Interzone 252 May-Jun 2014

by Andy Cox, Editor

  A powerful book by any standards, made even more so by the literary device of the ‘book within a book’ meta-narrative, giving it a distance which makes the unfolding events even more unsettling. It deserves to do well. Lotz has a unique voice, which we need to hear more of.

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  LAGOON

  Nnedi Okorafor

  Hodder & Stoughton pb, 320pp, £7.99

  Stephen Theaker

  Lagos was lazily named by Portuguese explorers in 1472, we are told: lagos means lagoon. Five hundred and thirty-eight years later, just after 11.55 pm on 8 January 2010, a huge alien craft plummets into the same lagoon. The ship has a transformative effect on the Nigerian ocean, “now so clean that a cup of its salty-sweet goodness will heal the worst human illnesses and cause a hundred more illnesses not yet known to humankind”. The swordfish we meet in the prologue triples in size, acquires retractable spines and golden armoured skin.

  The aliens are more cautious on land, sending at first a single representative. It/she makes contact with three humans caught in the ten-foot wave thrown up by the ship’s arrival. Adaora is a marine biologist whose husband has just hit her for the first time. Anthony Dey Craze is a famous rapper from Ghana with a way of working magic with a beat. Agu is a soldier, still bleeding after a failed attempt to stop squadmates assaulting a woman. Each felt drawn to the beach.

  Adaora asks their new friend to call herself Ayodele. There is “something both attractive and repellent about the woman”, who they discover is a shapeshifter. She is polite and pleasant, but quite clear on the fact that her people will not be leaving: “No. We stay.” The world has changed, and the question is how to adjust, how to survive, not how to put things back how they were. They take her back to Adaora’s home, but barely have time to talk before word gets out.

  Adaora’s babysitter sends a video of the alien to her sketchy boyfriend Moziz, and he recruits friends to plan a kidnapping. One of them shows the video to the Black Nexus, a LGBT group of which he is secretly a member, and so on. Soon there is a huge and angry crowd outside the house. Meanwhile, the government, near paralysed by the absence of the president – secretly recovering from heart surgery in Saudi Arabia – does little to investigate what’s happening in the bay, or to protect the city and its inhabitants. As Lagos falls prey to riots and chaos, Adaora, Anthony and Agu realise what they must do.

  The characters through whose eyes we see these events are likeable but not paragons, and always interesting to spend time with, especially the alien Ayodele, who is at first unthreatened and amused by the humans she encounters. “You people have your own…little inventions,” she says, upon seeing Adaora’s new computer; she giggles, “a creepy dovelike sound that raised the hairs on Adaora’s arms”. The grating noise that accompanies her transformations, “the sound of metal balls on glass”, reminds us to fear her.

  The dialogue of some characters, in particular Moziz and his gang, is presented in Pidgin English, making it a bit difficult to understand at first. He says about the aliens: “Well, if dem get flying ship, wetin again dem get wey we no sabi?” But readers who persist will get the hang of it; even those who (like me) fail to realise there is a glossary at the back. In any case, SF readers shouldn’t be put off a book by a few sentences in an unfamiliar language.

  Two thirds in, the book takes an unexpected turn. It would be unfair to give away its surprises, but these sequences provide some of its most frightening images, as the alien disruption of our reality intersects with another, older disruption – and it’s all being filmed on phones and uploaded to YouTube, which keeps it grounded. People in the most terrible danger are still pleased to see their hits piling up.

  As the book approaches its conclusion, some readers may wonder sadly if the swordfish introduced in the prologue ever returns. Forget guns on mantelpieces, don’t put giant sea monsters in the first few pages unless they’ll be back to cause havoc. It does return eventually, and it does cause havoc, but don’t expect this book to spend very long at sea. It’s a story of the city, of the fragility of life in a city where some people live in extreme poverty and the government isn’t paying attention, where one well-meaning nudge can have disastrous consequences.

  Lagoon delivers a compelling narrative, characters with interesting pasts, presents and futures, and intriguing alien technology and motivations. For British readers the Nigerian setting may be a novel one, the people we meet in Lagos not those we’ve read about a thousand times before, their perspectives on first contact not those we’re used to seeing. It’s an epic story told in a measured, focused way, that coolly resists the temptation to sprawl, and I liked it a lot.

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  THE BOY WITH THE PORCELAIN BLADE

  Den Patrick

  Gollancz hb, 336pp, £16.00

  Matthew S. Dent

  When challenged, I usually describe myself as a lapsed fantasy fan, in much the same way as others might consider themselves lapsed Catholics. My journey into the world of genre started with the likes of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Anne McCaffrey.

  A large part of what ended up putting me off fantasy was a perceived lack of imagination within the confines of the genre itself.

  So you can see why Den Patrick’s The Boy with the Porcelain Blade appealed to me.

  This is a fantasy in a renaissance-ish Italian setting, rather than the medieval western European model which has become so prevalent; it claims to offer something different. Which is a good starting point for a novel of any genre.

  The shame of it, from this reader’s perspective, is that it fails to capitalise on that.

