Ace Double Reviews, 17: Annihilation Factor, by Barrington J. Bayley/Highwood, by Neal Barrett, Jr.

Ace Double Reviews, 17: Annihilation Factor, by Barrington J. Bayley/Highwood, by Neal Barrett, Jr. (#33710, 1972, $0.95)

a review by Rich Horton

(Covers by Enric Torres-Prat and Peter Lloyd)

This Ace Double looked particularly interesting to me, as Bayley and Barrett have both published outstanding stuff, and both are at their best quite notably quirky writers. However it must be said that neither of these novels represents its author at his best -- both are quite disappointing, really. Annihilation Factor is the longer story, at about 51,000 words, and it is an expansion of a 1964 New Worlds piece called "The Patch". (Bayley's other Ace Double half, The Star Virus, reviewed previously in this series, was also an expansion of an earlier New Worlds story,). Highwood is about 46,000 words long. Barrett also appeared in one other Ace Double, with his 1970 novel The Gates of Time.

I have compared Barrington J. Bayley to Charles Harness before, and I think the comparison holds up insofar as concerns the wackiness and imaginativeness of the concepts they build their books around. But they differ greatly in general attitude -- essentially, Bayley is extremely cynical, often dour (though on occasion almost whimsical); while Harness is very romantic. (Incidentally, I see from an interview on Juha Lindroos's excellent (though not updated since 2002) website The Astounding Worlds of Barrington J. Bayley that Bayley acknowledges the influence of Harness on his work.) Bayley remains an interesting author, though not a great one -- his prose is pedestrian, and (like Harness) his ideas sometimes seem simply too weird, too disconnected from any sort of consistent logic -- and the same goes for his plots. Bayley began publishing SF as a teen in the mid 50s, but his first novel was 1970's The Star Virus. He is probably best known for some novels published by DAW and sometimes Doubleday later in the 70s, into the 80s: Collision Course (1973), The Fall of Chronopolis (1974), The Soul of the Robot (1974), The Garments of Caean (1976), The Zen Gun (1982). After about 1985 he had difficulty placing further novels, and from then until last year his only novel to appear was the Warhammer tie-in Eye of Terror (1999). 2002 saw the publication by Wildside of two new novels (apparently dating to the late 90s): The Sinners of Erspia and The Great Hydration. He continued to publish short fiction, some quite good, almost all of it decidedly offbeat. "A Crab Must Try" won the BSFA short fiction award in 1996. Bayley died in 2008.

Annihilation Factor is set in a far future human empire riven by economic divisions and dynastic upheaval. It opens with a "young" (only 90) aristocrat visiting the "Pretender Prince" whose father was deposed by the current King. The aristocrat, Jundrak Sann, offers the Prince amnesty in return for aid against a mysterious quasi-living being, called "the Patch", that lives in space and has been devouring entire solar systems, leaving all inhabitants dead. But the Prince, fearing a trick, refuses. On Jundrak's return we are introduced to the corrupt nature of the Empire's society, in which aristocrats can live to be 600 or so while the poor live only as long as we do today. Jundrak himself is something of a mild iconoclast, as he has a lower class lover. But he is also a schemer, and in his role as the head of the Empire's research project into a new faster class of starships he has made arrangements to take control of the new improved fleet himself.

Into this society comes the only man ever to survive the Patch, a basically psychotic anarchist called Castor Krakhno. Krakhno preaches, basically, socialist anarchism, a virtuous position in this corrupt monarchy, but his true goal is the annihilation of all life, which is repugnant to him. His encounter with the Patch has given him superior mental powers that have led to his having considerable success fomenting rebellion. Also, the Pretender has had some military success against the King. But the Patch is on its way to the Pretender's system. And Jundrak is maneuvered by the Machiavellian chief of the King's security into trying to infiltrate Krakhno's organization.

It's all rather busy, and extremely cynical. Everyone is basically bad, though they have good points. Jundrak is the closest we have to a hero, but his character as presented is chaotic -- he's quite cynically evil when the plot demands it, but almost innocent and naive when the plot demands THAT. The resolution involves a few more twists, some of them just plain silly -- though the final fate of the revolutionaries is very well presented, surprising and logical. The story reads a bit slow as well -- I suspect the original version (which I have not seen) might have been the right length to support the basic ideas. It's not a terrible book, but it's not very good, certainly one of the least of Bayley's works.

Neal Barrett, Jr., started publishing short SF with stories in Galaxy and Amazing in 1960, and continued publishing regularly for about a decade, at which time he began selling novels, including the two Ace Double halves mentioned above, and the Aldair series for DAW. I'm not terribly familiar with his early work, but by all accounts it's fairly routine stuff. Then, someone once said, Barrett stood too long next to fellow Texan Howard Waldrop and just mutated. Beginning in the mid 80s he published a few novels and a number of short stories that are gloriously weird, poetic, loopily imagined -- just real neat stuff. Most notable probably are the novel Through Darkest America (1986), and the short stories "Ginny Sweethips' Flying Circus" (1987, Nebula and Hugo nominee), "Stairs" (1988, one of my personal favorite stories ever), and "Cush" (1993). By the early 90s, however, he was concentrating on mystery novels, such as Pink Vodka Blues (1992), a scary mystery about a couple of alcoholics; and Skinny Annie Blues (1996), one of a series about the somewhat antiheroic Wiley Moss. Later he published a couple further unusual science fantasies beginning with The Prophecy Machine (2000). He died in 2014, at age 84.

