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Surrogates, by Robert Venditti & Brett Weldele, Top Shelf Productions, 2006, $19.95.
Last year around this time I reviewed the first three issues of this comic book miniseries. Now all five issues have been reprinted in trade paperback form. I also mentioned at that time that this trade edition was probably going to become available once the series had run its course, so there's no real reason for me to mention it again except that, since I've now had the chance to read the whole series, it would be gravely remiss of me not to bring it to your attention once more.
Yes, it's a comic book, but the story is pure sf, and better sf than much of what's appearing in prose form these days. It's the kind of thing I imagine Philip K. Dick would have written, if he had written comic book scripts. As it is, Surrogates carries Dick's spirit forward into a new medium. It's an absolutely fascinating piece of work—heartfelt and thoughtful.
Support these guys because we need more sf this good, no matter the medium.
* * * *
Mercy, Unbound, by Kim Antieau, Simon Pulse, 2006, $6.99.
Kim Antieau has a light prose style, quite humorous at times, though it's far from slapstick. That might make it seem like an odd choice for her to tackle such a serious issue as anorexia, but it really does work.
First, let me assure you that she doesn't play the issue for laughs. The humor simply comes from the askew observations and dialogue of the characters.
This is the story of Mercy O'Connor who thinks she's becoming an angel, so she's stopped eating, because angels don't need to eat. She doesn't have delusions of grandeur. It's more that she sees the world as a terrible place in need of succor and comfort, and feels that for some reason she's been chosen to help out. She doesn't know how much she can do, but she plans to give it her best.
Naturally, her parents are upset about this—especially her mother, with a history in her family of Nazi concentration camps where many of her family starved to death. They can't see the wings Mercy feels itching in her shoulder blades, so they send her to an eating disorder clinic in New Mexico.
Mercy's scared and a little confused at the clinic. The girls here really are sick. And since no one can see her wings, and they aren't growing, she starts to have doubts. What if she's not an angel? What if she's just an ordinary girl who's killing herself?
Antieau finds wise, affirmative answers to all of this in her story, letting it unfold in a realistic manner that nevertheless carries a whisper of magical realism.
An earlier novel by Antieau—Coyote Cowgirl—is one of my all-time favorite novels, but this new book certainly comes close. I think what I like best about it is how comfortably—and ably—Antieau reflects life in its pages. The hopes and fears, humor and sorrows. Weighty issues approached with a light touch, lighter ones—in the hands of her characters—taking on a certain gravitas.
This is how it is, and I'm enchanted with Antieau's gift to show it to us in such a way that we see it all anew.
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Waking, by Alyxandra Harvey-Fitzhenry, Orca Book Publishers, 2006, $8.96.
I've mentioned before in this column how I choose the books to review for it: I simply try everything that comes in. If a book holds my interest, I'll read it until it doesn't anymore, or I've come to the end.
That makes for some nice surprises as I try books by authors unfamiliar to me.
Case in point, Alyxandra Harvey-Fitzhenry. I didn't know the name, and the cover of Waking—very simple, lots of white with a band of red on which lies a red rose dripping one drop of blood—could have been about anything. I thought it was going to be a vampire novel, but instead, Harvey-Fitzhenry is riffing on “Sleeping Beauty” in a contemporary setting.
Beauty is the name of the main character. She's been having a hard time of it lately with her mother having committed suicide by cutting her wrists and her father now not allowing any sharp object in the house. Beauty's not allowed to use knives, scissors, pins. Her meals are served to her by her father in bite-size portions.
School's not much better. It's hard enough having to get by with a given name such as hers, but now everyone is watching her with a morbid curiosity because of what her mother did.
Beauty's solution is to withdraw into herself. She paints in secret in a corner of the basement and goes through her school days with her head bent down and as low a profile as possible.
And then everything changes with Luna, the new girl in school.
Luna lives with her mother in a kind of Pre-Raphaelite commune in an old house in town. Through a chance encounter at school, Luna befriends Beauty and gently but firmly pulls her out of her shell, with possibly disastrous results.
