If that’s a contentious statement, it’s meant to be. Abnett (who came up through working in comics for 2000 AD, Marvel, and DC) has a massive oeuvre, but most of it is either comics or tie-in fiction written for Games Workshop’s publishing arm, Black Library. While he’s penned two original releases (Triumff and Embedded, available from Angry Robot) and a fair number of books set in the Warhammer Fantasy universe, the majority have been set in the universe of Warhammer 40k, a miniatures game that started out as essentially Warhammer Fantasy transplanted into space. The setting has drawn quite a bit of derision over the years due to featuring space elves, space orks, and even (until a mid-’90s retcon) space dwarves.
Time, attention, and the curatorship of editors and authors like Abnett, however, have turned the Warhammer 40k universe into a setting rich in dramatic potential. The repressive Imperium of Man marries the Catholic church of the Dark Ages with Stalinist Russia, where vast armies of conscripts are pressed into service for xenophobic wars while the Holy Inquisition desperately tries to keep a lid on heresy, lest daemon cultists corrupt entire worlds with the vile power of the Warp. Melodramatic? Absolutely—this is a setting whose tagline is “In the Grim Darkness of the 41st Millennium, there is only war.” But 40k is also hugely influential—Blizzard’s Starcraft franchise owes a huge debt to 40k (the Zerg are basically Tyrannids, while the Protoss are very similar to the Eldar), and many prominent game designers and commentators (including Jay Wilson, the lead designer of Diablo 3, and Jerry “Tycho” Holkins of the webcomic Penny Arcade) are enthusiastic fans. Even the Immer in China Miéville’s Embassytown, while not as demon-haunted as 40k’s Warp, requires navigational beacons (like 40k’s Astronomican) and spawns monsters and weirdness in the exact same fashion.
While divers hands have helped shape the 40k universe over the years, Abnett is surely one of the most influential. Not only have his depictions of the Imperial Guard and Inquisition shaped all that followed, but in the case of the Eisenhorn trilogy, which focuses on Gregor Eisenhorn, an inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos, they’ve outlasted the game and miniatures they were written to promote (the Inquisitor skirmish game). Furthermore, Abnett was one of the first authors to delve extensively into civilian life in the Imperium (in Necropolis and the Eisenhorn trilogy) as well as to describe life and imperial society at the peak of the Imperium’s influence (in Horus Rising).
All of this is to say that Abnett’s work isn’t narrowly focused on military concerns but regularly encompasses social, personal, religious, and technological context in a manner parallel to Lois McMaster Bujold. The Space Marines of the Iron Snakes chapter have rites of passage and rituals of homecoming appropriate to a Hellenistic warrior society; a planet about to be visited by a Titan Legion has a run on toys modeled on the gigantic war engines; the vast cathedrals raised to glorify the God-Emperor of Mankind have their own internal weather systems and speakers so loud they cause pain at close range. Like the best of his fellow tie-in authors (Karen Traviss springs to mind), Abnett has taken a franchise that could easily come off as silly and filled in its lacunae with sufficient invention that something as inherently ridiculous as a daemon-possessed starship bellowing its name over communications channels can give his readers chills.
It’s a shame, then, that Abnett’s very best work often comes late in a series or otherwise relies on readers knowing more than the text contains. Only in Death is my favorite haunted house story, hands down, as well as a brilliant account of an infantry siege, and it’s the eleventh in the Gaunt’s Ghosts series. Titanicus mostly stands alone, but a certain amount of familiarity with 40k lore is required to really appreciate its ending. Even Pariah, Abnett’s latest, and the first book in a new trilogy, has a moment that doesn’t have its full impact unless you’ve read Legion—a book in a completely different series, set over 100 centuries before.
That said, in terms of its accessibility and overall quality, Pariah is probably one of the best entry points into Abnett’s oeuvre (especially for readers who don’t perk up at the thought of multichapter, pitched battles). Its protagonist and narrator, Alisabeth Bequin, is an orphan and a student in a school for covert agents of the Inquisition—the Maze Undue—buried in the depths of Queen Mab, a decaying, violent, Dickensian city that is being smothered by the weight of its own history. Alisabeth and all the other students at the Maze Undue are pariahs, or psychic nulls—psionically gifted children whose power is to nullify the power of other psykers (and to weaken daemons and the influence of the Warp) in an area around them. Pariahs also produce an instinctive revulsion in everyone they meet, however, so Alisabeth and her fellow pupils wear bracelets that allow them to suppress their gifts with a flick of a switch and pass as ordinary—a vital ability for students who are dispatched to infiltrate noble houses, artists’ collectives, and the like.
