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OtherRealms Issue 29 Part 03
Electronic OtherRealms #29
Winter, 1991
Part 3 of 10
Copyright 1991 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved.
OtherRealms may be distributed electronically only in the original
form and with copyrights, credits and return addresses intact.
OtherRealms may be reproduced in printed form only for your personal use.
No part of OtherRealms may be reprinted or used in any other
publication without permission of the author.
All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the author.
Scattered Gold
Charles de Lint
Copyright 1991 by Charles de Lint
A Graveyard for Lunatics
Ray Bradbury
Knopf, July 1990; 285pp; $18.95
Unlike many authors who have been writing for as long as he has, Ray
Bradbury has only published twenty-five books. But also unlike many
other authors, those twenty-five books are true jewels.
Whether he turns his keyboard to science fiction such as his The
Martian Chronicles or Fahrenheit 451, fantasy like The October Country
or Something Wicked This Way Comes, or mysteries such as the recent
Death Is a Lonely Business or the book in hand, what stands out in
Bradbury's work is both the sheer quality of his prose and his
affection for his characters.
The latest book takes the narrator of Death Is a Lonely Business and
places him on a 1950's movie studio lot as the scriptwriter for a
horror film. Together with a boyhood friend, he sets out to create
the perfect movie monster, only to find that the lot itself and the
graveyard that lies beside it, are already haunted by a monstrous
Beast.
But this isn't a horror novel. Rather, it's a love letter to the
movie business as it existed in the 50s, encompassing both the
positive and negative aspects of it. With Bradbury as the author,
though, it's all viewed through a soft-focus lens. There are the
genuine aspects of a whodunit, as well as the elements of a thriller,
yet in the end one leaves the book with a strong sense of the times
and the warm memory of the very real characters with whom Bradbury
peoples his fiction.
Make Way for Dragons!
Thoraninn Gunnarsson
Ace, August 1990; 215pp; $3.95; 0-441-51527-1
From another world to ours, come two battling dragons -- one huge and
evil, the kind one associates with Wagner's Ring Cycle; the other
small and good. The battle ends in a draw and both creatures go off
to recuperate for the next round. The evil dragon heads off into the
wilderness; the good one -- whose name is Dalvenjah -- makes her way to the
nearest city where she hopes to hook up with a local sorcerer.
What she ends up with is a cello-player named Allan Breivik who, while
he has a certain amount of inborn magical talent, has no training.
What follows is an enjoyable romp as Dalvenjah and her dragonet
Vajerral (who snuck in through the rift between the worlds behind her)
adjust to living in California and prepare for the next battle with
the evil dragon.
Gunnarsson has a nice light touch with his prose and he's mostly on
target with his story. Where it falls apart is when he brings in the
FBI. They're fairly innocuous at the beginning of the story but when
they reappear towards the end, they don't act like real police
officers at all and deliver lines along the lines of "Even so, I would
not have her sacrifice herself."
Still, if you can ignore that aspect and you aren't looking for
anything beyond a light entertainment, I don't doubt that you'll have
some fun with this novel.
Alien Sex
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Dutton, May 1990; 251pp; $18.95; 0-525-24863-3
This anthology, following on the heels of Datlow's extremely
successful Blood Is Not Enough, repeats the set-up of the earlier
book. Once again it's a mix of reprints and original stories; once
again she presents a series of highly innovative glimpses into all the
varied possibilities inherent, but so often not found, in a theme
anthology. It's to her credit that both books can be read straight
through without a sense of sameness. Yes, each story relates to the
theme, but from that point on, all bets are off.
Alien Sex runs the gamut from Larry Niven's hilarious essay on
Superman's sexual limitations, "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" to the
seriousness sf speculation of "Husbands" by Lisa Tuttle. Along the
way we catch glimpses of bestiality (handled very tastefully) in Leigh
Kennedy's "Her Furry Face", a dark poem by Michaela Roessner, Philip
Jose Farmer offering a William Burroughs-esque version of the Tarzan
myth, Pat Murphy's fascinating exploration of evolution in "Love and
Sex Among the Invertebrates", and a handful of other wonderful
stories.
