At the end of last year's Forever Odd, Odd retreated to a monastery where he hoped to make a new life for himself away from the busy turmoil of the world at large. But while Koontz could no doubt find a way to hold our interest in simply relating Odd's day-to-day life in St. Bartholomew's Abbey, with its picturesque setting (the High Sierra of California) and motley collection of monks and nuns, he's too much the storyteller to leave Odd content for long.
Having grown up in the desert, Odd has no experience with snow. So with a storm forecast, he stays up late, sitting by his window, to watch it unfold. Unfortunately, there is more out there in the night than simple wind and snow, and all too soon Odd is plunged back into the sort of misadventures he was trying to avoid by coming to St. Bartholomew's.
I've mentioned before in this column how Koontz's books have gotten leaner over the past few years. In Brother Odd, he stretches the prose out a little bit once more, but rather than slowing the action down, it enhances Odd's first person narrative. The story is told with warmth, and just a touch of humor, both of which echo Odd's character while also alleviating some of the grim elements that he has to tell us as the events of this long day and night unfold.
One of the reasons readers enjoy first person narratives so much is that, when they're done properly, it feels as though the character is telling them the story, one on one. There's a personal connection, and when the character is as engaging as Odd Thomas, we want to stay in his company—not just to find out what happens next, but because we are captivated by his voice.
And that's why I'm happy to say that, although this book wraps up the story begun in its pages, just as did the other two volumes in the series, the final scene of Brother Odd appears to set the stage for at least one more outing.
* * * *
Fables: 1000 Nights of Snowfall, by Bill Willingham & various artists, Vertigo, $19.99.
I've mentioned the monthly comic book series Fables in this column before. It follows the various adventures and exploits of the characters we know from fairy tales and classics (the Big Bad Wolf, Snow White, Mowgli, etc.) as they live their lives hidden in Fabletown, somewhere in New York City.
They came here from their homeland, fleeing the armies of the Adversary, and now try to make do in our mundane world. What's fun about the series (which is up to issue fifty-six as I write this) is that the various characters retain their traits and magical abilities, but have adapted and changed—as we all do over time.
This new book uses prose and comic scripts to tell a variation on Scheherazade's Arabian Nights. This time it's Snow White telling the stories. She arrived in the land of the Arabian Fables as an ambassador from her own community, but soon finds herself in Scheherazade's predicament and ends up telling the Sultan stories to save her life (which apparently is what inspired Scheherazade herself to do so as well when Snow White leaves).
Snow White's stories deal with many characters familiar from fairy tales (Snow White herself, the Frog Prince, the witch from Hansel & Gretel, Old King Cole) and are set in the Homelands when the Adversary's armies are just beginning to invade. But just as with the contemporary New York stories in the monthly series, in Fables: 1000 Nights of Snowfall, we're given fascinating new insights and differing points of view from what we thought we knew about these characters.
The art ranges from quirky to wonderful, with my favorites being a rare collaboration between Charles Vess and Michael Wm. Kaluta, illustrating the prose sections with gorgeous full- and half-pages of art more reminiscent of story book illustration from the turn of the last century than modern comic book art.
If you like the monthly series, you'll love this book. And if you're unfamiliar with Willingham's strange take on fairy tales, this is an excellent place to come on board and see what the fuss is all about.
* * * *
Suicide Girls in the Afterlife, by Gina Ranalli, Afterbirth Books, 2006, $8.95.
No, this slim volume isn't about those tattooed and pierced Goths and punks of Internet fame, but rather a look at the afterlife that awaits young women who end their own lives. It's a serious subject, and while the characters seem a little lighter of heart than you might expect, and there are some very funny—and sacrilegious—moments, the author has serious things to say. But that doesn't stop a lot of it from being irreverent and tongue-in-cheek.
We meet both the devil (he's a Goth) and Jesus (he's a hippie) in this book, as well as a number of other unusual characters as we journey with a young woman named Pogue to a strange hotel in the afterlife—a holding tank of sorts while Heaven and Hell are undergoing renovations.
