Interzone #265 - July-August 2016

by Andy Cox [Ed. ]

  And the relationship between the two strands? Yeager’s son Justin suffers from pulmonary alveolar epithelial cell sclerosis, or PAECS, which is the fatal disease caused by mutant GPR769. There are occasional passages from other points of view which are only visited the once.

  Takano has characters hark on violence’s inevitability. “We project our true colours onto our enemies, fear them, and attack them. And in using violence against others, the nation and religion are the support systems that pardon our actions.” Maybe so, but “War is just another form of cannibalism. Humans use their intelligence to try to hide their instinct for cannibalism.” Really? Again, “Good deeds are seen as virtuous precisely because they run counter to human nature,” which is definitely arguable. The point is in any case somewhat undermined by Koga’s determination to succeed and the members of Operation Guardian ending up protecting the creature – a three-year-old named Akili.

  The descriptions of the mechanics involved in undertaking Organic Chemistry are also not convincing. And a month to synthesise a chemical’s agonist from scratch – even with the help of an advanced computer programme – is more than a tall order. The violent scenes, in addition to being curiously perfunctory, read more like reportage at a remove. Then there is the skating over of the ethics of administering an untested drug (actually two drugs; an allosteric agent is also required) on human patients.

  Extinction is an uneasy mix of military fiction and thriller. A work of pure SF would surely focus more on the evolved human. Granted, Akili has an undeveloped pharynx and is therefore incapable of speech (though can two-finger type). He can factorise large numbers into their prime components so compromising the security of encrypted data and communication between computers, but otherwise his agency is limited. Not so Koga’s mysterious telephonic prompter, a further link between the two main narratives.

  Whether it is a consequence of translation is difficult to determine but the writing is plodding. It is also full of redundancies and meanderings of various sorts such as a disquisition on the lack of remuneration scientists receive for their endeavours. The slightest action is described, information dumping is intrusive, often ad hoc and frequently unnecessary.

  As SF, Extinction is nugatory. Action thriller devotees may wish to take a look.

  CHILDREN OF EARTH AND SKY

  Guy Gavriel Kay

  Hodder & Stoughton hb, 571pp, £19.99

  Lawrence Osborn

  Guy Gavriel Kay’s latest is set in the same world as several of his previous novels. A generation has passed since the fall of Sarantium, which has been renamed Asharias by its conquerors. There is an uneasy stand-off between the victorious Asharites and the Holy Jaddite Empire to the west. The Grand Khalif in Asharias is intent on expanding his empire westwards but has so far been thwarted by the inhospitable lands of Sauradia that lie between his armies and Obravic, the current capital of the Jaddites. But year after year he sends armies west, keeping the Jaddites on the defensive and bleeding their coffers as they are forced to field armies in reply.

  There are clear parallels between the world of Kay’s imagination and Renaissance Europe. Readers familiar with European history (or even just European cities) will immediately identify Sarantium/Asharias with Constantinople/Istanbul; likewise Seressa with Venice, Dubrava with Dubrovnik, and less obviously Obravic with Prague. Such similarities are I suspect an important part of what makes Kay’s world-building and his descriptions so powerful; they allow him to draw his readers into places that seem familiar to them through television, internet, and other media.

  But there are important differences as well. While the Jaddites, Asharites, and Kindath (who are mentioned only in passing in this novel) are analogous with Christians, Muslims and Jews respectively, their beliefs are quite different. And Kay plays with European history as well, distorting and compressing timelines, to further differentiate his imagined history from the real world.

  Furthermore, Kay’s imagined world is one with a subtle thread of magic woven through it. It is less obvious here than in some of the earlier novels. Of course he is now depicting an era on the cusp of the scientific revolution: alchemists are at work in Obravic and the Emperor is delighted by technological toys. But the magic is still present in a grandfather’s ghostly voice, in the skills of a village healer, in the song of a long dead singer heard only by those with the gift.

  It is a richly portrayed tapestry. In the hands of a less-skilled artist the world and its history might have dominated the story and dragged the characters along in its wake. But Kay superimposes upon this grand sweep of history a cast of more or less ordinary characters whose lives we are invited to follow.

  Danica Gradek wants revenge for the death of her family and the kidnapping of her brother at the hands of the Asharites. He wants only to serve his Khalif and rise in the ranks of the Djanni, the elite Asharite force made up mainly of men who were kidnapped from Jaddite territories as children.

  Pero Villani knows that he has the potential to be a great artist, but poverty stands in his way until an unexpected request comes from the rulers of Seressa. If he does as they ask – and lives to tell the tale – his fortune will be made.

  Leonora Valeri has been imprisoned in a convent and her lover butchered by her family. She has nothing left to lose, so when Seressa’s Council of Twelve offers her a new life as their spy in Dubrava she jumps at the chance.

  Marin Djivo is the younger son of a leading merchant family in Dubrava. He is weary of his life of womanising, feels it is time he settled down, perhaps married one of the eligible young women of the city, and took on more responsibility.

  Then his path crosses those of Danica, Pero, and Leonora. Thereafter their lives weave together and are impacted by larger events in Empire and Kaliphate, opening up new possibilities for them and taking them to places they would never previously have imagined.

