It is obviously not coincidental that Samatar’s narrators are all women: The Winged Histories addresses that which is so often elided in conventional fantasy novels – the absence of women, or at best, the limited roles available to women. If Lord of the Rings shows us only privileged women, able to disguise themselves in order to fight, or else to remain sequestered from the grubbiness of war, Samatar’s women have to deal with the effects of war head on, because in their various ways they are all involved. While it may be true that Tavis presumes on her status in order to learn to fight, she is nonetheless part of a sustained military campaign, and all that entails. Likewise, she and Siski have always been aware of their significance as nieces of Olondria’s ruler, the Telkan, thanks to their aunt, Mardith, who seeks to gain power through matchmaking. However, through Seren and Tialon we see women who are nominally reliant on men in order to survive, and the ways in which they negotiate survival in a world that is rapidly changing.
Samatar continues also to explore the issues that preoccupied her in Stranger, such as the competing power of the spoken word and the written. Who makes history – the writer who records it in books or the singer who memorises old songs and creates new ones? Between them, those who read and those who remember create the narrative mosaic which forms this novel but it is an uneasy relationship. I found myself thinking of Derrida’s ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, not a thing that often happens when I read a fantasy novel but entirely appropriate here.
Like its predecessor The Winged Histories is told in exquisitely written prose, here reflecting the different rhythms of the various storytellers’ formal styles as well as their private languages. But while the language of A Stranger in Olondria was lush, orotund, reflecting Jevick’s poetic influences, the prose here, for all its richness, is still leaner somehow, as if reflecting the exigencies of war, at home and in the battle. Words need to be saved, in case they run out, and used sparingly. It is when the narrators are most hard-pressed that words suddenly pour out of them, as though their masks of endurance have finally slipped.
And still there is more to be said about The Winged Histories and its predecessor. Thoughts and notes piled up as I read on, and I reached the end wanting nothing so much as to return to the beginning and start all over again. Samatar’s work really benefits from rereading, which is more than can be said for a lot of contemporary novels. This is a very satisfying novel to read, challenging and troubling too, as the very best fiction ought to be.
TWO YEARS EIGHT MONTHS AND TWENTY-EIGHT NIGHTS
Salman Rushdie
Vintage pb, 296pp, £8.99
Jack Deighton
The title is an indicator, clearly alluding to a famous collection of tales of wonder, promising exotic happenings, digressions, meanderings and stories within stories. Yet it is also somehow unmistakably Rushdian. Exotic but recognisable, aslant but accessible. In any case, I doubt any other present-day author would invite comparison to such a well-known set of stories as the Arabian Nights. But the conceit doesn’t come from nowhere. If he perhaps hasn’t addressed the supernatural quite as directly in most of his previous novels there has nearly always been more than a hint of the strange, brushes with the uncanny, in Rushdie’s work. So here we have jinn (not genies, no, we don’t use that word any more) the Grand Ifrits, Zumurrud the Great, Zabardast the Sorcerer, Shining Ruby the Possessor of Souls – so slender he disappears when he turns sideways – Ra’im the Blood-Drinker, the source of all the world’s vampire stories, and the jinnia Dunia, otherwise known as Aasmaan Peri, aka the Sky Fairy and the Lightning Princess of Mount Qâf.
The narrative is couched as a looking-back at the legendary time when the seals between the worlds eroded, a great storm struck the Earth and the Strangenesses began. Yet the story begins over eight centuries earlier, in 1195, with the arrival at the house of the philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes) of a young homeless girl. This was Dunia, indulging her fascination with human men and her capacity for love. For two years eight months and twenty-eight nights they lived as man and wife and produced numerous offspring, whose descendants, all characterised by their lobeless ears, became the Duniazát. Not named after him as, “To be the Rushdi would send them into history with a mark upon their brow”. Ibn Rushd’s dispute with the philosophy of a predecessor, Ghazali, “Only fear will move sinful man towards God,” and who stated that things happen only because God wills them, provides us with disquisitions on God’s nature, “God is a creation of human beings; the clap-hands-if-you-believe-in-fairies principle.” These differences are played out on a grander scale during the war between the worlds that followed the Strangenesses.