I liked this book. The characters are engaging and Harvey-Fitzhenry has a deft hand with her prose, slipping effortlessly between the third person perspective of the real world to Beauty's first person narrative in a series of unsettling dreams she has where she's haunted by a mysterious woman in black.
There's no indication on the book that it's being marketed to a YA audience and that's just as well. This is a well-told, magical story that will appeal to anyone who doesn't need some horrible monster, or things blowing up, to enjoy a good book.
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A Dirty Job, by Christopher Moore, William Morrow, 2006, $24.95.
I realized, as I started to write this review, that I can say many of the same things about Moore's writing that I did in my recent review of Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys. The main appeal of authors such as this is their voice, and how enthusiastic you feel about their work is entirely dependent on your reaction to that voice.
While Gaiman's voice is that of a kindly Brit uncle (albeit with a bit of nasty imagination, and a quirky streak in his personality), Moore is more North American and matter-of-fact. But there's that same underlying smile in his voice—the smile that tells us that, like Gaiman, Moore likes his characters and us, and he's letting us in on the jokes he sees.
I like Gaiman's voice better, but Moore is the better plotter. Gaiman's plots amble, and while they eventually get to where they need to go, one has the sense that a lot of it's made up along the way. Moore's plots are sturdier. Here you get the sense that everything plays a part in the forward momentum.
I could be wrong, of course. Gaiman could plot out every detail, while Moore writes on the fly. I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that for all the quirky elements in his story, Moore is still the more straightforward storyteller.
In A Dirty Job, newly widowed Charlie Asher discovers that he's been unwittingly recruited to be ... well, not exactly Death. More like an aspect of Death, the way department store Santas aren't really Santa Claus, but they do his work for him on a small scale.
Asher is the last person for a job such as this. Slightly neurotic and a bit of a bumbler in the first place, he's trying to raise his newborn daughter and keep his secondhand thrift shop going at the moment this all comes to him, while dealing with the awful grief of losing the love of his life. The last thing he needs is the job of collecting the souls of the deceased, and then passing them on to the next person who should have them.
He also doesn't need to be attacked by giant ravens that live in the sewers, or have a pair of pony-sized black dogs show up to protect his daughter. Or one employee envious of his new career (the Goth), while the other suspects him of being a serial killer (the ex-cop). And what happens if he doesn't fulfill his new duties?
This is a funny book. I mean, genuinely funny. And like the best of such books, the humor grows out of the characters and situations they find themselves in. But it also has a lot of heart—and that heart is what will bring us back to the book, once the chuckling has died down.
I can't end this review without quoting from Tim Sandlin's blurb on the back cover: “I would recommend A Dirty Job to anyone who is ever likely to die."
* * * *
Castle Waiting, by Linda Medley, Fantagraphics Books, 2006, $29.95.
Fantagraphics Books hav
e outdone themselves with the production of this complete collection of all of Linda Medley's Castle Waiting stories. (Though, for accuracy's sake, it's all one story—a real novel, though it's told in graphic form and first appeared as a serial comic.) But perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised. This is the same publishing company that has been lovingly bringing into print everything from the classic Peanuts and Krazy Kat strips to the very contemporary work by Los Bros. Hernandez (which appears under the collective title of Love & Rockets) in sturdy hardcovers with actual sewn bindings and thick paper stock to highlight the art.
Castle Waiting looks and feels like a fat fairy tale book you might find on the same shelf as your Andrew Lang colored fairy tale books and Arthur Rackham illustrated editions. And funny enough, both are obvious inspirations for Medley's work.
Like Harvey-Fitzhenry's Waking, Castle Waiting is a riff on “Sleeping Beauty,” but it's set firmly in a never-never medieval world, and while it starts off with the elements of that classic fairy tale, what it's really about is the after. In Castle Waiting, the princess is woken from her hundred years slumber by the prince, but then they immediately ride off into their new life, leaving behind all the people who keep a castle running.