  Kay clearly loves every one of his characters because he manages to make each one unique and memorable. And that is true even of characters who appear for only a few pages. We are presented with a rich tapestry of lives, and Kay manages to convince the reader that each one is important in the unfolding story of his imagined world. They are all carefully crafted individuals with their own unique hopes and fears, strengths and weaknesses, trying to live their lives as best they can in the face of whatever fate or the gods have thrown at them. He clearly cares about his characters…and therefore so does the reader.

  If you have read any of his previous novels, you won’t need any more persuading. If you haven’t, you are in for a treat!

  NOT SO MUCH, SAID THE CAT

  Michael Swanwick

  Tachyon Publications tpb, 288pp, $15.95

  Duncan Lunan

  This collection of seventeen stories is non-consecutively numbered 18–270 for no reason that’s explained – perhaps in order of writing, but not in order of publication, since the oldest appears as no.139 and the most recent as no.80. The title paraphrases a line in ‘Of Finest Scarlet Was Her Gown’, a story set in Hell where a talking cat is not so strange. But in the wide range of these stories, some things are strange indeed.

  If there’s anything they have in common (and there’s not much) it’s the feeling that each one is, or could be, an episode in a longer narrative. For example, ‘From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled’ is set on an exoplanet inhabited by beings like millipedes, orbited by a space habitat or very large starship containing half a million people from Earth. The Babel of the title is the only hive city which has allowed humans to land, and it’s been destroyed by the rest as a precaution, leaving one human and two millipede survivors to make their way to another city in hopes of refuge. But this is no Enemy Mine story, and the possibility of one is summarily dismissed. “They endured four more days of commonplace adventure, during which they came close to death, displayed loyalty, performed heroic deeds, etc, etc,…you know the way this sort of narrative goes.” We never learn how the story ends. Among the many complications, th
e ET language comes out in translation as fragments set in weird punctuation which only an AI avatar of the human’s dead lover can interpret. The technique reminds one of C.J. Cherryh, except that Cherryh would have made this either a full-length novel, or a chapter within a novel in which the reader followed a much longer segment of the action.

  Talking of segments, the story which most sticks in the mind is ‘Passage of Earth’, where the roles above are reversed and Earth is orbited by the starships of a race of intelligent worms who lack sight, and experience reality by ingestion. The story begins as an alien autopsy and then turns out to be part of a sequence in which human thought-processes are (literally) being digested. We know some of what went before, but nothing of what comes after. The detailed biology is reminiscent of novels with input from Jack Cohen; he’s not listed in the preface or introduction, but it may have come via Aldiss, Harrison, or Niven and Pournelle.

  There are echoes of other writers too, where Swanwick may deliberately have tried his hand at their kind of story, as he hints at in his introduction. ‘The Scarecrow’s Boy’ reminded me of Aldiss’s ‘But Who Can Replace a Man?’, ‘Pushkin the American’ has a basis and an ending which reminded me strongly of R.A. Lafferty (who is cited), and Swanwick describes ‘The She-Wolf’s Hidden Grin’ as Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus “as it might have been told by James Tiptree Jr.” ‘Steadfast Castle’ recalls Ron Goulart. It has the standard dialogue of TV investigations like CSI or Law & Order, except that here the investigator is far less in control than he thinks he is. After the wordplay which ‘Passage of Earth’ has forced on me, I can’t resist the punch line which Swanwick has omitted: cynical as the cop may be, he has forgotten that the house always wins.

  Being reminded of favourite authors is no bad thing, but in each case Swanwick has made the topic his own. The time-travel of ‘3 a.m. in the Mesozoic Bar’, the matter-transmitter theme of ‘The Woman Who Shook the World-Tree’ and the multiverse of ‘An Empty House with Many Doors’ have all been done before, but not everyone can preface the last by saying “I penned a tragic romance that required the advice of a physicist”. Turning to the fantasy, ‘Tawny Petticoats’ has pleasant echoes of both Leiber and Vance, but it begins “The independent port city and (some said) pirate haven of New Orleans was home to many a strange sight. It was a place where sea serpents hauled ships past fields worked by zombie labourers to docks where cargo was loaded onto wooden wagons to be pulled through streets of crushed oyster shells by teams of pygmy mastodons as small as Percheron horses.” Note the “small as”: They’re the size of Clydesdales. We’re not in Lankhmar, nor the Dying Earth, nor in yet another example of the England-before-the-Black-Death so much imitated in the wake of Game of Thrones. Nor, most certainly are we in the New Orleans of Katrina, NCIS or Louis Armstrong. But by story 195 of a seventeen-story collection, we shouldn’t expect to be anywhere so familiar.

  INTO EVERYWHERE

  Paul McAuley

  Gollancz pb, 432pp, £8.99

  Paul Kincaid

  Over the last decade or so, Paul McAuley’s stories have often featured an Earth undergoing cultural, economic or technological decline that comes into contact with something profoundly alien. Usually the human habits that have precipitated the decline continue unabated, hampering any true understanding of the enigma. The nature of the aliens and what they might or might not contribute to humanity varies from story to story, but they share a sense of sadness generated by the failure of humanity in the face of the other. Of late, this inchoate strand of storytelling has come together into the Jackaroo sequence, of which Into Everywhere is the second novel.