  The plot follows Lucien de Fontein. Lucien is an “orfano”, which is a difficult concept to explain without spoiling any key plot points; suffice it to say, they are physically different, and nominally under the protection of the king. Lucien dreams of acceptance, but finds himself increasingly drawn into political games as nobles manoeuvre for power around a reclusive, mad king.

  It’s not a bad story, and it’s not too badly told. The problem, principally, is with the pacing. It starts off with a sense that there is some event of great significance about to happen. It then takes a few chapters for it to actually happen.

  The world Patrick has created is complicated, detailed and intricate. It is no surprise that he has concluded that it requires some explanation for readers to find purchase on it, but at times we seem to lurch out of any cohesive or engaging story into an episode of This is Your Life.

  If this stunts the plot development in the early sequence, it is nothing to how infuriating it becomes as the story wears on. Almost all of the action and excitement is in the present, and so for every other chapter to pull the reader out of that present to some ill-defined point in the past is quite jarring.

  I suppose, really, if I’m saying that I was annoyed at being taken out of the story, then I can’t say that it wasn’t engaging. And it was.

  Following its strikingly original setting, it avoided what presumably had been the Assassin’s Creed bear trap, to cling to its very own tone and nature. When it was allowed to run free with the oddity of its own plot it seemed to excel, only to crash down again under the weight of endless confusing social etiquette, or a perplexing focus on the characters’ clothing.

  Perhaps surprisingly, then, the characters were a breath of fresh air. Some of the background characters – including, actually, one of the antagonists, who maybe shouldn’t have been such a background character as he was – were a little cardboard, but the lead characters were real, sympathetic and flawed.

  Lucien is the archetypical stroppy teenager, waking up to the realities of the privilege he has enjoyed, the injustice of the world beyond his walls, and the extent to which he has no control over even his own life. It is tenderly written, without whitewashing him into any sort of stereotype. Lucien was one of the things I found I was most sold on, and most completely believed.

  One thing I feel I have to note is the standard of copyediting. It…wel
l, it wasn’t good. The odd typo is expected in a full-length novel but here I found obvious misspellings, and sentences which made no sense at all. Presumably, my copy having been an uncorrected advance review copy, this will have, on the whole, been rectified when it hits the shelves. But I did notice it, and it did annoy me.

  When it comes to making a final judgement on The Boy with the Porcelain Blade, I’m a little torn.

  It didn’t grip me from cover to cover, true, but as I said there is a lingering sense of promise, the potential to be something bold and original if only it could cast off its own baggage.

  This is the first book in a trilogy – which would be apparent from the endless unexplored feelings of something amiss which seem to be actively ignored by the characters – so there is still space for some of that potential to be realised. But, though it was interesting in a number of ways, it ultimately didn’t wow me and I was left wishing that it could have been more.

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  ASTRA: BOOK ONE OF THE GAIA CHRONICLES

  Naomi Foyle

  Jo Fletcher Books pb, 379pp, £14.99

  Maureen Kincaid Speller

  We tell one another stories to amuse and entertain ourselves, but we tell them also to commemorate, to educate, and, in the most extreme cases, to support an ideology. Astra, the novel’s eponymous protagonist, lives in a community that lays great emphasis on storytelling. The founding myths of Is-land are told over and over in elaborate community ceremonies by people who are only one or two generations removed from those pioneers. It reinforces their sense of who they are and where they’ve come from, but the stories also seem to act as blinkers.

  Is-land itself is a small state located somewhere east of present-day Europe, which was created in the wake of a global economic and environmental collapse by refugees from ecological and neo-pagan communities in what was once the UK. While the details of this collapse are necessarily sketchy – when the novel opens Astra is a child, and as the story is told entirely from her point of view, the reader is entirely reliant on her childish apprehension of these stories – it is clear that the community has worked hard to protect its existence and maintain its philosophy. The communities of Is-land see themselves as working to heal the earth, in Is-land at least; their borders are sealed, to keep out those who would abuse the earth, and they refer to those beyond the Boundary as Non-landers. Is-landers live communally, grow their own food, make their own textiles, build low-impact houses, compost, recycle. Some communities have a relaxed attitude to the human body, eschew clothes and go ‘skyclad’. Yet even through Astra’s unquestioning gaze the reader already notes oddities. Where do the raw materials come from for the Tablettes which are such a feature of every child’s life? Why must the children serve a mandatory term with IMBOD, policing Is-land’s boundaries? Why is so great an emphasis laid on research involving genetic manipulation? For that matter, why does IMBOD seem to take such an interest in every aspect of the children’s lives?

  The novel’s crisis is precipitated by two events, the first of which is Astra’s Shelter-mother, Hokma, persuading her to evade the Security shot, the preliminary to beginning training with IMBOD. Hokma’s concern is that this ‘shot’ suppresses children’s creativity and imagination, making them more open to IMBOD training and easier to manage. The other event is the arrival of Lil, who has grown up without the benefit of community education, raised by a Non-lander father who has taught her a very different version of history. Lil, unlike Astra, does not see Is-land as a paradise and constantly challenges Astra’s vision of the place.

