Interzone 252 May-Jun 2014

by Andy Cox, Editor

  THE MOON KING

  Neil Williamson

  NewCon Press hb, 352pp (with bonus material), £24.99 / pb, 340pp, £12.99

  Neil Williamson’s debut novel, The Moon King, has all the complexity, power and emotional charge that admirers of his short fiction have come to expect from his work. Meticulously crafted, compelling and moving, it is a tale of long established tradition in conflict with social unrest, an authoritarian system at odds with individual aspiration and technology colliding with the all but irresistible forces of nature.

  From the outset the book triggers a series of associations with a number of classic works of SF and fantasy. There’s the same relish for rich and idiosyncratic character, labyrinthine ritual and unsettling architecture that you find in Peake’s Gormenghast books. Then there’s an oneiric exploration of the post-industrial metropolis with vague echoes of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, and the same sense of precision-engineered illusion you get in Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner. Like all of these illustrious points of reference, The Moon King has a deliciously masochistic feeling of claustrophobia. And, like all of them, it is imbued with a subtle but robust strand of political engagement. It’s an imaginative tour de force. It’s a captivating page-turner of a mystery story. But it’s also a tale that questions the way we understand ourselves, our social interactions and our relationship with the natural world.

  Glassholm is an island city whose culture is mired in ancient and rigidly observed tradition. It’s a hard place, subject to the powerful influence of the moon, and its survival appears to be critically dependent on the rasping operation of ancient but intricate machinery and the carefully choreographed, and sedulously recorded, actions of the Lunane, or Moon King. The city’s benevolent monarch.

  The story unfolds through a series of dark discoveries, spectacular confrontations, unreliable memories, confusing episodes, nightmares and fleeting glimpses. It soon becomes apparent there is a dark and disturbing reality beneath the ritual and apparent order. There are strange and elusive creatures, unravelling illusions, mysterious machines, labyrinthine conspiracies, acts of staggering brutality and political cans of worms. This is a carefully imagined and brilliantly rendered vision of a world in crisis.

  Against an adamantine sociopolitical backdrop, we track the stories of three deftly drawn and disparate characters: there’s Anton Dunn, a dissident engineer who has stumbled into the Court of the Moon King seeking a lost lover; Lottie Blake, an artist alienated from her fanatically religious family; and John Mortock, a cop forced into early retirement.

  Anton, jilted on his wedding day, embarks on a spectacular bender and wakes the following morning with an apocalyptic hangover. It happens to the best of us, I suppose. But few of us wake up in a spectacular, circular bed in the personal chamber of the reigning monarch. Even more disorienting, the court’s servants appear convinced Anton is really the Lunane, and seem determined to persuade him that ‘Anton Dunn’ is merely an imagined identity.

  Lottie’s casual sexual encounter with an overseas visitor during the period of ‘Full’, when inhibition and restraint are abandoned, leads to an unsettling relationship. The artist’s life is complicated by her connection to dissident groups in Glassholm and her sense that all is not well below the carefully presented surfaces of her society. Meanwhile, Mortlock investigates a series of vicious murders and struggles to come to terms with the guilt-infused undercurrents of his life as a cop. These stories ferment into a strange brew of deceptive plots, dark secrets and profound and unsettling revelation.

  There are ‘luck monkeys’ running amok, archives of manuscripts put to the torch, wandering moons, impossibly contrived and intricate contraptions, bizarre sects and forgotten but rediscovered people. The political irony is handled with impressive subtlety and engagement and the richly imagined set pieces are sustained through a driving narrative that competes with Glassholm’s strange machines in terms of its intricacy and flamboyant energy.

  The Moon King embeds biting sociocultural observation in a narrative that fizzes with inventive energy, provocative wit and consummate artistry. Often dazzling but always imaginative, intensely serious yet enormously entertaining, it is a sparkling debut novel that breaks fresh ground for Neil Williamson and adds to his growing reputation as an accomplished storyteller in the short form.

