Locus, March 2013
Page 8
In brief, The Prophet of Bones essentially sets up the intriguing science fictional conceit of the original story, and then plays it out much along the Crichton/Koontz lines of The Games. Kosmatka is clearly fascinated by the underlying genetics and anthropology, and cheerfully goes on about haplogroups, nucleotide pairs, and DNA sequencing in ways that would leave the Crichton school in the dust, but he just as cheerfully leaves all that in the dust as biological samples from the Flores hobbits become maguffins in a tale of international and corporate intrigue. We first meet Paul Carlsson as a brilliant kid crossbreeding mice in secret from his abusive father, a successful scientist. For reasons initially unclear, the adult Paul is hired to work on the dig in Flores collecting biological samples, but it’s not long before the Indonesian government decides the genetic material is a sort of national treasure, killing one of Paul’s colleagues, expelling others from the country, and turning Paul himself into a fugitive – but not before he manages to smuggle out a sample of hobbit DNA. Back in the States, Paul finds he’s still not out of the woods, as everyone from a powerful congressman to a shadowy corporation that once employed his father seems to be willing to murder anyone who assists Paul in his investigation of the nature of that DNA – including one of Paul’s ex-lovers. (It must be said that women don’t fare too well here; both of the major female characters are ex-lovers of Paul, and even though one is a scientist at Chicago’s Field Museum, she’s mostly along for the ride.) Before it’s over, though, the story veers into the genetic-monster mode of The Games or Dean Koontz’s Watchers, complete with some pretty unlikely (but screen-ready) derring-do on Paul’s part.
Despite a few excesses, Prophet of Bones is a better novel than The Games, partly because Paul is an intriguing character in his own right, partly because of Kosmatka’s portrayal of scientist-zealots willing to suppress evidence in support of dogma (something we’d have expected in the 16th century, but are we entirely free of it yet?), partly because the conceptual breakthrough which might challenge an entire dominant world paradigm is kept understated and ambiguous, and partly because Kosmatka handles the more outlandish thriller elements with a straight-faced panache. In the long and uncertain history of SF/thriller hybrids, it probably, in the end, has more in common with scientifically intelligent thrillers like Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio than with Crichton, Cook, or Koontz, and while it doesn’t conceptually move much beyond the original story, it offers a good deal of fast-moving fun.
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It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that Love Is Strange: A Paranormal Romance is the oddest book Bruce Sterling has written. That subtitle is no misnomer, and although Sterling seems determined to reclaim the term ‘‘paranormal’’ from its Twilight years, he’s not at all averse to writing dialogue like ‘‘I can’t promise you eternity. Because, I am a mortal woman. But I can promise you me. Look at me. Look here, at me. I love you. I am yours. You can have anything you want from me.’’ That particular effusion is delivered by Farfalla Corrado, an itinerant freelance translator, to Gavin Tremaine, a brilliant accountant and trend analyst whom she meets at the Capri Trend Assessment Congress and immediately suspects might be The One foretold by her psychic mentor. Farfalla, an Italian raised in Brazil, thus also carries the weight of that paranormal rubric: she’s not only a translator, but a kind of witch and seer whose mode of apprehending the future is in stark contrast to Gavin’s data-driven venture-capital analyses. This contrast of world-views is what really drives the narrative, together with some fascinating subplots involving an American academic, a lost Cupid statue, an obscure 19th century American woman novelist, and Gavin’s chronically unimpressed Goth younger sister.
