PRAISE FOR
JEAN-CHRISTOPHE VALTAT AND AURORARAMA
“He is funny, intelligent, lyrically precise, and frequently self-aware.”
—JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORKER
“A magnificent achievement, balancing serious intent with arch humour. It’s also beautifully stylish, replete with inventive steampunk iconography and fantastical characters in a stunning polar setting.”
—ERIC BROWN, THE GUARDIAN
“The novel glides on silver skates from the surreal to the absurd to the languorously decadent … Irresistible.”
—LAURA MILLER, SALON
“Combining Arctic adventure with Victorian fantasy, this page-turner is as sparkling and colorful as the northern lights.”
—SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
“Aurorarama [presents] one of the most thoroughly conceived alternative universes I’ve ever encountered.”
—WIRED
“Aurorarama tells a tale of political intrigue (secret police! Eskimos! Prisoner-esque hovering airship!) with some truly lyrical prose.”
—io9
“Jean-Christophe Valtat’s Aurorarama follows steampunk’s basic conventions, but its influences and setting are of a different species. Narrated as a trans-Arctic alterna-history, Aurorarama harks back to Jules Verne, Raymond Roussel, and Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre … This surrealism is largely what distinguishes Aurorarama from standard-issue steampunk … Aurorarama mesmerizes less for its intricate plot twists or descriptions of steam-powered gizmos than for its extraordinary dramatization of the birth and death of a civilization.”
—ERIK MORSE, BOOKFORUM
“[Aurorarama] entrances and delights. You could spend years picking apart the sly references and the particular myths, poems, novels and songs that inspired Valtat, or you can simply enjoy it for the experience. Valtat is making his American debut in a big way … With his remarkable enthusiasm and bravery, it’s completely possible he’ll conquer the world.”
—JESSA CRISPIN, NPR
“Aurorarama is perhaps what Jules Verne would write if woken from the dead and offered a dose of mushrooms … An enjoyable amalgam of thriller, fantasy, and polar adventure, topped off with a sprinkling of anarchist intrigue … Valtat’s world is ingeniously imagined and peopled with an alluring cast.”
—JACOB SILVERMAN,
THE NATIONAL (ABU DHABI)
“Marvelous, perfect, and perfectly marvelous! … [Aurorarama] promises to attract discerning and sophisticated readers galore, those fans of the fantastical who are tired of second-hand visions and stale conceits … Valtat’s novel is Little Nemo in Slumberland as retold by a trio of Jeff Noon, Steve Aylett and William Burroughs. I can hardly wait for its sequels.”
—PAUL DI FILIPPO,
THE BARNES & NOBLE REVIEW
“As well-written as it is well-imagined … Aurorarama explicitly blends conventional narrative pleasures with the logic of dreaming.”
—STRANGE HORIZONS
“Aurorarama is an experience to be savored.”
—MAKE MAGAZINE
“The prose is gorgeous, undeniably so.”
—SAN FRANCISCO
BOOK REVIEW
“A terrific storyteller, Valtat mixes humor and poetry, romance and politics into a surprisingly thoughtful page-turner about social revolution.”
—MATTHEW JAKUBOWSKI, PASTE MAGAZINE
“[Valtat] has a magical sense of shape and a gift for lyrical prose that are rare in modern writing.”
—LA CROIX
“Valtat [is a writer of] beautiful energy.”
—LE MONDE
“The most noteworthy contribution to steampunk in almost two decades … Aurorarama rejuvenates an entire subgenre, adding creativity and accuracy (historical and, more importantly, tonal) to a field that risks being defined solely by corsets and airships. Beyond its importance in legitimizing steampunk, Aurorarama is a sparkling read—breathing, human characters wandering amok in one of the most captivating cities in fiction.”