During that time rationality crumbled. Some found their feet didn’t touch the ground and might float away so high that they died, others were weighed down so that they became crushed. A baby born during the storm caused outbreaks of sores on anyone corrupt or dishonest into whose vicinity she came. The irrational became commonplace. The Duniazát had inherited some of Dunia’s jinn powers and were invaluable in the final confrontations with the Grand Ifrits. The whole time of Strangeness lasted, of course, two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights.
Lines like “If I get hurt in this putative affray of yours then I’m not an innocent bystander?” to a policeman from a musician at risk from the incitements of a rabid preacher show that the events of Rushdie’s life have contributed mightily – as, I assume, theirs must necessarily do for all but hack authors. Yet while the novel contains all Rushdie’s strengths, it also manifests and perhaps magnifies his faults. There is not much restraint here, there is a lot of telling, the treatment is consciously literary and full of word play. Yet the retrospective narrator defuses any tension in the reader as to the eventual outcome. Rushdie also feels it necessary to define FTL despite name-checking eleven masters of science fiction.
However, the book is mainly a meditation on the nature of story. “All our stories contain the stories of others and are themselves contained within larger, grander narratives.” “The first thing to know about made-up stories is that they are all untrue in the same way” (which feels Tolstoyan but is certainly debatable). “To tell a story about the past is to tell a story about the present.” That stories tell us what we are; we tell them in order to understand ourselves. Quite where the incursion of the supernatural leaves us with that one is rather problematic. “To recount a fantasy is to tell a tale about the actual.” Well, maybe. “If good and evil were external to Man, it became impossible to define what an ethical man might be” is closer to the mark.
In general Rushdie is at his best when his flights of fancy are tethered more firmly to earthly events, more centred on his human characters which here are too thinly delineated. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is pyrotechnic, impressive even, undoubtedly worth reading, but ultimately curiously lacking in heart.
WORLD OF WATER
James Lovegrove
Solaris ebook, 384pp, £5.99
Stephen Theaker
Dev Harmer died at Leather Hill, the worst battle of a terrible decade-long war between humanity and Polis+, AI zealots who see an atheistic humanity as their natural enemy. The war ended in a truce, Harmer’s consciousness was saved, and now he is downloaded by Interstellar Security Solutions into one genetically modified host form after another. His job: to foil the plots of spies and saboteurs working for Polis+. This is the second book of his adventures, but, like the Dumarest books of E.C. Tubb, you could begin with any of them. He was having adventures well before the first book began, and he’ll have many more after this one ends, unless he earns enough credit at last to buy himself a new copy of his original body.
Not so fresh from his gruelling adventures on Alighieri in World of Fire, Harmer now continues his fight against the “digimentalists” on Robinson D in the Ophiuchus constellation, also known as Triton. His previous body was that of a miner suited to work on an extreme thermoplanet: short, heavyset, muscular and stumpy, with nocturnal vision and the face of a
boxer who had gone a few too many rounds. This time he has high cheekbones, protective eye membranes, webbed fingers, gills on either side of his neck, and a face that can flash bioluminescent messages to those that can understand them. This is his first time as an amphibian – but the body has been compromised. It’ll be dead in three days.
He needs an amphibious body because Triton is an ocean planet. It was an ice giant until a small shift in axial rotation warmed things up. That event persists in the legends the indigenous Tritonians tell of the Ice King, who sleeps in the ice at the heart of the world and will awaken when the time is right. None of the indigenous people are happy to have forty thousand humans building habitats on the ocean surface, and those angry enough to fight in the name of the Ice King are able to find plenty of support, and, predictably enough, Dev soon finds that the colonists are less than innocent.
It’s his job to bring peace to this world, and in the process uncover any Polis+ activity. In three days. Before he can get started, he’ll need to get his gills working, and that means a merciless swimming lesson, where his ISS liaison pushes him fifteen metres down into the ocean. Just when he’s about to black out, he breathes in the cold seawater, and feels it rush down his throat, and out through his neck, giving him oxygen as it passes through – even after just two books, it’s clear that a big pleasure of this series will be the way Harmer adjusts to the quirks of each body, and works with the skill set of each. This is not a body built for brawls in bars, for example, and Dev almost comes a cropper when he gets drawn into one. But at least it gives him a lead… And in the water it’s a different matter, as we see when he encounters a seven-metre long thalassoraptor and all its teeth.