Narrated by Alisabeth, Pariah follows her from her upbringing and training at the Maze Undue to a point when events conspire to shake the foundations of her world. An attack on the Maze Undue sends Alisabeth into the streets of Queen Mab, forcing her to don one old cover identity after another as she attempts to determine what is going on and why everyone from merchants to the Ecclesiarchy to the Holy Inquisition seems to regard her and the other students of the Maze Undue as either enemies or prizes to be captured. By the end of the book, Alisabeth has learned that the Maze Undue was not what it seemed and that the Holy Inquisition is divided, with a rogue Inquisitor (Eisenhorn) being pursued by one whose last deployment destroyed a world (Ravenor). She has also learned that there are many other forces in play, including at least two groups of Traitor Marines, several noble and merchant houses, and mysterious individuals known as the Nine and the King in Yellow. The book ends on a reversal with Alisabeth passionately defending Eisenhorn to Ravenor, only to be rescued from his custody in a manner that reveals many of Ravenor’s claims about Eisenhorn to be true.
As my mentions of Eisenhorn-as-character and Eisenhorn-as-Trilogy may have suggested, Pariah builds on two previous trilogies (which focused on Eisenhorn and Ravenor, respectively). Unlike Only in Death, however, which really does require knowledge of most of the Gaunt’s Ghosts books preceding it, Pariah functions quite effectively on its own, due to Alisabeth not being privy to the events of those previous series. There are certainly revelations which those familiar with the Eisenhorn and Ravenor books will anticipate, but this book should work whether or not you see those twists coming. Abnett manages some magnificent sleight of hand, too, to the point where I completely missed one major revelation related to 40k’s extensive lore until it was rubbed in my face. And for all that the three-word reference to Legion will be opaque to most readers, it gave me a chill when I read it because it was so dense with implication.
One is often hesitant to recommend the first book in an unfinished trilogy to readers, because however excellent it might be, there is no assurance that those that follow will match its quality or wrap up the series in a satisfactory manner.
But in light of the excellence of Pariah (and his latest Horus Heresy novel, Know No Fear), it seems clear that Abnett has regained the mastery of the suspense and military sf forms he’d attained before being diagnosed with epilepsy at the end of 2009/start of 2010.
And in case I haven’t made it explicit enough already, most of Abnett’s other books are very good too. Titanicus, Double Eagle, and Brothers of the Snake all stand alone and display Abnett’s talents to advantage, while the Gaunt’s Ghosts and Eisenhorn/Ravenor series start off a tad rough but build to some very impressive heights. Abnett’s Horus Heresy books are also very impressive, particularly Horus Rising, which sets the stage, and Know No Fear, which contains the immortal line “It starts raining main battle tanks,” but unfortunately the other installments don’t live up to the standard he sets. As for his original work, Embedded leverages Abnett’s expertise with military sf, but the big reveal at the end isn’t, whereas Triumff tries too hard to be funny.
Make no mistake: while Pariah is a tie-in, it is one that e
nnobles the form, which combines the suspense of a thriller with a world that is three parts Vance, two parts Dickens, one part Lovecraft, and one part Anthony Price. This is a very good book—no qualifiers, not “for a tie-in,” just very good, full stop—and well worth the attention of spy enthusiasts and connoisseurs of science fantasy tales.
* * *
Alec Austin lives in Berkeley, California.
Wonders of the Invisible World by Patricia McKillip
San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2012; $14.95 tpb; 288 pages
reviewed by Joe Milicia
One of the pleasures of reading through Patricia McKillip’s latest short story collection is discovering how many kinds of fantasy she practices: classic High (wizards and princesses), Victorian fairies-at-the-bottom-of-my-garden (sinister ones here), a not-quite-fractured fairy tale, dream narrative, and one or two unclassifiable. Plus three of the sixteen pieces in Wonders of the Invisible World are science fiction, including one set on a planet painted in rather Orientalist colors and another—well, I’m sorry to say that even the act of labeling it sf is to commit quite a considerable spoiler. As a character in one of the stories remarks, “This is not at all what I expected the unexpected to be like” (102).
