Resurrected Review: The Armies of Memory, by John Barnes

Here's something I wrote back in 2006 about the concluding novel in John Barnes' Thousand Cultures series. Barnes' work has never, it seems to me, got quite the attention it deserves -- he's a fascinating pure science fiction writer, and some of his stories are among my favorites of the past few decades. Alas, he has fallen somewhat silent of late: no novels since 2012, no short fiction since 2019.

Review: The Armies of Memory, by John Barnes

by Rich Horton

In The Armies of Memory John Barnes concludes his Thousand Cultures series that began with a lovely novelette, "Canso de Fis de Jovent", in Analog in 1991. This story, which tells of the experience of a group of friends including the narrator, Giraut Leones, when their world, Wilson, and their culture, Nou Occitan, a synthetic recreation of Occitan, an historical area of France (in the Provence, and associated with the Cathars) at the time of the troubadors, is perturbed by the arrival of Springer technology: instantaneous jump gates, that serve to relink the "Thousand Cultures" that Earth has planted on a number of worlds. The other key technologies are powerful Artificial Intelligence (restricted in human space by Human Supremacy laws) and a means of reincarnation by installing recorded brain states ("pyspyxes") into cloned bodies. That story became the first section of A Million Open Doors, which was followed by Earth Made of Glass and The Merchants of Souls. In these novels Giraut became an agent for humanity's OSP, which tries to keep the various cultures from becoming overly oppressive and from bothering their neighbour cultures. He married a woman named Margaret, then underwent a painful divorce. He discovered remains of mysteriously vanished aliens, the Predecessors. He was present at the founding of a new religion, Ixism, and simultaneously at the mutual destruction of two cultures. And he dealt with the crisis on Earth, where a majority of the population has chosen to "go into the box": permanent VR life.

As this novel opens, Margaret is now Giraut's boss, and Giraut is the head of a small team of agents including his new lover, his reincarnated 8-year old (physically) father and his reincarnated friend, Raimbault, from his youth back on Wilson. Giraut is also a spectacularly successful musician, playing Nou Occitan trobador-tradition music. Now he is premiering a new song cycle based on the life and beliefs of Ix, the founder of an important new religion. But this has made him a target, perhaps of Occitan traditionalists, or perhaps of enemies of Ixism -- or who knows?: at any rate, he is the subject of repeated assassination attempts. After a while it becomes clear that the assassination attempts are a curious mixture of brilliance and incompetence. And finally, more scarily, that they are being carried out by force grown clone bodies implanted with "chimera" brains: that is, the combination of two or more recorded human brains, an obscenity in Council culture.

All signs lead to planets of the "Union", a little-understood group of illegally colonized planets outside of Council space, in particular Aurenga, the planet colonized by the "Lost Legion", a group of Nou Occitan war criminals. This is interesting because there are indications that the lost psypyx of Margaret's predecessor Shan is also there. What's more, they learn that not only are human "chimeras" involved, but some chimera's might have AI components.

The novel quite intriguingly spirals from an important but smallish mystery to bigger and more important mysteries. Eventually it is in great part about the meaning of intelligence, and of humanity, and the place and rights of AIs. And this is in the context of extremely scary revelations about the fate of the Predecessors, and a threat of alien invasion. Barnes treats these issues very intelligently, and the novel is always interesting: full of action, full of neat science-fictional ideas that have interesting philosophical ramifications, and full of fine and engaging characters. A weakness is that the closing sections seem rushed, and are full of long (and still fairly interesting) passages in which we and the main characters are baldly told the situation, rather than having the situation organically revealed. And the unwinding of things towards the end has an air of patness, convenience, about it, even as it leads to a dramatic setpiece of a series conclusion. But even with this shortcoming, this remains one of the must-read SF novels of 2006.

Resurrected Review: Fool Me Twice, by Matthew Hughes

I wrote the review below back in 2004. I should add some detail -- Matthew Hughes (born in England but in Canada from age 5) has continued to write a variety of stories in roughly the same milieu -- an acknowledged variation of Jack Vance's Dying Earth setting, featuring a wide variety of differing heroes and antiheroes. As with many writers of his age (a decade older than me) he has lately turned to small presses and self-publishing for his books, though his stories can still be found in places like Lightspeed. The stories remain reliably entertaining and I recommend them. He has also written crime fiction (as Matt Hughes) and other work as by Hugh Matthews.

Review: Fool Me Twice, by Matthew Hughes

by Rich Horton

Canadian writer Matthew Hughes published Fools Errant, his first SF novel, in 1994. His second, Fool Me Twice, followed in 2001. Beginning last year he began to publish (mostly in F&SF) a number of short stories set in the same milieu. Another novel, Black Brillion, followed in 2004. All these works are set in the far future of Earth, just prior to the era of Jack Vance's Dying Earth. Hughes captured Vance's style pretty well, and did a pretty good job of imagining odd societies in the Vancean manner as well. His first novel, however, while quite enjoyable, was probably a bit too overtly a Vance pastiche. However his own voice has become increasingly developed in his more recent stories.