One of my favorites was Lewis Shiner's updating of the Lilith myth in
"Scales" -- not so much for the story itself, which is good, but for the
deceptively simple and moving prose in which he tells it. I liked his
narrative style so much that I pulled his recent novel Slam from the
middle of the "to be read" stack and started in on it as soon as I
finished the last story of the book in hand.
I don't know what subject Datlow will turn her sly attention to for
her next anthology, but you can bet I'll be lined up at the bookstore
waiting to get my copy of it as soon as it's available. The one short
story that she edits for OMNI every month just isn't enough.
Slam
Lewis Shiner
Doubleday, July 1990; $18.95; 0-385-26683-9
As mentioned above, Lewis Shiner has a deceptively simple prose
style -- trust me on this, it's not easy to write this clearly and
concisely and still keep a sense of heart in one's work.
Slam is a mainstream novel with prose just as invigoratingly spare as
that of "Scales". It's told from the viewpoint of a
thirty-nine-year-old man who's just served six months in a federal
penitentiary for tax evasion and is now out on parole. He gets a job
as caretaker in an old oceanside house, looking after some twenty-plus
cats, and soon is involved with as eccentric a cast of characters as
one could hope for: his lawyer friend Fred, who's always telling
lawyer jokes; his fundamentalist parole officer, Mrs. Cook; the pastor
of a local UFO church; a pair of deaf and blind treasure hunters
(one's blind, the other's deaf); Terrell, an escaped convict with whom
he shared a cell; the local widow, Mary Nixon; and a group of
anarchistic skateboarders.
Over the passage of his first week of relative freedom, Dave runs the
gamut of emotions, from falling in love with one of the skateboarders
who's young enough to be his daughter, to his convict buddy Terrell
running dope out of the house Dave's looking after. Complicating
matters is the fact that Dave just can't deal with authority and his
parole officer is putting the pressure on him.
How Dave deals with it all makes for an entertaining, at times
humorous, and always thoughtful story. The final resolution's a bit
idealistically pat, perhaps, but within the context of a piece of
fiction, it does work.
Slam, for all its realism, isn't realistic fiction. Many of the
characters say or do things one wouldn't normally associate with the
sort of person they are. But what underlies the surface story is an
exploration of anarchy -- how to be truly free in a world that has no
patience for those who stray from the norm -- and whether it's the
skateboarders, Terrell or Dave himself discussing it, the resulting
thoughts on the subject give depth to a story that's not only
entertaining, but provocative.
The Real Story
Stephen R. Donaldson
Bantam Spectra, January 1991; 210pp; $19.95; 0-553-07173-4
After nine highly successful fantasy books, and three mysteries under
the pen name "Reed Stephens", the best-selling living fantasy author
Stephen R. Donaldson has made a career change with his new novel, The
Real Story.
It's not simply that its subject matter is pure science fiction, nor
even that it's a particularly short book from an author whose novels
usually sprawl out some five-hundred pages per book. The writing
itself has changed to suit the tone Donaldson wished to set with this
breakaway from the past.
The Real Story is part of a five-volume series, the opening salvo in
The Gap into Conflict, but introductory to a longer work as it is, it
still stands admirably on its own.
The time is the far future. Humanity is out among the stars, mining
asteroids for the ore that humanity has always needed to fuel its
expansions and progresses. On the edge of known space, among the
asteroids of Delta Sector, Donaldson explores a Byzantine relationship
between a woman named Morn Hyland and two ore pirates, Angus
Thermopyle, as despicable a character as one is likely to meet in
fiction, and his rival Nick Succorso, who remains somewhat of a cipher
even when the book is done.
Central to the story is the captor/victim relationship between
Thermopyle and Hyland. Thermopyle is a social misfit, amoral, a
misogynist when he thinks of women at all. When he captures Hyland
after her ship has gone down on an asteroid, he becomes determined to
break down her will; to make her his, body and soul. Her body becomes
his through a futuristic device known as a zone implant which allows
him to control her every movement, but her spirit remains unbroken
until hope for succor arises in the presence of Succorso.