  For the outsider it is quite clear where this story is going, but the narrative is taken at Astra’s pace which means that we follow her rather too slowly through adolescence, preoccupied with such events as the Blood and Seed Ceremony, sporadically wondering why what she is told doesn’t match Lil’s stories, gradually realising that she has not been told the whole truth. Always, there is the background concern as to when, not whether, she will be discovered. This is fine so long as we are interested in Astra herself but despite her secret Astra is mostly an ordinary child, who takes everything pretty much at face value, and that is what the reader is given. Added to that, her world is not only familiar to her but is familiar to anyone who has read a lot of utopian or dystopian fiction. Much of what is actually going must go unremarked on by Astra because she simply doesn’t have access to it. As adult readers we might note that the general community seems either to be kept in ignorance or to deliberately maintain such a stance but without an adult viewpoint we cannot know, not until the end of the novel, and even then there are only hints. Too often it seems that Astra is a vehicle for Foyle to show us round the world she has created, and the action will only properly start in the second volume of the series.

  Foyle has commented in articles that she is especially interested in the domestic in SF but while I’m sympathetic to the notion, domestic is not the same as ordinary. An author has to work very hard to make the ordinary seem compelling and I do not think that Foyle fully achieves this. Is-land’s stories about itself succeed so well that its inhabitants cannot see past them; for the reader, heavily reliant on one of those characters for information, the story behind the story remains mostly inaccessible, as a result of which the novel itself can never fully come to life.

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  THE FIRST FIFTEEN LIVES OF HARRY AUGUST

  Claire North

  Orbit hb, 407pp, £14.99

  Jack Deighton

  There is a potential problem with the central premise of novels broadly comparable to this. It is one which also besets any work of fiction set either in virtual reality or a computer game. To wit: if a character cannot die – or can be resurrected after death – where is the jeopardy? Why ought readers invest time and energy; why should they care? Here that problem is encapsulated by the title. We know before the outset that Harry August has at least fifteen lives. Why, then, for example, should the grubby circumstances of his conception and initial upbringing matter to us? However, North – the publisher emphasises that the author is pseudonymous but has experience – neatly sidesteps the issue by beginning her story at the end of Harry’s eleventh life, thus making it clear that any single life journey is not of itself crucial. And the jeopardy is not to Harry alone, but to human existence. “The world is ending.”

  This idiosyncratic book reads at various points as if the author could not quite decide what sort of beast it actually is, first like a literary novel, then a thriller, a historical tract, a spy story and a tale of revenge - all the while riffing on Alternative History. And, yes, it does veer (rather suddenly) into more straightforward Science Fiction about halfway through, then morphs back again before returning to SF for its dénouement. As befits a tale of someone with more than fifteen lives the narrative is not linear but skitters about, incorporating vignettes from Harry’s existences and encounters with others of his kind. Yet it does manage to come together as a more or less coherent whole.

  Harry is one of the kalachakra, an ouroboran, humans whose consciousness and memories of previous lives recycle back to birth after their death. In subsequent lives these memories begin to resurface after infancy. Before the lives accumulate this can lead to madness, later there can be advantages. Perhaps even worse for Harry, he is what the kalachakra call a mnemonic: he forgets nothing. Kalachakra are few enough at any one time but are scattered throughout history, sometimes leaving messages in stone to their successors. No explanation is given for their unusual attribute, their reincarnations just happen. Their knowledge of past lives ensures that no new one is a carbon copy of a previous existence. The Cronus Club, an organisation kalachakra have set up to succour their kind, can help remove them from the boredom of a re-lived childhood. And it turns out that the circumstances of Harry’s birth do matter. Kalachkra can be excised from the world, if they are prevented from being born. Harry’s obscure origins are a shield against any such calamity.

  In each of his lives the broad sweep of history
is similar but it is not emphasised in the text, except where the differences are obvious, that the detail means subsequent lives cannot be lived in the original but instead take place in parallel worlds. In a stance reminiscent of Star Trek’s Prime Directive, the Cronus Club tries to ensure that kalachakra do not interfere with the course of history. Such activity has led to cataclysm at least once before.

  Harry’s parallel existences have allowed him to learn many languages. His various employments take him all over the world, mainly in iterations of the 1950s, the primes of his lives, to a research establishment in the Soviet Union, the China of the Great Leap Forward, and to the USA. In one of these lives Harry is a physicist and meets the charismatic Vincent Rankis, subsequently becoming involved in Rankis’s project to build a quantum mirror – a device which will bestow a God’s perspective on the world.

  While the writing is effective and for the most part reads smoothly, out of kilter phrases such as “a skill as much valued in the incompetence than the mastery” (about punting on the Cam) might suggest that English is not actually North’s first language. There is also a lack of fine tuning in the last chapter where the readership to whom the narrative is addressed shifts from where it had lain up to then, the general (you and me) to the specific. In addition the resolution comes a little too easily and strikes against the established character of Harry’s antagonist.

  This book may well become an award nominee but for all its apparent ground-breaking aspirations and apocalyptic overtones The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is in the end a rather conventional tale. But then, in all of literature, there are said to be only seven distinct plots.