—PORNOKITSCH
LUMINOUS CHAOS
Copyright © 2013 by Jean-Christophe Valtat
Illustrations © 2013 by Mahendra Singh
First Melville House printing: October 2013
Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
and
8 Blackstock Mews
Islington
London N4 2BT
mhpbooks.com facebook.com/mhpbooks @melvillehouse
The Library of Congress has cataloged the
hardcover edition of this book as follows:
Valtat, Jean-Christophe, 1968–
Luminous chaos : a novel / Jean-Christophe Valtat ; [illustrated by] Mahendra Singh. — First edition.
p. cm. — (The mysteries of new Venice; Book two)
eISBN: 978-1-61219-142-3
1. Anarchists—Fiction. 2. Time travel—Fiction. 3. Paris (France)—Fiction. 4. Steampunk fiction. I. Title.
PQ2682.A438L86 2013
843′.914—dc23
2013027517
v3.1
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
EPISODE I: Every Doge Has His Day
EPISODE II: The Most Serene Seven
EPISODE III: The Lost Embassy
EPISODE IV: In Morphine Mists
EPISODE V: The Mechanical Medium
EPISODE VI: Etherama
EPISODE VII: The Enigma of the Snow-Globe Eye
EPISODE VIII: The City of Blood
EPISODE IX: The Secret Chief
EPISODE X: Recognitions
EPISODE XI: The Empire of Death
EPISODE XII: The Black Aurora
EPISODE XIII: The Doppelganger Gang Murders
“Parisian literature of the byways has its own methods, and its purveyors are shrewd enough to know what will be tolerated and what enjoyed by their peculiar class of patrons; transcendental toxicology and an industry in idols worked by criminals intercommunicating by means of Volapük may be left to them.”
—A. E. Waite, Devil Worship in France, 1896
“Of Paris, what am I to say? All of it was of course a delirium, a tomfoolery.”
—Fyodor Dostoyevski, The Gambler, 1865
I
The Divorce with the Sea
On that sunny St. Mark’s day in 1907 A.B.—After Backwards—the white Buildings of New Venice bristled with flags and were heavy with banners, while all along the thronged embankments a cheering crowd waved through a colourful whirlwind of streamers and confetti. As far as the eye could see, a canalcade of ribboned gondolas paraded under draped bridges, crushing brittle pancakes of ice with their gleaming gilded prows.
It was a great day for New Venice, but for Brentford Orsini it was the worst of his life.
He sat under a canopy in the leading gondola, with a look on his face so sombre that Dürer’s Melancholia might have patted him on the back and offered to buy him a drink. Even his mind’s eye was frowning as he remembered that this was the very same route he had taken, barely more than a year earlier, on his way to kick the Council of Seven out of the City they had dishonoured. What for? What good had it done? Weren’t they all almost back to where they’d started?
The crowd above him seemed a noisy, bothersome blur. He wouldn’t have been surprised if they had stoned him and shouted abuse, or, more aptly, jeered at his naïveté. That would have made more sense than this masquerade, which mocked everything he had ever made or meant.
Today was the day when, after a year of rule that had passed as quickly as a dream, he was to hand over his position as
Regent-Doge to his elected successor. There was nothing wrong with this in principle: after all, he himself had penned the part of the City and Commonwealth Charter that regulated the Regency until the legitimate Doges, Geraldine and Reginald Elphinstone, came of age to govern the City of New Venice and the Northwasteland Commonwealth. He had not even been personally defeated: the charter did not allow a regent to be a candidate for his own succession. This should have been his triumph, a testimony to his ability to protect the wintering ship of state and to his integrity in giving back, as promised, the rudder that he had snatched from the senile hands of the Council of Seven.
But no: every time Brentford looked to his left and saw Peterswarden wearing the robe and golden stole of the Regent-Doge, he felt like the King of Fools.
Brentford’s reign had started off well, though, with the admittedly gruesome but nonetheless rather positive news that the entire Council of Seven had been engulfed in a crack while crossing an ice-cutting field, shortly after the uprising that had banned them from New Venice. It had happened a few miles away from the city, and for some weeks it had been a favourite excursion among New Venetians to snowshoe or skate to the place of the accident, where heads of reindeer frozen in their struggle could still be seen protruding like puzzled chess knights on an infinite white square. Brentford had felt not so much sorrow as a certain sense of safety, which, he now discovered, had been illusory.