Highwood is set on a planet, called Sequoia by humans, that is dominated by trees a few miles high. There is an intelligent humanoid race living in the trees, the Lemmits, who have an unusual social structure: the males and females live in separate groups, hating each other, only getting together irregularly for "Motherings". Hamby Flagg is the human representative on Sequoia, but he has issues -- he's a drunk who is down to his last couple of bottles of whiskey, and he's accompanied by an AI companion, a "psych-Bear", which uses sarcasm to try to keep him sane. New on the planet is the beautiful sociologist Kearney Wynn, who is determined to figure out the mysteries behind the unusual Lemmit culture, and who is also disgusted by Hamby Flagg, both his person and his sketchy reports.

Soon after Kearney's arrival, strange things begin happening. A Mothering is in the offing, but so is something stranger still -- a mutilated Lemmit delivers an ominous message that sends both the male and female groups from the tree occupied by Hamby and Kearney on a trek to another tree. Various disasters occur, including Kearney's near rape by the females who have adopted her, Ham's psych-Bear's apparent malfunctioning, Kearney's imprisonment, and the death of a tree. Eventually the two are forced to the deadly surface of the planet, where they make a very unexpected discovery.

I don't think the book works very well at all. It sets up an intriguing mystery concerning Lemmit society, but the eventual solution is unconvincing and very disappointing. Much of the action is disjoint, with lots of confusing jumps in the telling -- I wonder if the novel might not have been rather arbitrarily cut to fit the Ace Double format. And the main characters are not convincing. Kearney's sexual attitudes in particular are cringe-inducing, from her revulsion at the Lemmit's Lesbianism to her own personal ambitions, as shown in this passage from late in the book, a passage that I really would have thought unbelievable by 1972: "I didn't climb all over this damn planet for my health -- or for science, either, for that matter. I was looking for a man, Flagg. I didn't know that, of course, and I sure as hell wouldn't have admitted it to myself, but it's true, nevertheless. And now that I've found one, motheaten and grimy as you are, I kind of like what I've got." (To be fair, after first deciding that she must abandon her career on the grounds that she must give all her attention to Hamby, she later tentatively decides that since Hamby will allow it, she might continue to do science along with him.)

By all means people should search out latter-day Barrett -- the late 80s work in particular. But this early novel is not nearly as good, and not even a harbinger of the better things that he eventually did.

Birthday Review: Cetaganda and Diplomatic Immunity, by Lois McMaster Bujold

Today is Lois McMaster Bujold's birthday. I've enjoyed her novels immensely, particularly the earlier novels in the the Vorkosigan saga, and the fantasy quartet The Sharing Knife. In honor of her birthday, I'm reposting two reviews I did of a couple of the lesser Vorkosigan books. Alas, that! But those are the ones I reviewed. The first was posted on my old home page; and the second was one of the reviews I did for the fine UK magazine 3SF, edited by Liz Holliday.

TITLE: Cetaganda
AUTHOR: Lois McMaster Bujold

PUBLICATION: Baen, 1995

ISBN: 0671877011

The latest of Lois McMaster Bujold`s Miles Vorkosigan adventures, Cetaganda, is, by Bujold`s own testimony, a rather light-hearted romp, a bit of a step down in seriousness and apparent ambition from Barrayar and Mirror Dance, her most recent Vorkosigan novels.

This novel is set a few years prior to the action of Mirror Dance. Miles is 21. He and his amiably dim-witted (by Miles` standards) cousin, Ivan, are sent to the home planet of the Cetagandan empire to attend the funeral of the Cetagandan empress. (They are chosen to go on somewhat unconvincing grounds: when did Miles and Ivan get elected Vice-President anyway?) Naturally, no sooner have they arrived (indeed, slightly before their actual arrival) they encounter a mysterious character and come into possession of a mysterious object (in fact, a rather slimly disguised MacGuffin). Miles being Miles, he does not sensibly report the incident to the Barrayaran Ambassador, nor to the local Imperial Security agent (to be sure, conveniently for the purposes of the plot, this latter person is away on some vague assignment). Instead, Miles bamboozles Ivan into supporting him in an attempt to resolve what quickly becomes a very delicate situation, on his own.

The two face deadly dangers, encounter beautiful ladies of both of the Cetagandan upper classes, and eventually find themselves enmeshed in a plot which threatens Cetagandan internal stability (and thus Barrayaran security, as Cetaganda is a traditional enemy.) A number of the details of the plot and the Cetagandan custom upon which the plot turns are unconvincing, but the book is exciting and entertaining and reads very well. Romance is somewhat backgrounded, although Miles does fall in love (hopelessly) with the most beautiful woman he`s ever seen (why does such a clever individual as Miles seem consistently to rate female beauty so highly? Though to be sure, he is only 21, and I guess us guys are guys, huh?!), and there is an almost perfunctory romance between two minor characters. (Ivan, to be sure, is quite amusingly involved with some beautiful Cetagandan women, and Bujold does provide one quite funny incident involving him and an anti-aphrodisiac: another quite pointed and appropriate (I suppose) comment on male-female relationships results.)

The most serious side of the book is an exploration of Cetagandan culture, which is built around genetic engineering of themselves. This culture consists of the haut, who are the true rulers, and the most highly "engineered", the ghem, who provide the military might, and who are less "engineered" and less controlled (partly to allow for the spontaneous generation of potentially useful traits), the ba, neuter servants who also serve as useful safe experimental objects for genetic changes (safe because they are neutered and couldn`t pass on harmful traits), and, presumably, large middle- and under-classes of mostly normal humans. This society is quite interesting, and Bujold makes some subtle and intriguing observations on the sources of power, and the different kinds of power, in particular the power divisions between the males and females of both the haut and the ghem. However, I think a proper exploration of this society would require a good deal more space, and I would quibble with some of the assumptions, in particular, the Cetagandans don`t seem different enough to me to be the result of centuries of genetic engineering. Also, they seem to be optimizing for feminine beauty (by "normal" standards, yet!), even while sex is completely divorced (no pun intended) from their procreation efforts. I find that hard to believe.