How much you'll enjoy Pogue's story—with its Worm Ouroboros twist—will depend on how much you like nontraditional storytelling, but it's certainly a fascinating—and for this reader, successful—experiment.
* * * *
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.
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Books by James Sallis
Three Days to Never, by Tim Powers, William Morrow, 2006, $25.95.
Un Lun Dun, by China Miville, Del Rey/Ballantine Books, 2007, $17.95.
* * * *
Literature and history both set out to explain the apparent world to us, to demonstrate, to witness. Literature does this by making up characters, events, populations, and settings; history, purportedly by amassing fact. But increasingly we understand that the divide is not so great as we thought. With history, we snare facts in our net, then go about trying to suss out their possible and always slippery connections. Our nets will only snare so much, and some of what they do catch, we throw back. History is finally as mutable as memory.
Fantastic literature, arealist literature, sets out to explain the apparent world to us also, while at the same time having at its heart the absolute certainty of other, often unsuspected worlds existing behind, to one side, or in the very same place as this one. It sets a frame around mankind's life and place in the universe, then steps outside the frame.
Fantastic literature has, as well, a fine tradition of brilliant writers more or less following Voltaire's admonition to cultivate their gardens—imaginary gardens which they proceed to fill with real toads. Writers tend by their nature to be outriders; and some of the quirkiest, those who seem not to fit in even among other outriders, are drawn to science fiction and fantasy. I'm thinking here of people like Alfred Bester, Carol Emshwiller, Gene Wolfe, John Crowley.
From 1983's Anubis Gates to Last Call, Expiration Date, and Declare, Tim Powers's work is as instantly recognizable as any of these. Taking limbs from dark fantasy, branches from the paranoiac visions of Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon, he has grafted them onto the currently popular subgenre of alternate history, bending history to his own, quite ahistorical imaginative ends, discovering in the process a singular and spectacular voice. His novels are crazy quilts stitched together from the most improbable material—slices and core samples, ragends and remainders of worlds that seem never to have been meant to coexist, much less collide.
In Three Days to Never we have (and this is the short list) a Shakespeare-quoting father and daughter, time travel, Albert Einstein, a rotting eyeless head used to communicate with the incorporeal, the Mossad, a blind assassin who sees through others’ eyes, a lost Charles Chaplin film, 1987's Harmonic Convergence at Mount Shasta, a secret society in existence since Medieval days, ghosts lugging their perceptions and speech ever backward in time as their timelines are obliterated, broods of babies appearing whenever universes are breached.
We also have, of course, all the landmarks of Powersland to steer by: multiple story lines, heavy-duty plotting and characterization, the gritty and the fabulist chockablock, uncanny blends of cerebral invention and breakneck action, abrupt shifts in perception, casual use of ritual magic. And hovering above it all (as John Shirley has noted) the sense that beneath “the fabric of the mundane world, the chatter of the media, the
artifacts of history, is a secret realm of vibratory significance.” The sense that the miraculous is all about us.
The narrative centers about the search for a time machine invented by Albert Einstein, a device he recognized as far more dangerous than the bomb. It has resurfaced, and apparently been used, by an old woman who seems one moment to have been at home in California and, the next, dying on Mount Shasta during the Harmonic Convergence. On the trail of the device are Mossad operatives, agents of an age-old cabal, and, seemingly, an errant, runaway father. Not on its trail, yet at the intersection of all points, are twelve-year-old Daphne Marrity and her English-professor father Frank.
Here, from quite early in the novel when pieces of Powers's quilt first begin to come together, is Daphne discovering unsuspected abilities. She has been watching a videocassette of what she believed to be Pee-wee's Big Adventure but which is instead a lost silent film, a key—like the cement slab bearing Chaplin's handprint stolen from outside Graumann's Chinese Theater—to the time machine.