The years go by and the castle becomes a refuge for those with no other place to go. So—overseen by Sleeping Beauty's original ladies in waiting, Patience, Prudence, and Plenty—we meet the stork-man Mr. Rackham, the bearded nun Sister Peace, the horse-headed knight Sir Chess, a Simple Simon, and Jain, a pregnant woman on the run from her abusive husband. They live their lives, and like the travelers in The Canterbury Tales, tell their stories to one another.
Now the thing that makes or breaks a story with any hope of merit is the characters, and what best illuminates characters is their dialogue and actions. Medley's dialogue is wonderful, and the anachronisms she throws in add to the flavor, rather than jar. Her art is somewhere between the fine art of children's book illustrators around the turn of the twentieth century and the Sunday comics of the middle part of the century: lots of clean lines, expressive features, and lovely detailed backgrounds.
You will find all sorts of references to old fairy tales in these pages—many of them very subtle—but more importantly, you'll find one of the freshest and most heart-warming reinventions of those old stories, of the spirit of those stories here. This is a book that should appeal to everyone and I can't recommend it highly enough.
And if you don't believe me, Jane Yolen makes an excellent case in her introduction as to why you should be reading this book. Go to the book store, flip through the book and look at the art, read Yolen's intro, and I know you'll be as won over as I was when these stories were appearing few and far apart as a serial comic book.
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Material to be considered for review in this column should be sent to Charles de Lint, P. O. Box 9480, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1G 3V2.
Books by Elizabeth Hand
James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, by Julie Phillips, St. Martin's Press, 2006, $27.95.
Go Ask Alice
This is the saddest story I have ever heard, and one of the most frustrating—not in its telling, which is superb, but in its depiction of a woman tragically born a half-century too soon. Alice Sheldon was brilliant, accomplished, beautiful, affluent. Her 1920s childhood experiences in the African wilderness were the stuff of fever dreams; as a teen debutante in Chicago, she could have been played by Katharine Hepburn, though one thinks Frances Farmer might have brought more to the role. Sheldon's subsequent careers—as a WAC, as a member of CIA photointelligence, as a psychologist—were overshadowed by her mother's long and successful stint as a writer, as well as by bouts of mental illness and Alice's profound unease with her own sexual identity. For fifty years this volatile psychic amalgam simmered, with a few added ingredients tossed in—a violent early marriage; long-term amphetamine dependence; a bipolar mood disorder; binge drinking, unhappy love affairs with men, faltering attempts to become a serious painter and writer, even a turn as a chicken farmer in rural New Jersey—until, in 1967, Alice Sheldon finally achieved the creative alchemy she'd been striving for, and the writer James Tiptree Jr. was born.
One often reads of biographies that their subjects could be fictional characters. It's safe to say that the hero/ine of Julia Phillips's definitive James Tiptree Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon would defy even the most extravagant novelistic imagination. Artist, CIA operative, gender-bending literary seductress with a Hemingwayesque alter-ego, Sheldon insured there'd be no Hollywood ending when, in a suicide pact, she murdered her elderly husband, then shot herself in their suburban home. As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up: Who would fall for it?
But a lot of people did fall for Sheldon's literary persona, most famously Robert Silverberg, who wrote in his 1975 introduction to Tiptree's collection Warm Worlds and Otherwise,
"It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing. I don't think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male."
Well, few things are ineluctably masculine in our post-Brokeback Mountain age, and Silverberg certainly has nothing to be ashamed of—Tiptree fooled all of the writers and editors he corresponded with during the heady years he was writing his best work, from 1967 until November 1976, when Alli (the name Phillips uses to refer to the “real” Alice Sheldon) discovered this letter in Tiptree's P.O. Box.
"Dear Tip,
Okay, I'm going to lay all my cards on the table. You are not required to do likewise.
You've probably heard from people already, but word is spreading very fast that your true name is Alice Sheldon...."