All in all, this is certainly an enjoyable book, though not her best. And yes, it does have closure!

Finally, I couldn`t leave without citing the one quotation in the book from my favorite Bujold character, Miles` mother Cordelia, on the subject of how a radical egalitarian (such as Cordelia) could adapt to life in an elitist, aristocratic society like Barrayar`s: "An egalitarian finds it easy to adapt to life in an aristocratic society, as long as she gets to be an aristocrat."

That`s not exact, but you get the point.

Diplomatic Immunity, by Lois McMaster Bujold, Baen, Riverdale, NY, 2002, ISBN 0-7434-3533-8, $25.00, 320 pages

Lois McMaster Bujold's Diplomatic Immunity is the latest of her extended series about Miles Vorkosigan, an aristocrat from the rather autocratic planet Barrayar. After a spectacular if often chaotic earlier career, his life has settled down to some extent. He is an Imperial Auditor, directly responsible to his friend the Emperor, with the job of investigating situations that might be rather politically sensitive; and he has also recently married. As Miles returns from a honeymoon trip, the Emperor reluctantly orders him to try to solve a problem for Barrayar at Graf Station in Quaddiespace, the remote system inhabited by the "Quaddies", genetically modified four-armed humans who were introduced in Bujold's first award-winning novel, 1988's Falling Free, and who haven't been prominently featured since then. It seems that a Barrayaran crew escorting a group of merchant ships has gotten in trouble with the Quaddies, and the merchant fleet has been detained. Profits are at stake, as is Barrayar's reputation, and possibly their right to trade in Quaddiespace.

Miles shows up and finds that the situation is more complex than expected. One Barrayaran crew member has disappeared, and another apparently wishes to desert. The Quaddies are furious, and the merchants are furious. Luckily for Miles, he has an unexpected friend on Graf Station: Bel Thorne, the Betan hermaphrodite who worked with Miles early in his career, and who still secretly works for Barrayar. With Bel's help, he starts to get to the bottom of the various mysteries, only to find that an even worse crisis looms, involving the possibility of war with Barrayar's traditional enemy, Cetaganda, as well as a threat to destroy Graf Station.

Bujold is always a readable writer, and she tells a fairly exciting story here. But some of the energy of the earlier Miles books is lacking. One wonders if her interest in the series is declining, or if the newly settled nature of Miles life (his stable job, his happy marriage) has leached the tension from the overall series story arc. This novel is enjoyable but not exceptional, and the ending is reasonable but in many ways very pat, very convenient. Minor Bujold.

Old Bestseller Review: The Thief of Bagdad, by Achmed Abdullah

Old Bestseller Review: The Thief of Bagdad, by Achmed Abdullah

a review by Rich Horton

This book doesn't appear on bestseller lists, but I'm sure it sold quite well, as it was the novelization of a very popular film, the original Thief of Bagdad, a silent film made by Douglas Fairbanks in 1924. The Fairbanks movie is considered his masterpiece, and one of the great silent films of all time. The 1940 talkie remake, produced by Alexander Korda, is regarded with similar respect. Both films were truly groundbreaking for their special effects.

This was relatively early in the history of movie novelizations (the first I can find were about a decade earlier). My edition is from A. L. Burt, by arrangement with H. K. Fly, which was a firm noted for play scenarios and novelizations of plays, and thus presumably a natural source for movie novelizations. It is illustrated with a few stills from the film. The byline is given "By Achmed Abdullah, writer of many lands and many peoples", and then credited further as follows: "Based on Douglas Fairbanks' Fantasy of the Arabian Nights, by Elton Thomas (copyright 1924 by Douglas Fairbanks) and a short version by Lotta Woods (also copyright by Fairbanks)". As far as I can tell, Elton Thomas is a pseudonym for Fairbanks, though Lotta Woods may be another person. The conception, apparently, was all due to Fairbanks, based on several stories from the Thousand Nights and a Night.

Achmed Abdullah (1881-1945) was an interesting person. He emigrated to the US sometime in the teens, and became a writer, of short fiction (especially for pulps such as Argosy and Blue Book), of plays, and of screenplays. He was once nominated for an Academy Award, for his screenplay for The Lives of a Bengal Lancer. His biography before he reached the US is less well-attested. He claimed to have been born in Russia to an Orthodox family (supposedly a relative of the Czar, but there is no record of a Romanoff cousin matching the details he gives), but to have been raised by his uncle, a Muslim. He said he moved to England and attended Eton and Oxford (neither school has any record of his attendance), and later joined the British Army, reaching the rank of Colonel. In the US, he married three times, and the book at hand is dedicated to his second wife, Jean Wick.

The book itself is a rather mixed bag. It does seem to be quite directly based on the movie. Abdullah is a competent writer, in a sometimes stilted style. At times the description reaches nearly Fanthorpean levels of excess. But at other times it is impressive, and the imagination shown is pretty cool. Although, to be sure, that imagination probably should be credited to Fairbanks and, even more, to the writers of the Arabian Nights stories. (Scheherezade?)