"And then the house lost its balance and began to tip over into the pit—for a moment Daphne couldn't feel the couch under her, she was falling—and in a panic she grabbed with her whole mind.
"The house lurched violently back to level solidity again, though the curtains in the front window didn't even swat; and black smoke was jetting out of the vent slots in the VCR.” [51]
Mossad, Vesper, sub-agent, or relative, each of the supplicants has his or her own agenda. Charlotte wants to undo her fall and return to innocence, by whatever means prove necessary; she believes that gaining access to the time machine will make this possible. Blind, she sees through the eyes of others, and is to the Vespers simply a tool, used much like the Baphomet head that terrifies her.
"She had lit a cigarette to kill the spicy smell of the thing....
"Charlotte had tried to avoid seeing the awful black head, but at one point while she was using Racasse's eyes he had looked straight at it.
"Polished black skin clung tightly to the eyeless skull, and paisley-shaped panels of silver filigree had been glued or tacked onto the forehead, cheeks, nose and chin, like metal Maori tattoos—probably to cover worm holes, Charlotte thought nervously—and a slack ribbon around its neck swung back and forth underneath the wooden stand.” [76 & 79]
Mossad operative Lepidopt wants to undo the Yom Kippur War. In the last days of that war, as he touched the Western Wall, much of his hand was blown away, the blow leaving behind a strange prescience. Twelve times in the twenty years since, he has, in the midst of daily life, realized that he will do some one thing never again.
"In 1970, three years after he had touched the Western Wall for the first and last time, he had attended a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade at the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv, and as the last notes of the Allegro Molto echoed away, he had suddenly been positive that he would not ever hear Scheherazade again.
"Two years after that he had visited Paris for the last time; not long afterward he had discovered that he would never again swim in the ocean.... Just during this last year he had, for the last time, changed a tire, eaten a tuna sandwich, petted a cat, and seen a movie in a theater....” [39-40]
Even as he, along with Charlotte and all the others, strives to undo, Lepidopt is himself being undone.
Everywhere here, Powers courts notions of private motive and public good, means and ends, utilitarianism, casuistry and the categorical imperative: the cracks, the crawlspaces, those jagged edges where lives have been torn away by violence, historical events, and personal suffering, and past which blows forever a dark, unappeasable wind. He reminds us that, just as the world we perceive around us may be only a part of the actual world, a single facet among many, an impression, so it may be with our time-bound perceptions of right and wrong.
Literature, it has been said, is a corrective to history. Reading Tim Powers, we are reminded how closely the two converge: how they help us try to understand, help us rise momentarily high enough to glimpse our place in mankind and mankind's place in the universe, help us go on.
* * * *
There are few more fascinating world builders than China Miville. Bas-Lag, the setting for Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council, is by turn grotesque and enchanting, ever strange yet oddly familiar, a refracting mirror that catches up elements and eras of our own world and throws them together in high relief. His powers of invention seem boundless, his sense of the intertwining of the personal and political quite unlike anyone else's, his sensitivity to language immense.
Fantasy hardly comes darker, or more illuminating of our own world. I regularly read pages of Miville to my students—the opening of Perdido Street Station in particular, detailing the love between Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin and the mute insect-woman Lin—and delight in watching students’ eyes flare wide as they lean toward me, then, afterward, sit in silence. That, I tell them, is how one writes of the world's innate strangeness. That is what Aristotle meant by recognitions.
And now, from this spinner of some of the darkest and most complex work about, in four previous novels and in 2005's collection Looking for Jake, we have a young adult novel.
Miville may be on holiday from Bas-Lag and New Crobuzon, but not from what most interests him. In no sense is this a watering-down or enervation, only a different way of getting at things. The internal dialogue has shifted, true—it is now with fairy tales and children's books rather than with tropes of classic fantasy, horror and science fiction—but the many engines of the narrative remain familiar. Even Miville's political preoccupations are manifest: Un Lun Dun is ruled by a group of incompetent, corrupt bureaucrats called Propheseers; a war against the great enemy, the smog, exploits fear and claims of terrorism to consolidate power.