Despite its concern with futurists and speculators, Love Is Strange is relatively subdued in the actual trendspotting and coolhunting that have become Sterling’s trademarks. It’s set around 2009 and 2010, and at times sounds like it could have been written then – or as if directed at a less au courant audience than Sterling’s usual readership. Gavin describes the new search engine Bing, and at one point the narrator helpfully points out that ‘‘Twitter was the web service where the Internet people in the audience were passing their secret messages.’’ What Sterling reader needs to be told that? Sterling is clearly less interested in gee-whiz technics than in the contrast between analytical and occult models of thinking about the future, which in turn expands into an operatic melodrama about free will and determinism acted out in the stormy relationship between Gavin and Farfalla, who bounce off each other like explosive-laden pool balls throughout the narrative, with Farfalla becoming a kind of style-mentor to Gavin’s younger sister, returning to another lover (whose reputation as an artist of designer microchips is one of the few cool-tech bits), and Gavin returning to Seattle (where his own old-money family is facing a financial crisis), each of them studiously trying to evade what they fear is a relationship self-destructive in its sheer obsessiveness. What emerges as an almost mystical symbol of that relationship is a missing statue of Cupid somewhere back in Capri, which they first learn about from a retired professor researching the life of Princess Amélie Troubetzkoy, an actual 19th-century American novelist who knew Oscar Wilde and married a European prince. (She sounds like a terrific novel subject in her own right.)
By the time Gavin and Farfalla finally meet again in a Sao Paulo, the mysticism has pretty much won out over the futurism, at least in terms of the plot. They briefly seem to experience a kind of time-slip a few years into the future, and when they begin climbing an abandoned high-rise where Farfalla keeps a secret hideout, Gavin could practically be climbing the Muspel Tower in A Voyage to Arcturus: ‘‘Every time we climb another story in this tower – things get a little clearer to me… It’s like I’m shedding layers of illusion.’’ Any novel that combines that sort of metaphysical epiphany, sharply realized settings that include Capri, Seattle, and the favelas of Brazil, insightful commentary on tech start-ups and trend analysis, an historical literary mystery, and dialogue like ‘‘But he needs me now! I must fly to him!’’ may be tonally all over the map and thematically a bit of a farrago, but it’s undeniably readable, and – whatever you make of the paranormal part – it’s unapologetically a romance, and a fairly compelling one at that, even when it lapses into dialogue that should be sung in coloratura.
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Daniel Pinkwater has probably done as much to mythologize Chicago as any living writer, even though in early novels such as Lizard Music and The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death it was thinly disguised as Hogboro or Baconburg. With Bushman Lives!, however, Chicago gets to be its own bizarre goofball of a city, complete with the Loop, the Art Institute, Bughouse Square and other landmarks (including the Chicken Man from several earlier novels), and I can attest that it’s just more fun to live here after having read this book. Pinkwater has long been a favorite of fantasy and SF writers from Neil Gaiman (whose Gene Wolfe collaboration A Walking Tour of the Shambles echoes his method) to Cory Doctorow and Harlan Ellison (who first called Pinkwater to my attention). Rare among children’s writers, he seems to hold up remarkably well on later rereadings. Even though I first encountered him as an adult reader, it’s remarkable how many readers who, revisiting his work decades after having encountered it in third or fourth grade, find that it’s just as hypnotically wacky as they remembered, only now they get more of the jokes.
The title Bushman Lives! refers to the legendary Lincoln Park Zoo gorilla, which for a while in the 1930s and 1940s was probably the most famous zoo animal in the world. Pinkwater’s teenage narrator Harold Knishke barely remembers having seen him, but by now in the early 1960s he and his pal, Geets Hildebrand, a compulsive building-climber, have made the phrase into a kind of litmus test for the kind of quirky geek hipness that has long been one of the most appealing hallmarks of Pinkwater’s teen characters, who are characteristically both smarter and weirder than their contemporaries. When Harold says ‘‘Bushman Lives!’’ to one of the clueless preoccupied adults who occ
upy Pinkwater’s fiction in equal measure, he’s apt to get a response like ‘‘Geshundheit!’’, while someone on the wavelength will respond in kind. To some extent, the novel is the tale of Harold finding kindred souls in the early years of the Beat era, and along the way it may offer more genuinely autobiographical insights than any of his novels so far. Pinkwater was initially trained as an artist and sculptor, and when Harold is advised (by a mysterious girl we’d now describe as Goth) to look closely at a de Kooning painting in the Art Institute, it changes the very way he sees the world. He begins taking life drawing lessons, drifts into the Beat-era club scene (where an ancient Delta blues singer named Blind Beet features a song with his name in it, though Harold can’t understand any of the lyrics), and meets a girl named Molly DeDwerg and her possibly supernatural pet the Wolluf (which looks just like a dog), and gets his own studio in a ramshackle whitewashed house, bigger on the inside than the outside, and which turns out to be all whitewash and no house. He comes under the tutelage of an eccentric painter named Gulyap Thornapple (whose backstory involving the Ghost Army of World War II is an epic in itself), and eventually – like Pinkwater – becomes a sculptor’s apprentice. Along the way, we encounter the usual Pinkwater assemblage of lunatics and eccentrics, including a mad veteran who rails against education as a conformist conspiracy, the Chicken Man himself, and a mysterious organization called the Lake Scouts which may or may not be robots, or zombies, or aliens, or all of the above. In brief, it’s another fine day in Pinkwaterland, with some elements that may strike closer to home than usual. ‘‘Nonconformist’’ may be a term as archaic as the Beat era Pinkwater describes here, but here and elsewhere he’s made the figure into something almost valorous.