Harmer is absolutely the star of the show here (at least until the story’s ultimate – and extremely epic – enemy is revealed), but he has a strong supporting cast. He forms an alliance with a Tritonian who has no love for humans but wants a peaceful resolution to it all. Her true name is a complex configuration of geometric patterns, an emotional autograph designed to convey an attitude of determination, resolve and desire for justice, and she more than lives up to that in the course of the book. On the human side, he is teamed up with First Lieutenant Sigursdottir and her band of brave and heroic female Marines. Dev takes an instant liking to her, but it’ll take some work to earn her trust.
This is a book for anyone who thinks they don’t make ’em like that any more. Well, they do, and to all the action and thrills you could possibly want James Lovegrove adds a good deal of intelligence, tackling post-colonial issues head-on while showing us a fascinating alien culture, all in chapters that end in cliffhangers and are short enough to entice the most reluctant adult reader. The series has a great premise, but it’s not a formula: this book offers a completely different experience to the first. The ebook is clever too: switch to publisher fonts to see how they are used to distinguish between different types of non-verbal speech. A brainy blockbuster.
HUNTERS & COLLECTORS
M. Suddain
Jonathan Cape pb, 506pp, £14.99
Stephen Theaker
The mother of Jonathan Tamberlain threatened to kill him if he ever squandered his gifts on criticism, and she wasn’t just speaking metaphorically, he informs us, she told him exactly how she would do it. She was an art collector, his father a poet; the two of them met at a boxing match. Sparring with his father left Tamberlain in a coma, and he woke up with an amazing nose, one that can catch the scent of a wine from half a mile away.
So he did exactly what his mother didn’t want: he became a food critic, though that’s not what he calls himself. He follows the example of his hero, Eliö Lebaubátain, in claiming the title of “forensic gastronomer”. It’s not entirely clear why, since there’s no legal aspect to his work – or at least there wouldn’t be, if he didn’t always get himself into trouble.
The book begins with snatches of writing from and about his early career, showing his rise to fame, but by the time the narrative settles down to its main adventure, he’s had the time to develop a long and intense relationship with his bodyguard, the marvellously formidable Gladys. To her he’s “like a grandpa you spend time with out of guilt”, and for him she’s like the annoying cousin your family takes on day trips, but they share an utter dedication to their respective jobs that is one of the novel’s most interesting features.
Unfortunately, Gladys wasn’t there the day he went to the Fair.
While Tamberlain grew up in the Western Hemisphere with a pair of liberal parents, the Eastern Hemisphere lived under the absolute control of Vlada Yinknokov, the Great Butcher. She had a billion people murdered during her revolution, including thousands of architects and doctors. She outlawed hospitals, declaring that from then on diseases would be cured by the will of the people. And she was at the Fair too.
Tamberlain only attended to make amends to an old friend. In that he failed miserably, and after a contretemps involving a bomb threat he didn’t mean to make he was taken away to the Great Butcher’s yacht, waking up to find a gas mask on his face and everyone including the dictator dead, following a nerve gas attack. Arrested and taken to the Eastern Hemisphere for interrogation, he fell into another coma, and it’s when he wakes up that the story proper begins.
Dr Rubin Difflaydermaus is a batty psychiatrist with a habit of showing up in Tamberlain’s head. He also has his book – Infinity Remastered: Engineering the Post-Human Species (and Why Our Great-Grandchildren Might Not Even Need Bodies) – delivered wherever Tamberlain is sleeping. The copy waiting after the critic’s latest coma contains a clue: a laundry ticket from the legendary Hotel Grand Skies.
Tamberlain has long dreamt of eating at its famous restaurant, the Undersea. Nothing will stop him getting to the hotel, and once he gets there, nothing will stop him eating that meal. He’ll literally wade through blood to get it, and he needs to, because the staff have completely lost their minds and every interaction brings with it the threat of ultraviolence. Ace literary agent Daniel Woodbine and bodyguard Gladys will do their best to keep him alive as the severed heads pile up, but he won’t make it easy for them.
Hunters & Collectors is quite reminiscent of Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson, and may appeal to the same readers. Instead of political writer Spider Jerusalem and his filthy assistants we have here a food critic, but he adopts a similarly misanthropic worldview (“To me the greatest possible horror is not that humanity might end, but that our Empire of Stupidity might last forever”) to protect a heart similarly sensitive to the horrors of his world. Like that comic, this is not an entirely serious book, but it does have moments that are truly shocking, and others that feel surprisingly sincere.