Fool Me Twice is a direct sequel to Fools Errant. In the first novel, the hero, Filidor Vesh, nephew to the Archon of Old Earth, was brought to some understanding of his potential responsibilities, and his capabilities. In this novel, he has become the Archon's apprentice, but despite some additional duties, he does not really seem to have fully taken up his role. Indeed, he seems all to willing to let his aide direct his actions, saving all the more time for his favored pursuits: eating, drinking, chasing women. 

As the novel opens, he more or less simultaneously makes a careless decision to allow exploitation of a remote rural area by some local nobles (named, transparently, Maguffyne); and falls in love with a girl he sees out his window. Not at all surprisingly, upon tracking down the girl he learns that she had come to petition him to protect her land from exploitation by the very nobles he has just supported. Soon he find himself stripped of his seal of office and effectively without an identity. 

He ends up chasing the girl in an attempt to make amends (and recover his sigil). He falls in with a travelling acting troupe, and later ends up thrown off a ship in the middle of an ocean. Luckily -- to an extent -- he is rescued by a sea creature -- unluckily the creature tows him to slavery on a remote island. Filidor is once again forced to take real responsibility for his life, and for the good of others as well ...

The end is never in real doubt, but the journey is very enjoyable. The influence of Vance is very much in view -- fortunately Vance is an author well worth being influenced by. Fool Me Twice isn't a great book, but it's a very diverting read.

Resurrected Review: Aiding and Abetting, by Muriel Spark

Review: Aiding and Abetting, by Muriel Spark

by Rich Horton

The recent publication of a biography of the great British novelist Muriel Spark, Electric Spark, by Frances Wilson, has led to some welcome attention to the writer. And it reminds me that I should return to her -- I read about a dozen of her novel some decades ago, and I found them remarkable. My favorites are mostly among her earlier novels, such as Memento Mori (1959), The Girls of Slender Means (1963), and of course The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961); but she was writing first rate novels nearly until her death in 2006. Some of the sheer viciousness of her early novels was a bit dulled in her later works, perhaps, but they remained intriguing and ambiguously dark. Here's something very brief I wrote in 2001 (lightly revised here) about her second to last novel, which appeared in 2000.

Muriel Spark's Aiding and Abetting is another very short novel, at about 36,000 words.  This story is based on the true story of Lord Lucan, a dissolute English Earl who killed his children's nanny by mistake (thinking she was his wife) and then beat his wife, though she escaped.  Lucan fled prosecution, and was never found.  Many people think he is dead, but there were rumours and "Lucan sightings" for decades. Spark did take some liberties with the real life facts of the case in this book. (The crime occurred in 1974 and Lucan was not declared legally dead until 1999, just prior to the publication of Spark's novel.)

Spark creates an unusual psychiatrist named Hildegard Wolf, who has a criminal past of her own (also based on a true story, apparently). Dr. Wolf has a practice in Paris, and she gets two new clients, both of whom claim to be Lord Lucan.  Eventually they use their knowledge of her past as a guard against her exposing them to the police. She is disturbed by this: also she isn't sure which or either of the men may be Lord Lucan. Soon Wolf's lover is also involved in the search for the missing Lord, as are an old acquaintance of Lord Lucan and the daughter of another old friend of his.

These people end up on a merry chase, leading to a very satisfying resolution. The book is written in Spark's usual, very enjoyable, ironic/satiric voice. It is sharply but subtly moralistic about the attitudes of Lucan's class, and about the nature and persistence of guilt.  It is also a thoroughly enjoyable book to read.  Spark was a marvel, and this book, publishe in her early 80s, stands respectably in the company of her best work.

Old Bestseller Review: Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

Thoughts on Charles Dickens' Great Expectations

by Rich Horton

What to say about Great Expectations, one of the most famous English novels of all time? I don’t really have an awful lot to add to the voluminous critical views. I am still in a sense quite new to Charles Dickens. I’ve read five of his novels (if we call A Christmas Carol a novel): Nicholas Nickleby and A Christmas Carol in my teens, and David Copperfield, Martin Chuzzlewit, and now Great Expectations within the last couple of years. In that list I would rank Great Expectations second behind David Copperfield.

Great Expectations was serialized in Dickens’ own magazine All the Year Round in 1860 and 1861, and published in book form (three volumes) by Chapman and Hall in 1861. It is a long book by most measures -- about 500 pages in my edition, nearly 200,000 words. I say long by most measures -- it’s not nearly as long as some other Dickens novels -- David Copperfield is 800 pages or about 370,000 words, and Nicholas Nickleby and Bleak House are both nearly as long as David Copperfield.

