwiller, whose large catalogue of paintings (as Ed Emsh) practically defined mid-twentieth-century sf imagery. But by far the larger part of her glory derives from her own writing: robust, adventurous, always sparkling, even at its grimmest. And Emshwiller can indeed at times be as cold-eyed as Cormac McCarthy (Entry 84). Her first short story appeared in 1954 (her complete output is currently being collected in several volumes), and she has gone on to produce these short gems right down to the present. But in the new century she became energized to write novels, and produced two superlative ones, both of which revitalized old tropes.
On Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, there lived a strange bipartite race. Half the race had the form of disembodied heads with some small appendages; the other half of the race were headless bodies. Of course, the headlings used the brutes as vehicles. Out of this pulp cliché, Carol Emshwiller, in an unwaveringly futuristic voice, fashioned a profound novel of amazing depth and intimacy. The Mount takes place on a future Earth where an alien race of conquerors known as the Hoots employ subjugated humans as their rides. Charley is a teenaged Mount who happens to be assigned to the Hoot child who will one day become the leader of the invaders. As the wild humans still at large launch a successful rebellion, Charley finds his loyalties torn between his master and his species. In the end, the pair forge a third way between the opposed camps. Dealing with issues of slavery and freedom and the awkward bonds between father and child, this novel belongs on the shelf with such classics as Tom Disch’s Mankind Under the Leash and William Tenn’s Of Men and Monsters.
Relatively soon after this triumph came an ever stronger work, The Secret City.
This novel is narrated alternately from two points-of-view, both alien. The first such being we meet is Lorpas, known to humans as Norman North. Like all his kind, Lorpas does not originate on Earth. Fifty years ago, a small party of aliens arrived here secretly as tourists. They became stranded. The elder generation gradually died off, leaving a few youngsters now grown to exiled adulthood. These remnants are almost as much human—by culture—as they are natives of their home planet, Betasha. They wander the planet, never daring to assimilate, hoping for a rescue mission that, so far, has never arrived. Lorpas is typical, an itinerant homeless hybrid, sensitive and intelligent, but never allowed by circumstance to reach his full potential.
Finally, after an uncomfortable run-in with the police, he determines to find the Secret City, a legendary refuge in the mountains where many of his kind have supposedly gone to ground. So he sets out into the California alpine wilderness.
The Secret City proves to be nothing more than a primitive encampment where only three remaining Betashans live: Mollish, an old woman; Allush, a young woman (and our second narrator); and Youpas, a feral young man who hates Earthlings—and who comes to hates Lorpas, as a rival for Allush’s affections.
The plight of this foursome is complicated immensely when the rescuers from Betasha finally turn up—with all the disdain that “civilized” purebreds can have for dirty savages. And when a human rancher named Corwin and his beautiful daughter Emily are drawn into the picture, the group dynamics become even more chaotic.
Aliens living in secret among humans is another of Rudy Rucker’s sf “power chords”—an sf trope so strong that it can be endlessly reworked. It’s stimulating to see such a fine, accomplished and subtle writer as Emshwiller having a go at it.
The genre holds a number of vivid prior examples. Perhaps the most famous is Zenna Henderson’s series involving “the People” (collected in Ingathering), and that’s a model it seems Emshwiller definitely has in mind. But there was also a more malign set of aliens intent on concealing themselves among us in the briefly broadcast but well-remembered TV series, The Invaders, and a little of this interpretation creeps into Emshwiller’s tale as well, in the actions of the brutal “rescuers” from Betasha. Algis Budrys’s Hard Landing is another relevant milestone. And finally, Steve Cash’s ongoing series about the Meq seems a close cousin to Emshwiller’s novel.
But all these past instances aside, no one has yet approached the trope with the finesse and grace of Emshwiller. She’s a writer of such slantwise sensibilities and such deep perceptions that she conveys the exotic weirdness of such a setup—and the almost unfathomable otherness of the Betashan mentality—with uncommon vividness and startling jolts of creepiness. Like Gene Wolfe, she filters actions through the perceptions of her characters in such a way that we are both drawn into the immediacy of her plot and simultaneously held aloof a bit. As in Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus, we encounter the world through the not-always understandable eyes of another species. There’s a little bit, too, of John Crowley’s outré Engine Summer in the manifestation of the Secret City as overgrown labyrinth.
But ultimately, especially through the love story between Allush and Lorpas, we come to cherish these aliens and realize their virtual identity with us. Perhaps that’s always the essential message of this particular power chord: there’s no real need to hide, for we’re all brothers and sisters under the skin—if we can overcome our prejudices, that is.
90
Kathleen Ann Goonan
In War Times (2007)
ON DECEMBER 7, 1941, “a date which will live in infamy,” Japanese military made an undeclared act of war on US forces station
ed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, killing 2335 soldiers and sailors and 68 civilians, sinking the Battleship USS Arizona with the loss of 1104 lives. On the evening before the attack, in Kathleen Goonan’s novel of time shifts and jazz, Sam Dance—an “uncoordinated soldier” with poor eyesight—is seduced by an exotic European physicist:
Dr. Eliani Hadntz was only five foot three, though she had seemed taller in the classroom, and Sam had not suspected that her tightly pulled-back hair was a mass of wild black curls until the evening she sat on the edge of his narrow boardinghouse bed. A streetlamp threw a glow onto her pale breasts…. He had no idea why she was here.
Throughout the novel, Dr. Hadntz slips in and out of Sam’s life, twisting history from the bloody path it has taken in our chronicles toward a utopian alternative that dances to the bebop arrhythmic cadences of the jazz that Sam and his best pal Wink love. It can’t be coincidence that Eliani Hadntz’s name speaks to our yearning for an alternative world where the worst excesses of a bloody twentieth century hadn’t happened. To young Sam, a brilliant but unschooled engineer, she brings the plans for an unexplained device that manipulates time by combining a “parallel spiral” (time’s multiple courses, and the DNA double helix) with the quantum uncertainties of consciousness. Hadntz reflects that
if human consciousness was the time-sensitive entity she believed it was, this device could be called a time machine… that affected the physics and consciousness of human behavior…. It would enable humans to use the constant expansion of the universe, in much the same way that the previously invisible power of electricity had been harnessed and was now put to all kinds of positive uses….
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