The story opens in Bagdad, with Ahmed, the eponymous Thief of Bagdad, engaging in a couple of thefts, eventually finding himself on the run, which leads him to the house of the Caliph. And there he gets a glimpse of the Caliph's beautiful daughter, Zobeid, and of course he falls immediatly in love with her. His mentor, the Bird of Evil, hatches a plan to get access to her -- and as it happens on that very day three foreign princes are coming to woo her: the Prince of Persia, the Prince of India, and the Prince of the Mongols. Ahmed poses as the Prince of the Isles, and one thing after another, the Princess falls in love with him as well. (Likely the various faults of the other suitors contribute!) But Ahmed abandons his plan to drug her, and determines to earn her love honestly, and confesses to being a thief. He is taken, and sentenced to death -- but Zobeid arranges his escape. Then, faced with the impossible choice between the corpulent Prince of Persia, the overproud Prince of India, and the treacherous and warlike Prince of the Mongols, she arranges a contest -- whoever can bring her the rarest treasure after seven months shall gain her hand.

So all the Princes head off to find a rare treasure. And Ahmed goes on that search as well. Key for him is his decision to commit himself to Islam, while before he had been a scoffer and a skeptic. So his journey takes him to the Valley of Seven Temptations, the Hill of Eternal Fire, and through other ordeals, until he finally reaches the Sea of Resignation to Fate, wherein he is guided to find a cloak of invisibility and a special silver box. Meanwhile the other Princes find certain rarities as well -- the Persian finds a flying carpet, the Indian finds an eye that can see anywhere, and the Mongol finds an apple that can restore life to anyone from any illness.

The Mongol has other plans as well -- he sneaks his army into Bagdad, to conquer the town by force if he does not get the Princess Zobeid's hand. And he arranges for the Princess to be poisoned, so that his apple will restore her to life. It turns out, however, that just as his apple is important, so too are the Indian's eye -- which reveals that Zobeid's illness has reached a critical stage -- and the Persian's flying carpet, which brings them to the castle in time to save her life. It seems Zobeid still has an impossible choice -- and she is waiting, hope against hope, for Ahmed. So the Mongol Prince unleashes his soldiers ...

Well, you probably know how it ends. Really, despite some silliness and extreme overwriting, this was a reasonably entertaining novel. Better still, I am sure, are both movies! My son Geoff reports that he's seen the Fairbanks movie, and recalls it as pretty good. And the Korda movie looks good as well. So I figure I'll try them both soon enough.

Birthday Review: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

Today is Susanna Clarke's birthday, so I thought it appropriate to repost the review I did of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell when it first came out. I loved that novel then, and I still love it -- it stands as one of the truly exceptional fantasies of the 21st Century.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

a review by Rich Horton

This novel has received a great deal of notice -- indeed hype. It has been called "Harry Potter for Adults", a rather unhelpful designation that reflects two things -- it shares a publisher with the Harry Potter books (Bloomsbury), and it does feature magic in something otherwise resembling the England we know. Neil Gaiman blurbed it as "unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years" -- a blurb that would be more defensible if the word "unquestionably" was omitted. One might perhaps conclude that this very fine book is indeed the finest English fantasy of the past 70 years, but I think one first would have to at least "question" the status of Tolkien and Peake -- to name the first two writers that leaped to my mind. Gaiman's 70 year period was evidently a nod to Hope Mirrlees's quite wonderful Lud-in-the-Mist -- a novel I do recommend people seek out.

I had earlier read a few of Clarke's short stories, those that appeared in the Starlight series of original anthologies. They were among my favorites stories in each of those book -- quite lovely and witty pieces. They are set in the same milieu as Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but none of them are actually part of the novel.

As Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell opens, we are introduced to a society of theoretical magicians based in Yorkshire. It seems that the practice of magic has disappeared from England in the previous couple of centuries. At one time magic was very common, and indeed the Northern part of England was ruled by a powerful magician, a boy raised in Fairie, called the Raven King or John Uskglass. The magicians who practiced during his 300 year reign were called "Aureate" magicians, and their successors "Argentine", but nothing remains of magical knowledge but a number of books of questionable authority, and occasional stories of the appearance of fairy roads and suchlike. Then a man named Mr Norrell makes a proposition to the Yorkshire society -- he will demonstrate to them that he is an actual magician. If he succeeds, they must all agree to renounce their claim to be magicians. Of course he does, quite spectacularly.

Mr Norrell, it transpires, wishes to revive the practice of English magic. But in a very limited way -- he seems to want no rivals. He buys up and hides as many reliable books of magic as he can find. He actively tries to suppress other magicians by such means as his deal with the Yorkshire society. And he is determined in particular to denigrate the memory of John Uskglass, and to avoid the Raven King's sort of magic and especially any dealings with fairies. However, he has some difficulty in getting an in with the powerful men of England -- to whom he hopes to offer his services. Only be bringing back the fiancé of one influential MP from the dead can he establish connections. And unfortunately he can only do that by dealing with a fairy -- and dealings with fairies are indeed dangerous.

Mr Norrell's bargain with the fairy works out very ill for the young lady he has revived, as well as for another couple of people. But other than that he is soon very successfully aiding the English side in the war against Buonaparte's France. Then another magician appears, a dilettantish young man named Jonathan Strange. Strange agrees to become Mr Norrell's pupil, but is soon chafing at Norrell's refusal to let him see many of his best books, and at his fears of dealing with fairies or studying John Uskglass. Strange also develops his independence by spending some years with Wellington in the Peninsula, aiding the Army by magic. After the war Strange breaks with Norrell, and threatens to publish a vast History of English Magic. But Norrell has his own ideas -- and more tragically, Strange's wife becomes a victim. The conclusion brings together, in a very satisfying way, Strange, Norrell, the enigmatic fairy that Norrell had summoned, the fairy's victims, Norrell's intriguing servant John Childermass, other magicians, and of course John Uskglass.