  A common frustration with many satirical and dystopian fantasies is their tendency to wallow in a cynical, life-negating view of humankind. This is not an indulgence Williamson allows himself. If he casts a jaundiced eye over our corruption, cruelty, folly and conservatism, he also celebrates humanity’s resilience, passion and talent for reinvention.

  The Moon King is challenging and intricate. Were there three separate but intersecting narratives at the outset or did the complexity emerge as the story unfolded for you?

  Confession time. The Moon King is my first novel and I had no idea what I was doing. As a short story writer who had rarely got past ten thousand words, the idea of filling a novel’s worth of pages with story seemed daunting, so my reasoning was that it’d be easier if I wrote three people’s stories instead of just one. In retrospect, it wasn’t easier. But it was the right thing for the book. Once I’d started down that road, the challenge was to make those stories work together to tell the larger story. There was a lot of shoogling things about over the years to get it right, including retelling one of the characters stories almost from scratch. I hope that work has paid off and it all fits together.

  There’s a powerful sense of place in The Moon King, with the themes deeply embedded in the geography and built environment. How important has living in Glasgow been to the development of this book?

  Absolutely fundamental. Glasgow is a place of colossal mood swings. Its location on the west coast of Scotland means the weather changes constantly. It’s capable of being filled with light one minute, then dark and dreary with rain the next. The traditional Victorian building material was sandstone, which not only glows in the sun and darkens in the wet but is also incredibly durable. I wanted Glassholm – the name is hardly subtle – to be a city that goes through monthly moon-phased cycles of entropy and decay followed by growth and mending, to a degree, to be doughty and durable. And Glasgow has those features in abundance.

  Possibly more subtly, I wanted to get across a sense of the politics of the place. Traditionally, Glasgow is possibly the most socialist place in the UK, but still exists within a society that, to a degree, has conservatism foisted upon it. In the book, Glassholm is literally a conservative society, but the people who live there demonstrate a natural inbuilt socialism that plays against the rules of their society, and comes to the fore when those rules start to break down.

  Lastly, there are flavours of the Glaswegian attitude, humour and pattern of speech throughout the book because they’re as much a part of the personality of the city as the architecture. There are a few Scots terms and phrases in there too that gave rise to interesting discussions with my editor, but nothing that will trouble the non-Scottish reader, I promise.

  How do you see your role as a storyteller?

  Writing is an act of communication, but I don’t think I’ve got anything to say that the world needs to hear. It’s fun to invent things that don’t exist, but reality always seems to have something equally odd up its sleeve. (Have you ever grown Brussels sprouts? Who would invent a vertical stalk clustered with tiny controversial cabbages? Or naked mole-rats? Or people who dress their dogs up as bees?) And, yes, fiction is a safe space in which to imagine monstrosities, but the world continually conjures worse terrors regardless. I write primarily because I get a huge kick out of creating stuff.

  To what extent has your work as a technical writer informed your writing of The Moon King, stylistically and thematically?

  Only very tangentially. In terms of style, technical writing is all about conveying information with clarity and brevity. There’s no place for linguistic fun and games, which I enjoy, so I’ve always maintained two
entirely different approaches for technical writing and fiction writing. Having said that, I draft long-winded and then edit back to leave as little as I can get away with so that the meaning of a passage is absolutely clear, so maybe, subconsciously, the technical writing skills are in operation there.

  More tangentially still, but more pertinent to the book is that I freakin’ love engineering. Specifically, engineering as a philosophy, not just technology. My university degree is in electronic engineering and my career as a technical writer grew out of that. I’ve always thought it a shame that the default mode for fantasy is pre-industrial and I don’t buy the notion that industrial progress is synonymous with the death of magic. Machines are amazing – especially ones we don’t understand. In The Moon King, there are fantastical elements in the world and the human solution has been to create machines that harness these. In fact, the central story is about an engineer press-ganged into fixing the machine that keeps the moon orbiting the city. Even though the machine is now so old that no one has a clue how it works. There’s something very seductive to me about balancing rational thinking against the unexplainable and it’s a subject I’ve visited several times in short stories.