If Poletics had a taste, it would be bittersweet. The moments of pure enthusiasm that had followed Geraldine and Reginald’s Restoration as the direct descendants of the city’s founders, the Seven Sleepers, along with the advent of something like a republic, had progressively evaporated, leaving—what a surprise—a more motley, complicated reality.
To begin with, the Forty Friends, though far away from the city they funded, had not appreciated the always rather subservient Council of Seven being replaced without their assent. Their investments, already on the wane before the revolution, had dwindled steadily ever since. That had not saddened Brentford, as economic autonomy was his ultimate goal, but it had infuriated certain classes of citizens, mostly tradesmen and shopkeepers, who suddenly discovered a passion for democratic debate exactly proportional to the drop in their income.
Then the Senate of the Seven Sectors, the first ever to be freely elected—by women as well!—and on which Brentford had relied to carry on the reforms, had proved somewhat prone to bickering and rather receptive to lobbying, when not, Brentford suspected, to the odd outright bribe. On the whole, Brentford refrained from forming any highfalutin theory of human nature, but he had to admit that he was disappointed.
Still, he’d had high hopes that when the elections came, Pieter Van Reimerswaal, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer for Everyday Entertainment and Exceptional Events, a clever, pleasant, and serviceable man, would win the necessary majority. The unexpected candidacy of Peterswarden, a notorious supporter of the Council of Seven—and the brain behind that most Machiavellian of schemes, the Inuit People’s Ice Palace—had been an ill omen and a political masterstroke, which Brentford was pretty sure had originated with the Forty Friends and the local lodges that supported them. As a Scandinavian, Peterswarden had naturally lobbied to get the votes that depended on the wavering senator from Niflheim, but even worse, he had used his anthropologist’s knowledge of the Inuit world to somehow convince Igjuktuk, the Inuk senator from the new Inuvik Sector, to tip the scales in his favour. Brentford had fought hard for Inuit civil rights, and felt the result of the elections as a bloody backstabbing. He doubted that the Inuit had forty words for snow, but he felt he could use forty words for betrayal.
The cortege eventually arrived at the long Polar Pier and its covered walkway, which led to a white building lined with Doric columns and a tower topped by a meridian globe: the Markham Marina. There, moored a few feet above the ground, softly bobbing in the sharp April breeze, floated the Dukedominion, the luxurious ceremonial airship reserved for such official occasions. Made on the Pennington design, it was elegant and spectacular, with its aluminium envelope shining in the pale polar sun, the characteristic dorsal fin running the whole of its length. Its most striking feature, however, was the gilt heraldic figurehead of the New Venice sea lion curling its powerful fishtail around the keel and defying the ice-fields with its spread wings and sharpened claws.
The party, mostly officials and their guests, disembarked from the gondolas and headed towards the airship, while the crowd looked on from behind fences or from the private ice boats strewn across Marco Polo Bay. Colourful balloons in the shape of the sectors’ animal totems could be seen floating all around, while much higher, silvery tethered aerostats harvested power from the storms and auroras—one of Brentford’s projects, which filled him with a bitter pride.
He couldn’t help comparing this procession to his own investiture the year before, or seeing the changes in the faces that frolicked and downdolphined in the frothy wake of power. His former mistakes passed all around him in fur coats, sashes, and top hats, mostly former secretaries and servants of the Council, some justly resentful and some whom he had thought better of purging and who, taking his leniency for weakness, had been waiting for the first occasion to bubble back to the surface. As to those who had pandered to him before realizing that was not the right approach, they were now eager to ignore his presence, staring through him as if he had become a ghost.