No doubt some of these stories have been shaped to some extent by the theme of the anthology in which they first appeared. (This is not to say that McKillip, like any writer, might not have a story sitting around that feels custom-made for the editor’s guideline.) For example, “A Gift To Be Simple,” in which a Shaker-like (i.e., sexually abstinent) community seeks a way to continue their tribe, comes from a 1999 sf anthology about alternative reproductive methods, Not of Woman Born. The most blatantly connected to its original publication is “Oak Hill,” from The Essential Bordertown, the fourth anthology in Terri Windling’s series about an urban noir realm, somewhere between the mundane world and Elfland, where elves are punk bikers and gang bangers. Not having read the series, I can’t say how much “Oak Hill” owes to the mythos and atmosphere created by a large team of authors over the course of more than a decade, but it certainly reads like a McKillip story, beginning with its childishly naïve teenage protagonist who tells strangers in diners, “I’m going to learn magic” (“which always made people fidget, forget to ask questions, find something interesting in the stuffed deer head, or the clock across the room” [100]). To be sure, the story is more phantasmagorical than many in Wonders of the Invisible World in the sense that it unfolds in unpredictable, dreamlike ways, or to put it differently, slips in and out of more levels of “reality” than the two (usually both fantasy realms) typical of McKillip’s writing.
“The Twelve Dancing Princesses” has a different sort of restriction in that it was written for A Wolf at the Door, and Other Retold Fairy Tales (note the subtitle). Compared to the more radical reimaginings of several other pieces in that anthology, McKillip’s version of the Brothers Grimm tale seems on a first reading to be a pretty straightforward retelling. But a quick glance at the original in standard translation reveals how cleverly McKillip has adapted it. She starts her story not with the king’s preposterous offer—find out where my daughters go dancing every night and win my kingdom (or die if you fail)—but, for more dramatic urgency and stress on character, with the soldier who hears of the offer and takes the chance. Unlike the old soldier in Grimm, McKillip’s warrior has youth, a personality—cheerful and generous—and a name, Val: “a good name for a soldier,” winks the crone who gives him the invisibility cloak and the equally valuable tip of not accepting a beverage from the princesses (who by the way are here named after flowers). For a touch of horror and suspense, the princes of the underground realm who dance nightly with the young ladies are more or less zombies who are planning to keep them in the underworld on the third night, which happens to be Val’s deadline. And being young, he doesn’t choose the oldest daughter as in Grimm but beams in delight over his “choice of flowers from A to M” (230). There is certainly no deep probing of the psychosexual undercurrents of the original fairy tale, only a pleasant adaptation for contemporary young readers. But her version does have a fascination with the “different world, strange and frightening and comical,” that she found in Fritz Kredel’s illustrations for Grimms’ Fairytales when she was a child. According to her afterword, she also tells that she chose this particular fairy tale because “it has elements that stirred my imagination: an unlikely hero, twelve troublesome princesses instead of one; a subterranean world, which might be the place where dreams begin, or maybe where they end” (Wolf 166).
That balance of strange and frightening and comical—and I’d add “homey” to convey the feeling of domestic comfort within the fairy-tale worlds of many McKillip stories—is typical of this author’s works, though the balance is often tilted in one direction or another, rather like the way that people were imagined to be dominated by one of the Four Humors or Temperaments in ancient medicine or Renaissance drama. In McKilip’s case, these are the Strange, the Frightening, the Everyday, and the Comical. The Strange—i.e., the eerie or weird—is omnipresent in Wonders of the Invisible World, but horror (the Frightening) is very seldom to the fore, perhaps because many of the stories were written for a young adult audience. The two stories with a Victorian setting and fairy-tale elements conjure up comparisons with some of A. S. Byatt’s stories, but McKillip rarely ventures into such terrifying depths. An air of the Everyday or Domestic—folks going about their business—is pretty common in these stories, even or especially in worlds where witches and wizards are typical denizens. As for the Comical, it’s so strong in some stories that its absence in others makes them stand out all the more: I’m thinking of the darkly atmospheric “The Fortune-Teller” and the eerily beautiful “Xmas Cruise,” which involves the labyrinthine decks of a cruise ship in Antarctic waters, a honeymoon couple, and their perhaps dangerous attraction to another couple.