The SF ideas at its heart, on the other hand, may not come as great surprises, at least not to people who have seen a holodeck episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but the book is after all being sold as contemporary fiction rather than SF, and it uses its rusty tools to tell quite a sharp story. Equally, what seems at first to be quite an experimental novel, beginning with a hundred-page flutter of notes, letters, fragments and diagrams, settles down after that to provide quite a conventional first-person narrative that nevertheless does the job.
That’s the book in a nutshell: a bit less ambitious than it looks, but still quite good, and rather well executed. Just like the guests at the Hotel Grand Skies.
MUTANT POPCORN
NICK LOWE
GODS OF EGYPT
X-MEN: APOCALYPSE
CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR
ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
WARCRAFT: THE BEGINNING
ANGRY BIRDS
RATCHET & CLANK
INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE
TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: OUT OF THE SHADOWS
WHEN MARNIE WAS THERE
TALE OF TALES
Who will love the orphans? Where will they ever find a loving home? As film continues to evolve beyond the canons of puny sense and taste, more big fi
lms than ever are ending up in the hundred-million-dollar flophouse for Hollywood’s unadoptables. Unloved and disowned by critics, domestic audiences, and even the internet, these are the blockbusters nobody wanted: the belated sequels to films nobody now remembers; the sunk-costs development hellspawn unwisely released to the light; the unwieldy international coproductions made entirely from tax credits; the profit-scrapings of once-valuable intellectual property; the game adaptations commissioned back before the user base collapsed; the exhausted franchise brand-milkers; the Chinese toehold partnership projects; the forlorn attempts to spin a remerchandising opportunity out of D-list media properties. And yet all of these sad-eyed waifs were conceived in hope and raised with love, and all carry within them the capacity for joy. Who will speak for them? Will nobody see the good and the cherishable in them? So let’s take a breath of perspective and celebrate for once the sincere delights of the films that disrupt the senescent canons of excellence, baffling tastemakers and dividing audiences in ways that challenge the very foundations of art.
This season’s charity poster child for the cinema of the unloved has to be Alex Proyas’ GODS OF EGYPT, a film whose only offence was to be too deliriously wonderful for merely mortal audiences to grasp. Proyas already has a free pass for life from sf fans for 1998’s Dark City, and though his intervening films have been more mixed joys, Gods of Egypt is the first time this serially thwarted titan has been given the budget and control to build an IMAX cosmos and canvas on a scale to match his gigantic fevered visions. Lionsgate fondly thought they were pouring money into a potential post-Hunger Games franchise, but what they’ve ended up funding is something immeasurably richer and dafter. In a loose adaptation of Chester Beatty Papyrus I, Nikolai Coster-Waldau’s Horus (Marco Beltrami choir: “Glorious, glorious Horus!”) squares off against evil brother Set as incarnated in the latest implementation of shouty Gerry Butler in loincloth and native Paisley accent, with Dark City lead Rufus Sewell as Lower Egypt’s villainous mortal instrument; and the divine brothers battle it out against a background cast of the most professionally unembarrassable cream of Australian thespianship, including Brenton Thwaites and Courtney Eaton as star-crossed mortal lovers, Bryan Brown as the overthrown Osiris, and Geoffrey Rush as all-seeing Ra himself eating the scenery of the universe, abetted by an infinite number of Chadwick Bosemans with diabolical Anglo-Wakandan accents, plus Élodie Yung in skimpy frocklets as Hathor, goddess of perpetual ethnically ambiguous hotness. Though he’s up against an international masterclass in the art of Australian acting under its twin gods Brown and Rush, Coster-Waldau holds his own splendidly, delivering a performance like a twinkly plank as the usurped heir to the cosmos whose forced alliance with an annoying mortal youth enables him to grow as a god – for yes, even gods here have a “journey” to learn upon – and arrive at a new dispensation between gods and their subjects. (“My journey isn’t about revenge at all costs,” he announces to a tinkle of golden pennies dropping: “it’s about protecting my people.”)
Interzone #265 - July-August 2016 Page 15