  What drew you to SF as a reader and writer?

  In terms of novels I was never an SF reader growing up. In my teens I read a lot of horror and then dabbled with epic fantasy for a bit, but it wasn’t until I joined the Glasgow SF Writers’ Circle in my twenties that I really started reading SF novels. They had lots of good suggestions, and I also set myself the task of reading at least one book by each of the ‘greats’ of the genre. I quickly discovered that I detested Asimov and Heinlein, got on okay with Clarke and Silverberg, but loved Delaney and Bester. That challenge is still ongoing. Every Eastercon I buy one of those thin, yellow-papered novels with the wacky covers by a writer I’ve heard loads about but never read.

  However, before that, in terms of short fiction, I can pinpoint it exactly: Interzone. I picked up my first copy of Interzone in 1988 or thereabouts. I’m not sure where I purchased it or what made me even pick it up. I’d certainly never heard of any of the writers – S.M. Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Gwynneth Jones, Ian McDonald, Eric Brown, Keith Brooke, Charles Stross et al weren’t just new to me, many of them were only just beginning their careers. But from that initial issue I loved the richness and strangeness of the experience of reading it. Because SF was new to me, I was blown away. There were no safe stories. There were weird stories and baffling stories and challenging stories and ones that broke my heart, but nothing that was just okay. It was one of those stories, Ian MacLeod’s ‘Well Loved’ from issue #34, which made me want to write stories of my own. I was living in a shared house in Shepperton, not far from the home of J.G. Ballard, an Interzone contributor at that time, as it happened, and true to my youthful engineer’s way of thinking I typed the MacLeod story out on my Amstrad PC so that I could take it apart and find out how it worked. Not long after that, I moved back to Scotland and started writing.

  I’m not saying this because of where this interview is taking place. I’m saying it because it’s true: Interzone has been one of the cornerstones of developing new voices in British SF throughout the twenty five plus years I’ve been reading it. And it’s still true. Without Interzone, The Moon King wouldn’t exist, and neither would this chat.

  * * *

  ANNIHILATION

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Fourth Estate hb, 195pp, £10.00

  Jo L. Walton

  Eleven failed expeditions have ventured into Area X. We embed with the twelfth – a psychologist, a surveyor, a linguist, an anthropologist, and a protagonist – as they cross Area X’s mysterious border, hoping to discover their precursors’ fates.

  Annihilation, first in a trilogy to be drip-fed throughout 2014, is part dark fantasy horror, part sci-fi adventure into verdant wilderness, and part bittersweet fabulism. The prose is lucid, gripping, and establishes a not altogether disagreeable sense of “breathless and unexplainable dread,” in H.P. Lovecraft’s words. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1936) and William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland (1908) are significant precedents in their mix of trepidation, adventure, and rapture. Annihilation can also boast a crawler and a pit, a bit like Abraham Merritt’s ‘The People of the Pit’ (1918).

  The biologist narrates. Whereas most of the other characters are deliberately vaguened, the biologist is richly and distinctively drawn. But even her richness is based on a particular sort of inwardness and inaccessibility: she is detached, taciturn, guarded.

  She’s equipped with backstory, with some antiquated kit – Glass and Siri go wonky in Area X – and sometimes with antiquated style. In moments of stately, mannered, almost translationy storytelling, she evokes the claustrophobic atmosphere of dignified cordiality of – say – the bourgeoisie of Sárszeg on the eve of the First World War.

  That archaistic stuffiness is conducive to a specific sort of anxiety and repugnance. You might call it a repugnance at oneself as nothing more than a fragment of social and economic architecture. It’s palpable in the way Annihilation’s characters go nameless, pared down to their professions. But Area X turns out to be difficult to circumscribe, and this specific sort of repugnance also turns out to be insidiously pervasive. It’s something far beyond a Fight Club-ish complaint about the suckiness of office life. Franz Kafka or – even better – Thomas Bernhard often portrayed scrupulously distinctive situations that somehow conveyed administrative anonymity nevertheless. Likewise Annihilation gives us, for instance, the protagonist’s husband as a “man who had been a passionate recreational sailor”, who “had never wanted to be a doctor, had always wanted to be in first response or working in trauma. ‘A triage nurse in the field,’ as he put it”. Shudder.