I found it completely delightful. Readers have noted its extreme length (about a third of a million words -- nearly 800 rather full pages). It is true that the plot moves slowly, and one can readily see ways that the book might be cut without losing the essentials of the story. But I don't think I would like it better cut. Clarke's witty voice is ever a delight, and I enjoyed all the meanderings. Her descriptions of magic are very effective -- there is a real sense of otherworldliness, of caprice, and too the effects are quite imaginative. Her characters, if perhaps a bit thin in places, are still interesting. For all the plot moves slowly, its resolution is as I said quite satisfying, and somewhat surprising. I was moved on occasion, laughing quite often, and never bored. (Which is not to say the novel is a fast or facile read -- it is easy to put down, but you will want to pick it up again. It is a book to live with for a few weeks, not to gulp down in a few sittings.) Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell stands as my favorite novel of 2004.

Birthday Review: Quicksilver and Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson was born on my first Halloween -- October 31, 1959, when I was all of 26 days old. In honor of his birthday, then, here are two reviews I did long ago, of his novels Quicksilver and Cryptonomicon.

First, Quicksilver:

Review Date: 12 April 2004

Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson
William Morrow, New York, NY, 2003, 927 pages, Hardcover, US$27.95, ISBN:0-380-97742-7
a review by Rich Horton

What to say about Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver (first of The Baroque Trilogy) that has not already been said? It is largely as has been reported: overlong, rambling, annoying anachronistic, not terribly well plotted. Yet for all that I rather liked it. I certainly didn't love it, and it is by no means as good as Cryptonomicon or Snow Crash, but it is a generally enjoyable and interesting hodgepodge of political intrigue, early scientific inquiry, disease and grime, and eccentricity. For a negative review with which I almost entirely agree in specifics, I suggest Adam Roberts's. All I can say is that I have little objection to Roberts's arguments, but that I came away from the book having enjoyed myself.

The story is told in three long books. (The entire novel is some 380,000 words, so each book is a substantial novel-length in itself. And of course Quicksilver is only the first of a trilogy!) The first book is about Daniel Waterhouse and his relationship with Isaac Newton. Waterhouse is one of a prominent Puritan family, who have wielded some influence during Cromwell's Protectorship. But the story really takes place as Waterhouse goes up to Cambridge, just after the Restoration of the Monarchy. Daniel's loyalties are divided -- he is still his father's son, but hardly a true believer in the Puritan religious doctrines. At Cambridge he befriends the very strange and otherworldly Isaac Newton. Daniel himself is presented as a competent natural philosopher but nothing special -- he is there as a witness to genius embodied by Newton (and others such as Hooke, Huygens, and Leibniz). Daniel becomes a minor political player, Secretary of the Royal Society, sort of a tame Puritan in the Royal cabinet. This section is told on two timelines -- one following Daniel from youth to near middle-age, the other a rather pointless account of Daniel beginning a much later (1714) journey back from Massachusetts (where he seems to have founded MIT) to London in order to testify in a dispute between Newton and Leibniz about the invention of the calculus. This last thread is, I think, a complete mistake -- it does absolutely nothing for the current book. I am sure it will be picked up in later books, and probably be important, but it's just so many wasted pages here.

The second book abandons Daniel entirely to tell the story of two rather lower-class individuals. Jack Shaftoe (the names Shaftoe and Waterhouse will of course be familiar to readers of Cryptonomicon) is a Vagabond -- at first an orphaned boy making a living by jumping on the legs of hanged men to hasten their death and reduce their agony, later a rather lazy mercenary fighting in various wars on the continent. He comes to Vienna, under siege by the Ottomans, and by happenstance manages to rescue a beautiful virgin named Eliza, a native of Qwlghm (a fictional island off the coast of England also from Cryptonomicon). Eliza had been kidnapped from the shores of Qwlghm and sold to the Ottoman Sultan, who fortunately was preserving her to be a gift to one of his generals after the presumed success of the Vienna campaign. Eliza's experience has given her one consuming passion -- the eradication of slavery. Jack (who is nicknamed Half-Cocked Jack due to an unfortunate earlier surgical procedure -- hence Eliza's virginity is safe from him -- though they find other ways to have a good time) and Eliza wander back across Europe to the Netherlands, meeting Leibniz along the way and having a variety of adventures. Finally Eliza is established in Amsterdam, becoming a financial genius and a spy for William of Orange, while Jack makes his way to Paris and eventually to a seat as a galley slave.

The third book switches between Eliza and Daniel, and in this book there is a somewhat coherent plot. Basically, by now the book becomes the story (told from an unusual angle) of England's Glorious Revolution, when William of Orange and his wife Mary take the crown of England from the hated Catholic James II. Eliza's role takes her to Versailles where we see the court of the Sun King, while Daniel plots against James from within his cabinet. The book ends more or less with the successful conclusion of the Glorious Revolution.

As I say above -- there is much wrong with this book. It is too long. Though I was never precisely bored I was often not particularly concerned as to when I would next pick up the book. (It took me the entire month of March to read it.) It is full of very jarring anachronisms, mostly in the speech of the characters. (The events and devices described are as far as I know all essentially real, except for the irruptions of the long-lived alchemist Enoch Root.) Stephenson has defended this by claiming the book is written for 21st Century readers -- if so, then why the absurd spelling tics, such as phanatique for fanatic? In the end the anachronisms simply annoyed me, pulled me out of the book. The overall plot, to the extent I could detect one, is hardly advanced at all in this book, though I think an argument can be made that there is a significant plot thread (taking us from the Restoration to the Glorious Revolution) that is resolved in this book and works fairly well. The characters are to some extent grotesques but mostly interesting grotesques -- they are, I suppose, the main reason I ended up liking the book on balance.