–Gary K. Wolfe
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LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: FAREN MILLER
Blood’s Pride, Evie Manieri (Jo Fletcher Books 978-0857389428, £20.00, 528pp, hc) September 2012. (Tor 978-0-7653-3234-9, $24.99, 516pp, hc) February 2013.
Dreams and Shadows, C. Robert Cargill (HarperVoyager 978-0-06-219042-0, $24.99, 434pp, hc) March 2013.
The Devil’s Looking Glass, Mark Chadbourn (Bantam UK 978-0593062494, £12.99, 384pp, tp) April 2012. (Pyr 978-1-61614-700-6, $17.95, 312pp, tp) February 2013. Cover by Chris McGrath.
SHORT TAKES
The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince, Robin Hobb (Subterranean 978-1-59606-544-4, $35.00, 184pp, hc) March 2013. Cover by Jon Foster. [Order from Subterranean Press, PO Box 190106, Burton MI 48519;
Etiquette and Espionage, Gail Carriger (Little, Brown 978-0-316-19008-4, $17.99, 310pp, hc) February 2013.
I start with two impressive first novels. Blood’s Pride is Book One of The Shattered Kingdoms, a trilogy with elements of the medievalesque epic, while Dreams and Shadows is more of an urban fantasy, but both deal with the conflict and interplay between characters from different worlds, mortal and magical.
Evie Manieri transforms the warrior race of Blood’s Pride from Vikings, ship-raiders who may conquer other lands but remain essentially mortal, into Norlanders who resemble some weird combination of aliens and zombies, with their unspoken
The background may not sound all that thrilling or unconventional, but the writing makes it feel absolutely genuine. There’s none of a newbie’s tendencies toward excess or uncertainty. In a brief conversation between Norlander and Shadari, when one speaks of a lost sister and the other swiftly sketches a doorway in thin air, they aren’t just introducing plot points (a presumed death, a way between worlds). Plain words add to the emotional impact of lines like these: ‘‘‘Harotha is dead.’ The words felt cold and hard leaving his mouth.’’
As it turns out, that sister isn’t dead, and becomes a major player. Though massively pregnant, she keeps on working as one of the Shadari temple seers who use a magical elixir to summon visions: mental trips through time. Most visions show enigmatic fragments of the future, but a few go the other way. Sent tumbling into her people’s past, Harotha glimpses ceremonies, judgments, victories, and defeats as a ‘‘dizzying spectacle’’ that moves ‘‘in jerky little jumps through a series of confusing tableaux.’’ She grasps enough to be appalled. At a major turning point for a once-proud culture, paranoia triumphed over reason with horrendous results:
From the depth of this fear came the decision to protect the future by erasing the past. Harotha watched with a deep, howling loss as they threw their books and scrolls onto the bonfires, consigning all their knowledge, all the Shadari’s history, to the flames…. And over the people they set a secular king, to deal with the city’s terrestrial affairs.