  A related shudder is the way Annihilation’s various intellectual disciplines (psychology, anthropology, etc.) are always tacitly turning people into objects. Perhaps it’s significant that the expedition’s linguist flakes so early on. The psychoanalytic philosopher Jacques Lacan once claimed that anti-intellectualism was always an alibi for something deeper – fear of language itself. In fact, the linguist never properly appears. Almost as if linguists were comforting stories told to children, because language has become so terrifyingly incomprehensible.

  One example of such language is Annihilation’s long green sentence spinning into the darkness. It is described as something out of the Old Testament, may recall the voice from the whirlwind in The Book of Job – the divine presence whose only justification is that He does not need to justify Himself.

  The association of language and contamination feels even more relevant though. Language is both outside us and part of our make-up. Change language and you change the soul. Annihilation also features post-hypnotic suggestions, sparked by short phrases (or, in one of the more superb passages, by a solitary word), a sort of allegorical example of personal getting usurped by events within language.

  Then there’s a certain crucial festering heap, a prolix monument to failure, which recalls a long history of missions to purify language in one way or another – to finally, once and for all, get language right. Obviously these missions are also doomed. Hymn-smith Rev. Isaac Watts described how “words that once were chaste by frequent use grow obscene and uncleanly” (Logick Ch. IV) – his own “the Lord is come” hasn’t dated well. For the Victorians, trousers became indescribables and then unmentionables, whilst inside them legs became limbs and then lower extremities. Euphemistic and roundabout ways of talking often feel just as festeringly infective as the corruption they are supposed to contain.

  Annihilation can certainly be cutting-edge too, with many kinds of uncanniness at play. The approach of Annihilation to facsimiles and metamorphoses is subtly informed by Singularity-type SF of the Noughties and beyond. The scary sentence loops in space, just as Bernhard’s sentences loop syntactically; but here Bernhard is perhaps filtered through the metaphysical horror writer Thomas Ligotti – t
he fragments of the sentence are redolent of the dreamy, hammily prophetic, and yet incrementally terrifying titles in Ligotti’s In a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land, His Shadow Shall Rise To A Higher House etc. (And just as Bernhard/Ligotti try to prang us out with italics, VanderMeer insists that something “has to do with the other boot print”).

  Annihilation courses unfailingly with crisp cinematic cues too. The recurring motif of green light is very UFO. Dolphins flash in the river. The biologist bursts a trapdoor with a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other. I got left feeling, “Whatever you think of the story, it was beautifully shot.”

  Annihilation feels self-contained, despite a whole rich tapestry of loose ends. And despite a multitude of influences – I’ve picked a few that make sense to me, but the connections and associations keep bubbling up – it is remarkably even, integrated and focused. Perhaps that’s because VanderMeer isn’t really being influenced by his uncanny inheritance so much as manipulating it. There is a ghostly attaché to the expedition’s experts: the anthologist. The anthologist has pored over more uncanny screeds than you’ve eaten hot TL;DRs. Jeff VanderMeer – this is what they say – always knows where to score some weird. It’s to his credit that this suggestive little novel doesn’t just put its suggestiveness in service of a creepfest, but also discovers thematic direction.

  By the way, plenty of explorers of Area X have already come back and everything. Wha-a-a-a-t? Why are you looking at me like that? When did I claim otherwise?

  This is another of Annihilation’s characteristic moves – a subtly disfigured cliché, which nourishes you with its ancient resonances, yet somehow still wrong-foots you. That particular trope is folded into a second, of the gibbering expeditionary who has seen That Horror Whereof One Cannot Speak. Once more, it’s not quite the cliché you expected: the protagonist’s husband came back from Area X, but he didn’t foetus up and cackle. He just stared, a bit nonplussed, at a boat.