(And all that said, for a book set in the same time period, I recommend much more highly William Makepeace Thackeray's Henry Esmond.)

Second, Cryptonomicon:

Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon is a huge book (about 425000 words). It's not really SF, though it hovers on the edge of being SF.  It's a very absorbing book, and a fascinating book.  Also, its strengths are those that lend themselves to a long novel: it is continually interesting, on the one hand; and on the other hand the plot is a minor source of the interest.  Thus there aren't boring parts that you have to wade through to get to the end: and getting to the end isn't as much the "goal". 

It's told on two timelines.  One is set during World War II.  Two main characters are followed in this thread: Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, a math genius and friend of Alan Turing who ends up assigned to the joint US/British codebreaking effort; and Bobby Shaftoe, a Marine who ends up assigned to a unit Waterhouse deems necessary: a unit which will fake evidence that the Allies had other means than codebreaking to allow them to achieve some of the successes they really achieved because they could read the Axis codes.  Thus the Germans and Japanese hopefully won't change their codes.  For some time this thread deals with the codebreaking end of things, but after a while interest begins to focus on a scheme by the Germans and Japanese to hide a bunch of gold in secure caches in the Philippines and elsewhere.  This introduces a couple more viewpoint characters: Japanese engineer Goto Dengo, German U boat captain Gunter Bischoff, and another member of Bobby Shaftoe's special unit, the Australian priest Enoch Root.

The other thread is present-day.  Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse' grandson, Randy Waterhouse, is part of a startup company trying to establish a "data haven" in a small island country in the Pacific.  This work takes him to Manila, where he meets Bobby Shaftoe's granddaughter, America (Amy) Shaftoe.  (Neither Bobby Shaftoe or Lawrence Waterhouse ever revealed to their children what they did during the War, so Randy and Amy have no idea that their grandfathers knew each other.)  Randy's efforts brush him against some organized criminals.  Also, they find something interesting in Manila Bay while laying cable, something which Randy recognizes as having to do with his grandfather.  Soon he is involved in a race to find one of the caches of Axis gold, and his success may depend on breaking a code his grandfather couldn't break.

All this is a fairly fascinating story by itself, with lots of action and heroism, but what makes the book really work is the clever stuff Stephenson does with infodumps.  He tells us about Unix systems, cryptanalysis, eating Cap'n Crunch properly, proper computer security, mining engineering, cannibals on New Guinea, Douglas MacArthur's relationship with the Marines, computer games, Japanese atrocities during the War, and much more.  And he's a very funny writer as well.  For example, he has an extended joke about an obscure (i.e., nonexistent in our history) set of islands belonging to the UK, with a language all their own, such that, for instance, Smith is spelled cCmmcdn, or something.  Of course this is relevant to cryptography.  But it's also very funny.  The characters are involving, if perhaps just a bit on the bestsellerish side: that is, they are a bit on the supercompetent side (though also with real weaknesses).  I really really enjoyed this book.  I'm not sure whether to nominate it for a Hugo, though: it's definitely one of the 5 best books I've read from 1999, but is it close enough to SF?

Birthday Review: The Lights in the Sky Are Stars, by Fredric Brown

Birthday Review: The Lights in the Sky Are Stars, by Fredric Brown

a review by Rich Horton

Today would have been Fredric Brown's 112th birthday. In his honor, then, I decided to post a fairly brief review I did a long time ago, for my SFF Net newsgroup, of his novel The Lights in the Sky Are Stars.

Brown (1906-1972) was a well-respected writer in both the SF and Mystery genres, winning one Edgar for his novel The Fabulous Clipjoint. His work was often funny, though often with a serious, even dark, undertone. He was well-known for his very short stories. His best known short story is probably "Arena", which was anthologized in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and which is considered a source for the Star Trek episode of the same title. Here's what I wrote back in 1999 (which is also when the novel is set):

I read an old SF novel I'd been meaning to try for some time, Fredric Brown's The Lights in the Sky Are Stars (1953).  This tells of a spacestruck man in 1999, an aging spaceship mechanic, who becomes involved with a politician and her efforts to reignite America's space program by pushing for the development of a ship to Jupiter.  It's mostly too cheesy and melodramatic to work: we need to put up with the hero breaking into an opposing politician's office to steal the meticulous records detailing his corruption, for instance, and with a tragic death, caused because a ten-day delay in getting the program started was impossible, and with the hero teaching himself spaceship administration in no time, and cutting the cost of the program from a near-prohibitive 300 million dollars (!) to 26 million dollars.  Among other things.  At the end there is another weird twist, almost the most melodramatic of all, which oddly almost works, and allows the novel to close on an effective, quite moving note.  It's still a case of preaching to the choir, though.  And in the final analysis I felt the cheesiness and implausibility of most of the novel doomed it.

By the by there are some neatly typical '50s predictions for 1999: TV remote controls, but those fixed to the living room chairs (!), private helicopters as a common means of travel, and chemical rockets planned to reach the moon by 1969.  (But they switched to atomics and got there by 1965: too bad for Brown's prediction record.)  There's also the odd '50s faith in progress uber alles: the lead character refuses to believe that light speed is a real limit (humanity's beat every other limit it's faced, by gum, it won't let a little thing like the special relativity stop it!), though to be fair that's only his attitude: the novel itself has no relativity-beating.  And there is a curious, somewhat effective, subplot involving a Buddhist vowing to get to the stars via teleportation.