Thermopyle is such an unsettling character, and his degradation of
Hyland so disturbing, that Donaldson has been forced to change his
prose style to tell their story -- not just because science fiction
requires a different style than fantasy, but because normal methods of
narrative are simply too immediate for this intense a storyline.
Gone is the rich tapestry of Donaldson's fantasy prose. In its place
he employs a style that is almost that of an essay or a biography -- a
spare, journalistic approach that effectively removes his readers one
step further from the action at hand, without noticeably lessening the
intensity of what they are being shown.
What remains, however, is Donaldson's sensitivity towards the
imperiled and his insight into the workings of a disturbed mind.
There is a world of difference between Angus Thermopyle and Thomas
Covenant, the principle character from Donaldson's most famous fantasy
series, but there are similarities as well. Both characters are
difficult to like and to understand, and both must have been difficult
for the author to use.
But then, as has been so capably shown in his previous works,
Donaldson's trademark is his ability to step beyond the ordinary, to
create not only new worlds that are fully-realized within the pages of
his novels, but characters that few other writers would even consider
making protagonists.
The Real Story is certainly a change of pace: short and to the point,
yet for those who have followed its author's career, it might well
seem inevitable that he would move on to the complexities that are
also found at the heart of this most recent work.
Black Cocktail
Jonathan Carroll
Century/Legend, 1990; 76pp; L4.50; 0-7126-2164-4
Weird Tales
edited by John Betancourt, George H. Scithers & Darrell Schweitzer
Terminus Publishing, Winter 1990-91; 146pp; $4.95 Magazine; no ISSN
Jonathan Carroll is a long-time favorite author of mine, but he also
continually frustrates me. In his novels, short stories and this
novella, he reveals a prose style that literally sings with clarity,
odd turns of phrase, resonance, insight -- in other words, all the Good
Stuff. Unfortunately, his last few novels and this piece in hand,
often leave me disappointed at the end. Not because his prose loses
its strength, but rather that his stories seem to run out of steam
about three quarters of the way through.
Novels such A Child Across the Sky merely left me somewhat confused at
the end. But this one....
It's starts, as most of Carroll's work does, with such promise: Ingram
York, trying to recover from his lover's death, meets Michael Billa
who seems to be the prefect friend: witty, a great conversationalist,
the kind of person who just makes you feel good. Imagine York's
dismay when, sometime later, he meets Clinton Deix, who claims that
all of Billa's stories are lies and can prove that he and Billa were
schoolmates, even though Billa is in his late thirties, while Deix is
only fifteen.
This is the sort of thing at which Carroll excels: tantalizing
puzzles, characters that come alive as soon as they step on the page,
mystery. But unlike some of those novels that left me confused at the
end, this time around I understood all too well. The puzzle would
have been better left unexplained. I won't tell you why, since I
don;t want to spoil things for you in case you feel differently; I'll
just tell you that it all seemed rather hokey.
Still, there's lots of nice touches such as York being Maris'
brother -- remember her from Bones of the Moon? -- sweet asides, snippets of
pearly wisdom, a sense of wonder. I used to have the same trouble
with the endings to Clifford Simak's later books, but I still read
them because the ideas, everything I like about Simak's prose and
characters were too good to miss.
So I guess I'll keep reading Carroll, marveling and being frustrated,
for as long as he writes.
Much better than Black Cocktail is the latest issue of Weird Tales
which features four stories -- a form in which Carroll excels -- and a kind
of interview. I say "kind of", since Carroll's responses to obvious
questions are all present; the magazine just didn't print the
questions. Still, it's easy to figure out what's going on.
The stories aren't exactly all new, either. "The Panic Hand" appeared
in a recent Interzone and "Tired Angel" showed up in Fear. There's no
mention of their previous appearances, but since both of those are UK
newsstand magazines, you'll likely not have seen either of them, which
would be a shame if Weird Tales hadn't reprinted them here, because
they're among Carroll's best work.