It's a testament to Julia Phillips's powerful narrative that this revelation—which we've been anticipating from Page 1—can still shock and almost sicken the reader, much as surely it did Alli herself. For someone who had built and dismantled an often shaky professional and sexual identity untold times over the years, before finding success and acceptance among the community of science fiction writers, editors, and fans, this note (from Tiptree's friend and correspondent, Jeff Smith) must have echoed like a tocsin, a warning blare that the ineluctably masculine James Tiptree Jr. was in fact Mrs. Alice Hastings (Mrs. Huntington) Sheldon, a bridge-playing, sixty-something suburban matron who lived with her retired husband in McLean, Virginia.
Alice Hastings Bradley was born in 1915. Her father, Herbert Bradley, made his fortune in real estate. Her mother, Mary Hastings Bradley, was in her lifetime a well-known writer, author of books like The Innocent Adventuress and The Wine of Astonishment; “a socialite, an explorer, and a big game hunter [whose] earnings kept her daughter in mink coats and finishing schools.” Alice and her parents lived in an expansive top-floor apartment near Lake Michigan; it included a penthouse and roof garden, as well as a cook, a chauffeur, and a series of governesses.
Alice's mother, Mary, comes across as the sort of writer whose career and ego depended, to some extent, on her family and friends acting as supporting players in the continuing drama of her life. In 1921, Mary took her show on the road: she enlisted herself, Herbert, and six-year-old Alice as safari companions to the naturalist and big game hunter Carl Akeley, whose glass-eyed trophies still gaze at viewers from dioramas in the Field Museum of Chicago and the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.
Alice's adventures were later recounted by her mother in several cheerful children's travelogues, Alice in Jungleland, Alice in Elephantland, and Trailing the Tiger. Alice's own experience seems more problematic, if not downright traumatic. The group shot and slaughtered an elephant, which was eaten by villagers. The next day their African porters went off to hunt, returning with a prisoner they claimed had attacked them. Despite Akeley's demands that the prisoner be turned over to the white Belgian au
thorities,
"that night the Bradleys heard screams, and in the morning the man was gone ... one of the ‘boys’ told them he had been killed and eaten ... Alice lay awake and heard the whole thing."
Among other adventures, Alice's mother jokingly offered her blonde daughter in trade for a chief's ivory bracelet, and Alice witnessed a group of Batwa pygmies dancing and wondered, “Am I a Batwa? I'm little.” It's almost anticlimactic to add that her mother shot and killed a lion, or that the formaldehyde-soaked remains of a young gorilla speared by one of Akeley's guides were stored beneath Alice's cot. Throughout their journey, Alice was always surrounded by such wildly contradictory elements—the otherwordly beauty and strangeness of the African landscape and culture contrasted with the screams of human torment and the stink of dead things.
"It was early impressed on me that I was viable only within the sheltering adult group,” the adult Alice wrote; “that the outside was dangerous and beyond my strength ... I never was allowed to learn to combat it; I lived helplessly inside ... wondering how I could meet each horrible challenge, and never getting a chance to practice."
This is a long way from the child described by Mary as “dancing along at the head of the line [of porters], holding her Daddy's or Mummy's hand and waving a greeting to the native women in the fields."
The Bradleys returned to Chicago in 1922 but two years later went back to Africa, this time exploring the Ituri rain forest. Nine-year-old Alice, despite her pleas, was forbidden a gun, though she did have an “old-fashioned crinoline” for costume parties. As they traveled into the rain forest, they often found themselves the first white people the villagers had ever encountered, and, as Phillips observes, “experienced what for most science fiction writers is only a story or a metaphor: first contact.” Alice entertained villagers by demonstrating how a door opened and closed, and showed them how her doll's blue-glass eyes would do the same. She saw lepers and heard of the ritual mutilation of girls’ genitals, which “scared my immature soul sick.” Most horrifying of all, she came upon the naked corpses of two men who had been “Stripped, tortured, tied to posts, and left to perish in the sun.” There was no place for this event in any of Mary's published travelogues, but she and her husband took photographs, and there was no way their impressionable, sensitive daughter could have forgotten it:
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