Birthday Review: Stories of Paul di Filippo

Today is Paul di Filippo's 64th birthday. So, it's time for another compilation of my Locus reviews -- lots of them this time, as Paul is a very prolific writer, and a writer whose work I greatly enjoy. The first review comes from Locus Online before I started reviewing for the print magazine -- I did a few reviews and essays for that site, edited by my predecessor as short fiction columnist, the excellent Mark Kelly (and doubtless those contributed to me getting the gig at the print version.)

(Locus Online, 12 April 2001)

It would be a shame if readers missed the long novella in the Spring 2001 issue of Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, one of the DNA Publications stable of magazines. This story is "Karuna, Inc.", by the always interesting Paul Di Filippo. Di Filippo works well at the novella length, and much of his best fiction is in that category, including the stories in The Steampunk Trilogy as well as such fine works as "The Mill" and "Spondulix".

"Karuna, Inc." (like "Spondulix", actually) presents a rather utopian view of economic activity. Shenda Moore is a brilliant young woman who took a nice inheritance and founded the title corporation, with the following mission: "the creation of environmentally responsible, non-exploitive, domestic-based, maximally creative jobs ... the primary goal of the subsidiaries shall always be the full employment of all workers ... it is to be hoped that the delivery of high-quality goods and services will be a byproduct ...". Without commenting on the likelihood of such a plan working in the real world, I'll just say that it would be nice if it would. But unfortunately, Shenda, though she doesn't know it, has an enemy: a consortium of maximally evil corporate types, led by the sinister Marmaduke Twigg.

The story is told alternately from the viewpoints of Shenda, Twigg, and a damaged veteran named Thurman Swan. As Shenda brings Thurman out of his shell of self-pity, Twigg comes to realize the existence of "Karuna, Inc." and moves against it. Di Filippo alternates sunny scenes of Thurman and Shenda with grotesque scenes of Twigg and his fellow evildoers, each of whom have a special operation to make them as evil as possible. The evil seems a bit over the top, and the good has a large dose of wish-fulfillment intermixed, but the story throughout is gripping, and the characters involving. It's a very fun read, mixing tragedy and optimism, mysticism and business, with Di Filippo's usual off-kilter imagination. Not a great story, but a good, enjoyable, one.

(Locus, February 2007)

And Paul Di Filippo, in "Wikiworld" (Fast Forward 1), engages in another of his utopian economic fantasias, this one about a world in which stuff gets done on the "wiki" model: a group of interested people competing and cooperating to build something. Such as house for our hero, Ross Reynolds, which leads to him running the country for three days, starting a trade war, and falls in love. Oh, and ganja on the Moon is involved too. Light-hearted, imaginative, fast-moving, sweet: lots of fun, like any number of similar Di Filippo pieces.

(Locus, November 2002)

Paul Di Filippo's "Shipbreaker" (Sci Fiction, October) is intriguing, about a man and two friends who are part of a crew of various species who salvage decommissioned starships. The hero, Klom, finds a curious alien in some sort of suspended animation, and after reviving it, adopts it as a pet. But it turns out to be something more than anyone expects. One interesting aspect of the story is the low position of humans in a galaxy dominated by much more intelligent species. The story does read like the opening segment of a novel rather than a complete story, however.

(Locus, December 2002)

The DAW mass market anthologies are a mixed lot -- some are quite awful, and some, like Mars Probes, are quite good. Once Upon a Galaxy, edited by Wil McCarthy with anthology veterans John Helfers and Martin H. Greenberg, is one of the better ones, if not so good as Mars Probes. The theme is "science fictional retellings of fairy tales", and most of the stories take a reasonably inventive approach -- sometimes a bit paint-by-numbers in replacing fantasy elements with Sfnal nuts and bolts, but still enjoyable. My favorite entry was Paul di Filippo's "Ailoura", a clever retelling of "Puss in Boots" on a far planet with genetically engineered animal-human chimeras, AI houses, immortality, and of course a younger son cheated out of his inheritance. Di Filippo throws in some nice Cordwainer Smith references for the SF initiates -- a very fun story. McCarthy's own "He Died that Day, in Thirty Years", is a clever and sardonic extrapolation of the unexpected effects of a slightly malfunctioning memory tailoring drug. Most of the rest of the book is decent entertainment as well.

Di Filippo is on a roll lately, though really he's been doing excellent stuff for a long time. His entry in the justly celebrated PS Publishing series of novella-length chapbooks, A Year in the Linear City, is one of the best novellas of this year. Di Filippo follows several episodes in the life of Diego Patchen, an up and coming writer of Cosmogonic Fiction, or CF, the Linear City's analog to SF. The plot turns on Diego's worries about his dying father, and his friend's obsession with a drug-addicted woman; as well as a trip down the city's border river to a distant borough. It's not really much of a plot, just a series of episodes. The fun is in di Filippo's description of the title City, which is very narrow but of unimaginable length, bordered by train tracks on one side and a river on the other side, and mounted, apparently, on some huge scaly beast. Di Filippo invents an engaging and convincing slang, sketches an interesting social/political/economic backgroun, and portrays any number of genially colorful characters, such as Diego's glorious fire-fighting girlfriend Volusia Bittern, or his editor at his main magazine market, an obvious John W. Campbell pastiche. The story is by turns pleasantly rambling, funny, sad, and full of sense of wonder. In general feel it recalls several of di Filippo's "alternate economy" novellas, such as "Karuna, Inc." and "Spondulix". Paul di Filippo is clearly one of the most original, and one of the best, SF writers now working, and while he is certainly not ignored, he does not seem to me to get quite the credit he is due. Perhaps that will soon change.