The other two pieces, "My Zoondel" and "Postgraduate", while not as
strong, are still fine, weird stories, and of course, Weird Tales
publishes features, columns and a number of stories by other authors
as well. The Dean Koontz interview is interesting, taking a different
line of attack than most recent ones have, Nina Kiriki Hoffman is in
fine form with her "Exact Change", and the whole package sports a
wonderful cover by Thomas Kidd.
Much Rejoicing
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
Copyright 1991 by Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
Episode 14: The Return of the Invidious Comparison.
But Without Piers Anthony.
I don't know what, if anything, they thought of it as song. But
that, as Santine Once said to me, is what you can never know and I
can never tell you.
-- Samuel R. Delany, Stars in my Pockets Like Grains of Sand.
Sometimes books leap out and demand to be compared with one another.
Or, at least, lumped together. I present for your delectation two pair
of such, a book that needs no companionship, and a couple of quickies.
The Night Mayor
Kim Newman
Caroll and Graf, $17.95;
0-88184-642-2
Sparrowhawk
Thomas A. Easton
Ace, $3.95; 0-441-77778-3
The Night Mayor is by turns scary, funny, silly, and gripping. Kim
Newman gives us the entertainment medium of the future, Dreaming, a
sort of movie set in cyberspace so that you can enter and experience
the characters' full range of senses.
A Dream is also the perfect escape haven for a convicted criminal,
Truro Daine, a supernasty who gives new meaning to the name "mass
murderer." Daine has escaped into a Dream of his own making, a
cine-noir Night City from which he can't be pulled by force because of
namby-pamby rules about the death penalty. Instead, a pair of
professional Dreamers must enter his Dream and eject him from within.
As the novel opens, one of the Dreamers, a schlockmeister named
Tunney, is already in Daine's Dream. His personality has been subsumed
into his best-known creation, a Bogartesque private dick named Richie
Quick. We follow him through a series of cliched hard-boiled movie
scenes (including an uproarious visit to Chinatown), with guest stars
galore, while, in alternating scenes, the other Dreamer, artiste Susan
Bishopric, is brought to his aid.
After Bishopric enters Daine's dream, the plot begins to permute and
mutate in delightfully unexpected ways, including a brief interlude
from a Japanese monster movie, before justice is done and Daine faces
a worse punishment than he has escaped.
Newman's future is marvelously detailed, but not very convincing. It's
the sort you go along with for the romp, like one of Douglas Adams'
confections. Also, the Dream gets sufficiently weird at times that
it's not entirely clear what is going on or why. And Daine never shows
himself to be as evil as his carefully-detailed reputation. These are
not mere quibbles, quite, but the ambition of The Night Mayor is such
that these flaws are easily forgiven.
Sparrowhawk, by comparison, is less daring plot-wise; it's essentially
a near-future police procedural. Tom Easton's daring is in his milieu,
a future in which biotechnology has advanced immensely: people drive
immense Tortoises and Roachsters (made from lobsters and, yes,
cockroaches) to work in the morning and live in giant, hollowed-out
gourds. We who have seen his "biofuture" stories in F&SF, not to
mention Gardner Dozois' Best of the Year anthology, have waited for
his first novel with some anticipation.
Emily Gilman is a gengineer developing the Bioblimp, a huge
hydrogen-self-inflating jellyfish with marsupial pouches, and
tentacles toughened to serve as cargo handlers: a moving van. Her
future is bright. But someone's out to kill Emily, and doesn't much
care who else gets killed along the way.
Detective Bernie Fischer comes in on the case. He follows clues and
leads in impeccable police-procedural tradition. The case is solved
and wrapped up neatly. It's a good mystery novel.
Unfortunately, it's a lousy SF novel. The plot is insanely pedestrian
for such a wild milieu; as far as Easton shows us, people and culture
are essentially unchanged by 100 years of advances in biotechnology.
The first scene in the novel is an airline terrorist attack, which is
immediately blamed on -- you guessed it -- Palestinians.
Emily is the mother in a nuclear family, faithful to her husband; she
has a brief fling with Bernie that only serves to strengthen that
devotion, and to convince Bernie to marry the fellow cop he's been
dallying with since before the novel opened. We -- at least those of us
who read mystery novels -- have seen this bit in too many police
procedural novels to see it carried forward into the next century with
anything but boredom and frustration.