But Peterswarden, of course, had been his most egregious miscalculation. He had been deeply involved with the Council’s darkest plots, but Brentford had deemed it sufficient punishment that the Northwestern Administration for Native Affairs and the Inuit People’s Ice Palace had been, respectively, reduced to rubble and emptied of all meaning. He had proposed Peterswarden as a chair for the charming but small Academy for Arctic Anthropology and forgotten all about the man, whom he’d dismissed as a simple underling. But Peterswarden, after all, had started as a polar explorer. That required not only toughness and shrewdness but also a sound understanding of networking, fundraising, and public relations, all of which he had used very effectively to orchestrate his comeback. And now there he was, tall, lanky, wiry, and wrinkled, in ceremonial robes and corno ducale, soberly saluting before he stepped up into the ship, while Brentford was reduced to a mere spectator of his own, spectacular downfall.
By and by the guests filled the luxury cabin that ran all along most of the keel. There again, no effort to impress had been spared: on each side, the round ports that joined the dark blue carpeted floor to the panels and mouldings of the gilded ceiling alternated with Arctic-themed oil paintings and carved allegories, all executed in a curvy, intertwined Art Nouveau style. At the far end, raised by two half-circular steps, was the double throne of the Dauphin-Doges, topped by convoluted statues of Boreas and Neptune and framed by figures of Dawn and Night.
There sat Reginald and Geraldine, wrapped together in their black velvet cloak, their clever eyes restless in their little pale faces. To Brentford the presence of these adorable Siamese twins was more a worry than a relief. Their sheer improbability surely incarnated something of New Venice, but even in this they were more heraldic than useful, and doomed to remain so in an increasingly lonely way. Worse, were they ever to be taken seriously, God knew what would happen to them. He suspected that it would be his next mission in the city to protect them from harm.
He could count on Gabriel for support in this, he supposed, as much or as little as anyone ever could count on Gabriel d’Allier for anything. But Gabriel himself (who now nodded at him discreetly from the back of the crowd with a little half-clownish, half-sorry grimace) was also about to leave the service of his two pupils the Twins, and would remain as far as possible from the hassles of a poletical life that he scorned.
Beyond Gabriel, Brentford’s past allies were glaringly absent. Captain-General Mason, dependably independent, had asked to be discharged with the change in administration, as if it prompted him to feel he had somehow failed New Venice, and his suc
cessor, a taciturn Anglo-Alsatian officer named Kurz, could barely conceal his impatience with democracy. Since their support had been decisive in last year’s coup, he supposed the Sophragettes could be counted upon (if, indeed, they still existed!), and likewise the Scavengers, but if it came down to that, it would really signify that he was back in the open, and with a target painted on his back.
He sighed as, with everyone aboard, the Dukedominion was unmoored and, with a whirring of her enormous electric propeller, started slowly to ascend over the ice fields and water leads of the ocean. There was a general silence, and a certain apprehension, for the ship was not the safest that ever flew, and the modest circle of a few wobbly miles that she completed on such days as this one was probably the most ambitious trip she could ever attempt. But the tension relaxed a little when from both sides of the throne a choir intoned the New Venetian Hymn, Purcell’s “Song of the Cold Genius,”
See, see, we assemble
Thy revels to hold,
Tho’ quiv’ring with cold,
We chatter and tremble.
It was the cue for the ceremony to begin. Peterswarden walked to the side port halfway along the keel, which was decorated with a Tiffany stained glass depicting a rather convoluted allegory of Justice. There, the purple-clad Elected Elders of the House of Honours and Heraldry presented him with both a nosegay of greenhouse roses and the Vera, a golden ring on a blue velvet cushion. He took oaths over it, a long mechanical series of formulaic promises meant to reassure the assembly of his submission to the Dauphin-Doges and the Senate, although it was well known by all that he actually controlled most of the senators. Then, a little square window was opened in the porthole itself, letting in a cold draft that made everyone shiver, and in profound silence, Peterswarden threw the ring overboard, while uttering the ritual formula: “We espouse thee, O sea, as a token of our perpetual dominion over thee.”
The crowd burst into applause and Brentford felt a pang of jealousy. Marrying the frozen sea from the lofted airship had been his towering moment, and poletical questions aside, it made him sick to watch Peterswarden stepping into his enchanted shoes. It was like seeing another man marrying one’s childhood sweetheart.
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