Comedy dominates in “Naming Day,” which is about a young student at the Oglesby School of Thaumaturgy who takes such courses as Prestidigitation, Legendary Creatures, and the Uses and Misuses of Elements. If I hadn’t examined Wizards: Magical Tales (2008), the anthology where it originally appeared, I would have thought it was written for a collection of homages to Harry Potter. But there were schools for wizards long before Hogwarts, and the success of “Naming Day” is almost entirely dependent not on parody or homage but on a very clever—not to say cute—denouement.
The novella, “Knights of the Well” (by far the longest story in the anthology), also leans toward comedy, both in its inclusion of droll situations (the dunking of the dignified knights of the title) and in its boy-gets-girl (i.e., Knight-gets-Minister-of-Water) plot. This is indeed a watery story, playful in its portrayal of a fantasy land where a mage is tasked with negotiating peace with the water sprites of the realm, aquatic colors are everywhere, and even the heroine is seen in aquatic terms: the knight is struck by the “sudden flash of green, the color of river moss, under her heavy, hooded eyelids and pale brows” (138). There is a particularly remarkable and lengthy description of an enormous, baroque fountain built for the ritual of honoring the water sprites.
“Out of the Woods” is another of the more playful stories but only partly because one of its main characters is a “possibly dotty” young scholar preoccupied with becoming a “great mage” while missing all the magical happenings around him. There is narrative playfulness, too, as the reader is led into thinking the story is structured upon the contrast between the mundane concerns of the scholar’s housekeeper (sore at heart because of her negligent husband and worn out by endless cleaning chores) and the clumsy efforts of the scholar to cast spells (leading to sausages in the rafters, for example). But it becomes clear that the housekeeper is the true visionary, and if this blatant irony—that the scholar’s gray eyes “seemed to look at her, through her, and beyond her, all at the same time” (26) but are blind to what she sees—seems all too obvious in summary, the execution is deft and surpr
isingly poetic, taking the domestic story more in the direction of the Strange. Typical is a passage that begins with the ordinary change of seasons but soon drifts toward the uncanny:
The squashes grew fat as the garden withered around them. The air smelled of rain and sweet wood smoke. Now and then the sky turned blue; fish jumped into sunlight; the world cast a glance back at the season it had left. On one of those rare days, Leta spread the washing on the bushes to dry [and turned her attention to the] great, gnarled stump [of an oak shattered by lightning]. It stood dreaming in the sunlight, revealing nothing of its secrets. Just big enough, she thought, to draw a man inside it, if one had fallen asleep against it. In spring, living shoots would rise like his dreams out of the trunk, crown it with leaves, this still-living heart big enough to hide a sleeping mage . . ..” (37; ellipses in the original)
The ending, involving a boat, a young woman with “hair the color of the dying leaves,” and a distant city, is superbly, seemingly effortlessly realized.
Even more beautifully realized is the ending of “Byndley,” one of the most haunting of the tales in the collection. When “Byndley” first appeared in Firebirds (2003), McKillip wrote a brief afterword that seemed to downplay the story’s seriousness: “I was trying to write a novel one day and ‘Byndley’ came out instead. Some stories are like that. You think you’re hatching a dragon and what you get is a butterfly.” Her Author’s Note adds some very conventional comments about “fairyland”: “one of those things, like mermaids and dragons, that doesn’t really exist, but that everyone knows about anyway. . . . Perhaps it’s just a glimpse of our deepest wishes and greatest fears, the farthest boundaries of our imaginations” (Firebirds 198). But the story itself, while certainly about deep wishes, is not terrifying but rather dizzying: its sense of reality vs. appearance is as hard to pin down as the Brigadoon-like town of the title, and its narrative constantly fluctuates between pursuit and flight. The final sentence, for reasons it would be a shame to explain here, is breathtaking, perhaps one of the best moments of the entire collection.
NYRSF January 2013 Issue 293 Page 6