To sum up, Sparrowhawk is an almost completely successful novel, but
successful only because it attempts very little. The Night Mayor is
less successful than Sparrowhawk, but because it attempts so much, its
failures are more interesting than the other's success.
Oddly enough, there is a related comparison to be made between the
next pair of books...
Winterlong
Elizabeth Hand
Bantam Spectra, $4.95; 0-553-28772-9
Mad Roy's Light
Paula King
Baen Books, $3.50; 0-671-72015-5
The common theme here: transcendence.
Elizabeth Hand's Winterlong is damned difficult to describe. It's set
after I don't know how many "Ascendences," which are fought with
"Rains of Roses" (tailored viruses) and may or may not be a new name
for world wars.
The viewpoint characters are definitely underclass and not really
clear on world politics. Which is fine; we learn enough to understand
what happens to the characters as the novel progresses.
Our viewpoints are a boy and girl who eventually turn out to be twins
separated, not at birth, but very young. They were the property of a
house of religious prostitution, the Miramar, one of several such in
the City of Trees. These houses worship a goddess, the Magdalene, and
a god, the Gaping One, the latter being a death-god who they'd rather
worship from a distance. He is supposed to bring the Final Ascension
when he returns.
The girl, Wendy Wanders, was sold by the Miramar because she was
autistic and so useless as a prostitute. The upperclass used her in
experiments, which partially cured her and gave her an artificially
augmented empathy. She enters the dreams of others, a talent which her
owners use as a therapeutic tool. But Wendy's clients have developed a
nasty habit of committing suicide.
The boy, Raphael, remained with Miramar and grew up a pampered
prostitute. He leaves the house to live with his current client, a
museum curator with sadistic tastes, in the hope of gaining knowledge;
he is not entirely successful. Raphael accidentally kills a curator
and has to flee for his life. On the way, he contacts a group of
corpse-eaters called the lazars.
Wendy is driven from her home outside the City of Trees in a Rain of
Roses; Raphael, the same night, is captured in a raid on one of the
Houses. They begin a complex dance which leads to their coming
together and the transcendent return of the Gaping One and the
Magdalene. The path is very bloody.
That is not merely an oversimplification of what happens in
Winterlong: it is a terrible distortion. To be frank, the book is too
dense to be tractable to summary. Looking over what I've written, I
see I've failed entirely to mention Dr. Silverthorn (who becomes a
walking skeleton before dying), Miss Scarlet (a talking chimp and the
greatest actor of the age, who is obsessed with the Disney film
Pinocchio), and a host of wonderful things.
I have also failed to mention that Winterlong, because it's so dense,
is very rough going in spots; in particular, in the first two chapters
(the point of view alternates chapter-wise between Wendy and Raphael)
it's difficult as hell to get your bearings. And the only reason this
is so is because of an apparent reluctance on Hand's part to
compromise with point-of-view or to introduce explanations of what her
point-of-view characters already know, descriptions of what they're
already intimately familiar with. This is laudable artistically, and
disastrous commercially. I don't see Winterlong attracting a mass
audience, which is a shame, because it's one of the most ambitious
novels since The Book of the New Sun (which it resembles in several
ways) or Neuromancer (which it also resembles in others).
Now, Mad Roy's Light doesn't seem like the sort of book that will end
up with a transcendent vision. At first glance, and even at second,
Paula King has produced a plot from Andre Norton and A.E. Van Vogt
born out of a milieu of C.J. Cherryh: which are, in fact, not at all
bad antecedents, as antecedents go.
Jennan Bartlett is a Cherryhish character, one of the first humans
inducted into a trading Guild led by the alien Daruma, isolated from
her own kind and loving the alien.
Another group of humans steals a McGuffin -- a widget, a religious
statuette called a Madringal -- from a planet named Shann, whose natives
are all schizophrenics. Bartlett gets involved in some trade and
political machinations which endanger her life roughly once on each
planet she visits, confronts her own need for human (sexual)
companionship, faces off mysterious, powerful aliens from outside
Guild space. A nice, neat, generic SF adventure novel sort of plot,
all in all...