(Locus, March 2003)

There is also (in the November-December 2002 Interzone) a neat story by "Philip Lawson" (Michael Bishop and Paul di Filippo). "'We're All in This Together'" is about a serial murderer who seems to get inspiration from the banal sayings of a newspaper column called "The Squawk Box". A mystery writer obsessed with contributing a saying to this column ends up involved in the murder investigation. Rather loopy, but with a serious core.

(Locus, April 2003)

Also in the April issue of F&SF, Paul Di Filippo contributes "Seeing is Believing", about a private investigator and a beautiful scientist investigating a criminal who seems able to use his PDA to bypass his victims' brains "Executive Structure". Di Filippo takes a nice SFnal idea and wraps a fast-paced and funny caper story about it. It's not exactly believable but it's great fun.

(Locus, May 2003)

Last month at Interzone Paul Di Filippo and Michael Bishop were featured in collaboration. This month they each appear separately, with rather humorous pieces. Di Filippo's "Bare Market" tells of a journalist's interview with Adamina Smythe, the computer-enhanced genius girl who controls the world's financial markets, resulting in unprecedented prosperity. But Adamina, besides being a genius, is incredibly beautiful, and the journalist is smitten -- what will sex hormones in the system do to the world's fortunes?

(Locus, July 2003)

Perhaps best of all is Paul Di Filippo's "Clouds and Cold Fires" (Live Without a Net), in which the departed humans have left a revitalized Earth in the charge of long-lived, intelligent, genetically engineered chimeras of some sort. Pertinax and his friends must deal with a threat from one of the still technologically oriented "Overclockers", humans who have stayed behind on reservations, and who refuse to abandon the old ways.

(Locus, December 2003)

"The Dish Ran Away With the Spoon", by Paul Di Filippo (Sci Fiction, November), is a very funny and clever tale of "blebs" -- spontaneously generated AIs caused by linkages between random sets of "smart" appliances. These AIs don't always have the best interests of humans in their "minds", and Kas, who lost his parents to a bleb, becomes paranoid when his girlfriend Cody moves in with him: he's worried that their combined possessions might bring the assemblage to a sort of critical mass. But his paranoia starts to affect his relationship with Cody -- just the opening a newly formed AI needs! Fun stuff, sort of a Cory Doctorow/Charles Stross future refracted through Di Filippo's unique sensibility.

(Locus, March 2005)

But best this issue (Interzone, January-February) is Paul Di Filippo's "The Emperor of Gondwanaland". This is a Borgesian story (and knows it, as signaled by being partly set in Buenos Aires, and by the use of Funes as a name) about an overworked magazine editor who stumbles across internet references to micronations. One of these is Gondwanaland, which seems insanely detailed for what must be an imaginative creation. The man joins a discussion group, and eventually falls in love with a woman on one of the groups. She pushes for a meeting -- but how can he find Gondwanaland?

(Locus, April 2005)

From the April F&SF, Paul Di Filippo's "The Secret Sutras of Sally Strumpet" is an amusing story with a dark edge, about a struggling writer who has finally made it big. The problem is, Riley Small's bestseller, The Secret Sutras of Sally Strumpet, purports to be the memoirs of a 25 year old sexual adventuress. Now that a movie deal is in the offing, a 35 year old man just won't do as the public face of the author. So, Riley and his agent decide to hire an actress -- when a mysterious woman shows up and declares that she IS Sally Strumpet -- and to Riley, she seems perfect. Especially when she seems ready to continue her sexual adventuring -- with him. But every silver lining has a cloud ... Di Filippo is very entertaining on most subjects, particularly on the ups and downs of a writing career, as already well established by his Plumage for Pegasus pieces -- and this story is another delight.

(Locus, December 2009)

Paul Di Filippo’s "Yes We Have No Bananas" (Eclipse Three) is one of his wacky but serious pieces of economic extrapolation, mixing advanced physics (involving branes and parallel worlds) with a world in which ocarina music is the height of popularity. The lead character, Tug, is down on his luck -- his girlfriend has left him, he’s being evicted, he’s lost his job, and so he ends up on a houseboat drawing a comic strip with a beautiful young woman and helping a nutty physicist put on a play designed to demonstrate the correctness of his theories ...what can I say? It’s Paul Di Filippo.

(Locus, April 2011)

Paul di Filippo, in "FarmEarth" (Welcome to the Greenhouse), suggests that one way to make boring ecological remediation tasks more enjoyable might be to embed them in a gaming environment, and wraps a nice story around that about a group of kids too eager to take on more advanced responsibilities, who thus get involved in a dangerous conspiracy.

(Locus, November 2013)

Also good this month (Asimov's, October-November) is Paul di Filippo's "Adventures in Cognitive Homogamy: A Love Story", about a brilliant young researcher visiting a "Science Park" in Colombia, where he is seduced into a dangerous encounter with a beautiful member of the underprivileged classes -- followed by (perhaps a tad too predictable) consciousness-raising. Di Filippo also has the best story in the November Analog, "Redskins of the Badlands", which resembles "Adventures in Cognitive Harmony" in the featuring a somewhat innocent highly talented hero, betrayed at the outset by his beautiful lover, encountering a dissident group (and having sex …) The angle here is a bit different -- Ruy Lambeth spends most of his time in his "skin", guarding UNESCO world heritage sites from the depredations of people like a group of ecoterrorists menacing Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta.  Both stories are a bit thin towards the end -- mostly interested in introducing some neat tech in the context of a somewhat optimistic (but far from perfect) future society ...But both are fun rides along the way.