Centuries passed, visions didn’t give fair warning, dynasties failed, and most Shadari became illiterate fisherfolk, easy prey for Norlander conquerors. Yet even now, some of the old fears linger, along with ancient temple rituals, hierarchies in the pursuit of uncanny knowledge, and rare acts of rebellion.
Harotha is fascinated by other people’s views of the universe. When her adventures lead to a simple meal with the Nomas king, breaking bread out in the desert, she asks him point-blank: ‘‘Do you really believe the sun is your father?’’ Unruffled and a bit amused by this brash Shadari, he responds, ‘‘You have a very complicated relationship with your gods, you know that? Ours is much simpler. Our gods don’t want anything in particular with us, and we don’t expect them to pay us any particular attention.’’
While other faiths expect far more, and magic can work wonders, the book tends to view all this with a refreshing lack of pomp. A boy with some kind of special powers behaves like any brash kid, eager to ride Manieri’s version of dragons, but sometimes in need of his mama. The critters that attract him have enough stench and bulk to make a man wonder, just how do they fly? As for romance, when a Norlander engages in sex with someone from another race, physical contact takes precedence over high feelings. Two very different types of skin, two forms of blood, come together in a surprising mixture of heat and chill – though the result may still be pregnancy (as Harotha knows all too well).
Pragmatic attitudes and goals mingle with the uncanny in a complex web of plots, as the perspective shifts between characters and cultures to gradually uncover a multitude of relationships, schemes, and secrets. Harotha’s brother Faroth, a Shadari freedom fighter, sees all Norlanders as enemies. The Norlander governor’s elder daughter Frea has plans of her own, bold enough to startle the nobly born soldier who is her lover: ‘‘Her genius for mayhem took his breath away.’’ That’s the insight of an intimate moment. Viewed from a greater distance, some people take on almost legendary stature for the coming war, with names like The White Wolf and The Mongrel.
Blood’s Pride takes its title from a sword. Despite her hereditary claim to one ‘‘opulently jeweled’’ weapon, Frea lets younger sister Isa grab the thing from their mother’s tomb and drag it off to her room. In its place Frea commissions Blood’s Pride, ‘‘according to her own precise specifications.’’ Norlander law won’t let Isa keep the gaudy heirloom without fighting for it when she turns 17 – a Naming Day tradition that their brother Eofar calls ‘‘pointless ritual.’’ The way he sees it, ‘‘Two women bang their swords together, the older one lets herself get pricked in the arm and then everyone goes off and gets drunk in the hall.’’
While the novel is full of such iconoclasts, this just ramps up the emotional force of scenes where the supernatural can’t be denied. It’s a remarkable feat for a newcomer, and leaves me eager for the sequel, Fortune’s Bligh
t.
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In his debut Dreams and Shadows, C. Robert Cargill takes an even more eclectic approach to fantasy, mingling the domains of Faerie, Djinn, and angels with modern Austin TX, for a book about changelings and worlds only a ‘‘veil’’ apart.
Initially, he uses the terms of fairy tales to introduce romance: ‘‘Once upon a time, there were two people who fell very much in love.’’ What follows swiftly grows mundane and a bit silly. This pair are teenagers who ‘‘met in a high school library, peeking over tenth-grade French books….’’ Jared’s a stammering nerd; Tiffany giggles and wears horn-rimmed glasses (‘‘He was a sucker for horn-rimmed glasses’’). After a first date at the movies, with a stop at a Dairy Queen, as they walk home he notices she’s nervous and realizes ‘‘she was his.’’ They marry, move to Austin, have a child named Ewan.
A scholar provides exposition for the book’s wealth of fantastic elements and inventions. Excerpts from the work of Dr. Thaddeus Ray, Ph.D., appear as brief chapters, notable for their directness and lack of academic jargon. Chapter Two informs us:
The Bendith Y Maumau are the world’s greatest musicians. They cannot sing a note, their baritone voices more akin to a walrus’ bellow than anything else, but with an instrument in their hands they can weave some of the most sensuous, melodic music ever heard…. It is this music that fairy communities use to hold captives, without need of chain or tether.