  Something Coming Through established the situation: Climate change, terrorism, a dirty bomb in London, had all brought Earth to the brink of collapse. Then, just when all seemed hopeless, the alien Jackaroo appeared, gifting to humanity fifteen worlds ready for colonisation, with the means to access them through wormholes. But the gift was not as straightforward as it might appear: Each of the worlds was littered with ruins left by previous client races of the Jackaroo, races that had disappeared. Not only that, but what they left behind was very dangerous indeed. By the end of that first novel, ships left by one of those earlier races, the Ghajar, have been made to work, opening up more worlds, though without quite liberating humanity from the benevolent oversight of the Jackaroo.

  Into Everywhere is not a direct sequel, but it continues the story of human encounters with the enigma of the alien. The chapters of the previous novel alternated between two viewpoint characters, one male one female, who were widely separated in space, one on Earth, one on the planet Mangala, though the trajectory of the story inevitably brought them together. The new novel replicates that structure. The woman is Lisa, an expert on alien technology who became infected with what she thinks of as a ghost in her head, split up with her husband, took to drink, and now leads a precarious hand-to-mouth existence; the man is Tony Okoye, younger son of a powerful family who enjoys life as a freebooter until his discovery of rare alien code reveals that his family might be his own worst enemy. Here the two are separated in time; we eventually realise there’s a century between Lisa from Tony, but the trajectory of the novel still brings them together for the climax.

  When Lisa’s former husband, out prospecting, happens upon a find that eventually kills him, it reawakens the ghost in her head, and also brings Adam Nevers of the UN Technology Control down upon her. Lisa’s only option is to try and discover what her husband had found; but the quest puts her in the middle of a feud between Nevers and Ada Morange (responsible for discovering the Ghajar ships in the previous novel), it also brings her into the orbit of Unlikely Worlds, the alien !Cha who is recording the story of Ada Morange and who may have a more significant role in the story of the Jackaroo than anyone has realised.

  If Lisa must battle her own demons, Tony must grow from dilettante to hard-nosed activist. His discovery was supposed to rescue humanity from a terrible plague, but his family are too involved with their own squabbles to want it, bloodthirsty pirates kill those Tony has been working with in order to get their hands on it, and the whole escapade reveals the betrayal of his trusted Aunty Jael, who turns out to be the preserved brain of Ada Morange. Simply surviving necessitates a determination Tony has never had to display before.

  The twists and turns of the plot that eventually bring Tony and Lisa together always look as if they are going to solve the central mystery of the Jackaroo: Who are they? What are their intentions for humanity? What is the actual role of the !Cha? But what we really learn is how human shortcomings have got in the way of solving those puzzles. In the hundred years separating Lisa from Tony there are two wars; the rivalry between Nevers and Morange flares into open conflict; most characters, good or bad, reveal pettiness, greed, jealousy, cruelty, deceitfulness. Was this what spelled the fate of the Jackaroo’s previous clients? There are revelations (the Jackaroo were already observing Earth at the time of the London bomb), but they only serve to increase the central mysteries. And the question remains: could this humanity ever put aside its faults long enough to solve them?

  The two Jackaroo novels may not be McAuley at his absolute best (they’re a little too mechanical in their structure for that), but they are building into an intriguing series.

  THE WINGED HISTORIES

  Sofia Samatar

  Small Beer Press hb, 206pp, $24.00

  Maureen Kincaid Speller

  I was hooked by A Stranger in Olondria from its very first sentence: “As I was a stranger in Olondria I knew nothing”. Jevick, the story’s narrator, had dreamed of travelling to Olondria since childhood. A Stranger in Olondria is both travelogue and memoir, charting Jevick’s exploration of a culture in which he inevitably remains an outsider, and the task thrust upon him, to tell the story of Jissavet of Kiem, dying when he met her, now demanding to be heard.

  The Winged Histories is a companion piece to A Stranger in Olondria rather than a sequel, wrapped around the e
arlier novel and extending beyond it, in time and space. The civil war that Jevick saw only the edges of now stands front and centre yet this is not a straightforward chronological account of that war. Instead, Samatar offers a series of overlapping accounts of that war, told by four very different women: Tialon, daughter of the last Priest of the Stone; Tavis, a noblewoman who leaves her family to become a soldier; her sister, Siski, who is transformed from socialite into refugee; and Seren, a nomad singer, who loves Tavis.

  This complex series of nested stories allows Samatar to explore the tangled history of Olondria, teasing out the conflicting intentions of its noble families (and here the dynastic ambitions of Tavis’s aunt figure heavily as she plots to ensure her family takes the imperial throne of Olondria), its religious leaders (through Tialon, we learn the story of her father, Ivrom, the Priest of the Stone, a puritan implacably opposed to the sensual cult of the goddess Avalei), and the effect of the civil war on those who owe no allegiance to either side and have tried to stay out of the conflict (Seren provides the account of what happens to her people as a result of the war spilling across borders).