In some ways reminiscent of his first novel, King Rat, which was among much else a retelling of the Pied Piper legend set in an imaginatively reconstructed London, Un Lun Dun (UnLondon) is in part his version of the Alice in Wonderland books.
We have short chapters filled with whimsy, wondrous images, strange occurrences, odd comities, and dread.
We have a world where a book of debunked prophecies grows clinically depressed, men with inkwells as heads stroll about, buildings are composed of old typewriters and dead televisions, umbrellas flap and move about batlike, and a milk carton named Curdle serves as pet to our two adventurers, Zanna and Deeba. A world boulevers, the forms familiar, their functions and import gone mysterious.
Miville also takes his plot from the communal pot of YA fantasy: young person (here the Shwazzy, choisi, chosen) finds him- or herself drawn to another, unsuspected world to save it. But if nothing in our own world is quite as it seems, then neither is what Miville dips from the common pot. In his version, the Shwazzy is down for the count from her first encounter with the evil smog, leaving the sidekick to carry on.
"There are fairy tales and debates with them all over the place in Un Lun Dun,” Miville has said in interview. And of weird fiction itself: “I think at its basic level, the weird ... is a kind of pulp iteration of the estrangement that surrealism tries to create from everyday life.” Thus the images in surprising, alogical configurations, the overlay of world and not-world, the reach for a convulsive beauty—all to the end of releasing us from the dailyness of our lives, to see those lives and our world anew: new focus, new frames, new wonder.
It all begins sweetly enough:
"For the last few weeks, dogs would often stop as Zanna walked by, and stare at her. Once a little conga line of three squirrels had come down from a tree as Zanna sat in Queen's Park, and one by one had put a little nut or seed in front of her. Only cats ignored her.” [9]
But then quickly, with cascades of the unkennable, the corner gets turned.
"Zanna spun the handle as if it were oiled. The noise of cars and vans and motorbikes outside grew tinny, like a recording, or as if it came from a television in the next room. The sound of the vehicles faded with the glow of the main r
oad.
"Zanna was turning off the traffic. The spigot turned off all the cars, and turned off the lamps.
"It was turning off London.” [23]
Welcome, my friends, to Un Lun Dun. And to Mivilleland.
Here we have the latest work of two masters of contemporary fantasy. An alternate London, an alternate history of our time. Look over one shoulder and you can see behind them a long train: Lord Dunsany, Mervyn Peake, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, M. John Harrison, Philip K. Dick, Gene Wolfe, Jonathan Carroll. Consciously honoring yet extending tradition, Tim Powers and China Miville continuously break new ground, reminding us what fantasy at its best—with its free-floating regard, its essential ahistoricity, its plummet to the archetypes within us—is uniquely set to accomplish.
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The Tamarisk Hunter by Paolo Bacigalupi
When the High Country News put out a call for stories about futures in which people have learned to live sustainably in the American West, they had high hopes. It turned out, however, that they received just one story that fit their stated goal of “a realistic assessment of people and their place in the landscape"—and it came from their own online editor, whom many of you know as the author of “Pop Squad,” “The Fluted Girl,” and “People of Sand and Slag."
Mr. Bacigalupi says that after this story appeared in the June 26, 2006 issue of HCN, it sparked a discussion of just how a deep drought might affect water rights in the West. Water managers and law experts were brought in, but nobody could produce anything more than wild guesses—of which this story was considered as good as any. And we think you'll agree it's a good yarn, too.
* * * *
A big tamarisk can suck 73,000 gallons of river water a year. For $2.88 a day, plus water bounty, Lolo rips tamarisk all winter long.
Ten years ago, it was a good living. Back then, tamarisk shouldered up against every riverbank in the Colorado River basin along with cottonwoods, Russian olives, and elms. Ten years ago, towns like Grand Junction and Moab thought they could still squeeze life from a river.
FSF Magazine, May 2007 Page 7