...except that the McGuffin holds the key to why the Shenda are all
crazy. We are privy to this knowledge from a brief prologue, set
fifteen thousand years earlier, in which a godlike being called
Madringa appears from a Shenda warp drive, cries "I AM THE LIGHT," and
destroys Shann's moon. The Mandringal McGuffin is, of course, the very
warp drive part which can resummon Mandringa, and does to various
extents as the novel progresses. The ending shows us some of
Mandringa's activities, but in fact still damn little of what it is;
King attempts to portray transcendence through silence, and fails.
In fact, neither Hand nor King succeeds brilliantly in portraying the
transcendent. As Wittgenstein observed, "What we cannot speak of, we
must pass over in silence." But because Hand's characters, her world,
her very language are so rich, while King's are ultimately so
familiar, her failure is the more interesting.
Which brings us, at last, to the only completely successful first
novel I've read lately.
Imagining Argentina
Lawrence Thornton
Bantam, $8.95; 0-553-34579-6
Rarely does a book make me weep. Almost never does a book make me weep
in public. But on the bus going home one recent evening, reading the
climax of Imagining Argentina, I could not restrain myself.
It's the story of Carlos Rueda and his family, told by his friend
Martin Benn. Benn is a journalist who works with Rueda's wife,
Cecelia, in Buenos Aires during the '70s. Cecelia writes a series of
articles about the "disappeareds" that culminates in her own
disappearance.
Rueda, and his daughter Teresa, are shattered. He tries in a number of
ways to cope, to compensate, to convince himself she'll be back; his
grieving is very real to the reader.
And then, one day, he starts telling stories about the disappeared. He
tells a mother that her child will be returned to her under
such-and-such circumstances: the child is. He tells of the death of
another, the continuing imprisonment of a third; and it becomes clear
that he is telling the truth, that somehow his stories tell what has
happened, and what will happen, to his listeners' loved ones.
Even the news of their deaths, even the news of their rapes and
tortures and deaths, comforts, because it ends the uncertainty. Too,
Rueda gains strength from those he helps. And we see, not only the
evil of the junta -- something we have all seen so many times we no
longer need to be convinced -- but, more importantly, the sheer
unimaginative banality of their evil. Rueda grows strong enough that
he can confront the man behind the disappearances, General Guzman: and
does so, and comes out of the office unhurt.
But he can not tell the one story he needs to hear, the story of
Cecelia. His life goes from bad to worse; his daughter is taken, and
when her story is told, it's one of torture and rape and death.
Rueda carries on. He knows that he must, that they took his daughter
because they dared not take him. His is a private war, but a war in
which he holds the only weapons that matter -- spirit and imagination.
Eventually, as the history books say, the Generals fall. I won't
reveal what part Rueda plays in this, or how he finds the end of
Cecelia's story, but I will tell you to go out and read Imagining
Argentina if you have to knock over a bank to get the money for it.
It's about love, about fear, about the survival of the human spirit,
and about the reason we all started reading this stuff anyway:
imagination and the power of stories.
Quick Takes -- all good reads:
Expecting Someone Taller by Tom Holt (Ace, $3.95; 0-441-22332-X). A
pleasant but dull Englishman accidentally gets hold of the Nibelung's
Ring and Tarnhelm. Silly and literate.
Stars in my Pockets like Grains of Sane by Samuel R. Delany; Emergence
by David R. Palmer; Little, Big by John Crowley (Bantam Spectra
Signature Special Editions, $4.95 each). Three of the most important
works in the SF/F field in the last ten years, all reissued with nice
covers and new introductions or afterwords by the author. If there's
any of these you don't have, you're in for a treat.
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (Workman, $18.95,
0-89480-8530-2) A grumpy angel and a pleasant demon try to stave off
the Apocalypse. Problem is, they've misplaced the Anti-Christ. Sort of
like Douglas Adams, only intelligent.
------ End ------