I’ll summarize the familiar story very quickly. There are some spoilers, though not for the very end, so skip this if you want, especially the third paragraph, which corresponds to the third volume of the novel. The hero is Philip Pirrip, called Pip for obvious reasons. He is an orphan who is raised by his rather abusive older sister and her very kind husband, the blacksmith Joe Gargery. As a young boy he meets an escaped convict who forces him to steal some tools from Joe so that he can free himself from his shackles, and he also gives the man some food. When Pip gets a bit older he is hired to regularly visit a strange woman, Miss Havisham, a wealthy spinster (in her 40s or early 50s though she is often portrayed as elderly) and Miss Havisham’s beautiful but very cruel adopted daughter Estella, and Pip conceives an unrequited love for Estella.

When Pip grows near adulthood, he is given a mysterious gift that will allow him to go to London and learn to be a gentleman. He is assured that there are "great expectations" for his future. He is sure that Miss Havisham is his sponsor, and that she intends for him to eventually marry Estella. In London he makes friends with a couple of men -- Herbert Pocket, the son of his tutor Matthew, who is also a relative of Miss Havisham; and John Wemmick, the clerk to the lawyer Mr. Jaggers who handles Pip’s "expectations", as well as Miss Havisham’s business. Pip learns gentlemanly ways but doesn’t really learn to be a man -- he runs into debt, spurns his old friends such as Joe as well as Biddy, a sweet and honest country woman who had seemed to love Pip when they were younger. 

And then one night he is surprised by a strange visitor -- Abel Magwitch, the escaped convict he had helped as a young child. Magwitch had been transported for life to Australia, and had become rich there. He had vowed to help his young benefactor -- to see him become a gentleman. Pip is astonished, and at first repulsed, and vows not to accept any more money from Magwitch. But over time he realizes that for all Magwitch’s coarse ways, and his truly criminal past, he is a loyal and fundamentally honest man. Pip comes to appreciate his friend Herbert more as well, and is given examples in behavior by people like Wemmick as well; and his character begins to take a turn, even as his expectations dwindle. I won’t detail the climax, or the various revelations that tie the intricate plot together, but the novel comes to a powerful (and slightly ambiguous) conclusion.

I was delighted as the novel closed to find myself having guessed right about how much of it would work out -- from such small things as John Wemmick’s marriage to Miss Skiffins to larger things like the eventual fate of Biddy. In certain novels this is a source of satisfaction -- these revelations should be on the one hand surprises but surprises that arise properly from what came before, so that eventually they are not surprises. If you see what I mean. And of course there is Pip’s fate -- which is honestly worked out, and which, as I hint, ends a bit ambiguously. (And, apparently, somewhat differently than Dickens originally planned.)

It’s a wonderful novel, it really is. I have said that I prefer David Copperfield, and I do. That novel is bigger and baggier, fuller, messier. As I put it, if a novel is a prose work of some length with a flaw, David Copperfield is a prose work of great length with great flaws -- and amazing virtues as well, and a great heart. There is just more there, and more that I love. 

But it must be said that Great Expectations is more unified, more tightly plotted, better structured. And there are the joys of Dickens’ eccentrics: John Wemmick and his father, "the Aged"; the expert lawyer Mr Jaggers; the hypocritical Uncle Pumblechook, a slightly less evil version of Mr. Pecksniff from Martin Chuzzlewit; the obsessed Miss Havisham herself; loyal and exceedingly honest Joe Gargery; Miss Havisham’s relatives and their "expectations"; Trabb's boy, Pip's tormentor but also a key helper at one point; the aspiring actor Mr. Wopsle; and the villainous Orlick.

My final question, for anyone who has gotten this far, is -- what to read next by Dickens? Bleak House is an obvious answer, and I’ll certainly get there. I also want to read some more of the Christmas novellas -- "The Cricket on the Hearth", perhaps? But what other novels? Dombey and Son? Oliver Twist? Little Dorrit? What do people suggest?

Recent Substack posts from me

Here are some links to recent posts on my Substack:

A look at a 1956 issue of Fantastic. Not a great issue, but it does have four stories by a very young Robert Silverberg. https://open.substack.com/pub/richhorton314252/p/the-bad-old-stuff?r=arrxg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

A parallel review of a science fiction magazine (Analog) and a mainstream little magazine (Zyzzyva): https://richhorton314252.substack.com/p/from-a-to-z-in-short-fiction-magazines

A review of Elizabeth Taylor's great novel Angel: https://richhorton314252.substack.com/p/satire-and-sympathy

A review of The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen: https://richhorton314252.substack.com/p/innocence-and-emptiness

Rich Larson's excellent new short story collection Changelog: https://richhorton314252.substack.com/p/review-rich-larsons-changelog